Discussion The Saboteur

Today it’s no longer surprise anyone with video games that were originally conceived as full-fledged series. Assassin’s Creed, Call of Duty, Mass Effect, Dragon Age - these names have long been heard by everyone and enjoy, in general, well-deserved popularity. However, this was not always the case. If you rummage around in the back streets of game stores, you can easily find many high-quality projects that, contrary to fairly high ratings in the press, have not turned into a venerable franchise with a dozen sequels behind. Today we will focus on just such games - diamonds, left one on one with time.

Games from the company Pandemic Studios even at the time of their release, it was extremely difficult to call something truly outstanding. Rather, it is a product of its own era: quality enough not to go to the sales repository the first week after the launch, but at the same time inferior to direct competitors.

The stealth action movie called The Saboteur can rightfully be called the studio's swan song. In this project, Pandemic employees gave their best. The main thing is, of course, a great visual style. There is hardly a man who does not appreciate the charm of noir Paris captured by Nazi soldiers. Black and white gamut, Irish hero, sexy British intelligence agent in assistants. The stamp on the stamp and the stamp drives, but HOW these stamps are made! In a word - our respect. And we didn’t talk about the gameplay yet, but it is very good here. The combination of stealth and action, chases and shootings - all this is "almost like in GTA", but thinner and more elegant stylistically.

Unfortunately, The Saboteur never got a sequel. The reason is simple: Pandemic Studios simply shut down. The company became another victim of EA. But a very good series could come out. But ... not fate. In any case, the game about occupied France rightfully went down in history as a fighter who managed to show World War II from a completely different perspective.
One very impressive story is associated with the name of Americana McGee. His first nominal project - the very adventures of Alice - turned out damn good. But then everything, to put it mildly, did not work out. Bad Day L.A., Grimm, controversial Madness Returns - one release is more ambiguous than another. And somewhere in the middle of this creative path Scrapland lurked - an ingenious parody of a consumer society.

In the story, the protagonist, a robot named DiTritus, became a journalist on a space station called Chimera, which was entirely inhabited by tin cans. A series of events leads the character to his own investigation. And here the events begin to sweep with the speed of a sports car.

In Scrapland, Americana and the MercurySteam studio (later they will create two parts of Castlevania: Lords of the Shadow - ed.) Managed to perfectly convey the atmosphere of what is happening. Noir notes, interesting situations, flying by cars - all this ideally fit into the general outline of the plot. Alas, despite the good ratings from the world press and gamers, Scrapland did not receive a continuation, and remained an author's project. Although, maybe it's for the best. Who knows how it would end, get over the game on the conveyor rails.