As a game reviewer, I keep trying to hold myself back from making comparisons to other games when making a new article. I think a game should stand by its own merits, only making the connections known when it's obvious that the game has to rely on it to succeed. Sure, we can compare apples to apples if it's something as obvious as Tekken to Street Fighter or Halo to Call of Duty, but there's a lot of detail that gets misplaced through all of this, often by my colleagues when they're churning out three-page reviews on a mediocre game, only to start on the next project a few hours later. A little patience and analytics would remedy this, but such is the fast-paced nature of our beloved media.

But, honestly, The Saboteur makes it very difficult to not do this. It's a World War II game, like about a few hundred games made this decade. It's open-ended and you can hijack cars, like in Grand Theft Auto. You can climb buildings in a city beaming with life and culture, like in Assassin's Creed. But, beneath all of this, The Saboteur is a fun game and pushes the media as a legitimate form of art--Bioshock and Portal, anybody?--and is definitely worth your money if you can get past some of the weird things that happen.

First and foremost, the art style of this game is very creative. Most scenes of the game will play out in a film noir-type style of black, white and red, but the really neat part of this is that it effects the map as a whole, giving the player a sense of doom and gloom, but also salvation, in the city. Areas of Paris in which "The Resistance" has made its mark will become colorized, while those that are in clear control of the Nazis will go to the aforementioned noir scheme. It just looks that good.

The Saboteur at least tries a few things differently. Rather than play as a soldier bent on toppling an evil in the 1940's Universe, you aim to mess things up on the inside in order to make Paris more habitable for the French during the Nazi Occupation. Mischief has never been so much fun, especially since the main character is a drunken Irish man. I wish I could've come up with this. You can blow up guard towers to make things harder on the Nazis. Or, you could knock out a soldier, steal his clothes, and pick off each soldier on the inside of a restricted area one by one. Or summon your fellow drunkards to get into a street fight while you pick off the stragglers from the rooftops. The possibilites are endless, and a lot of fun to mess with.

Sometimes, it's a little too tempting to forgo the thought process and just do what's simple in order to move on. Basically, you kill a few guys, run, and come back to fulfill an objective. This is obviously a terrible way to play this game, but The Saboteur suffers in difficulty thanks to  regenerating health and a somewhat bare stealth-detection system. It's sad when the most simple strategy is to just force your way in rather than get creative and use the stealth tactics that the game offers to get the job done, especially since you can take so many hits before going down to begin with.

The story is different from most games, however--a tale of revenge and a strong character analysis of main character Sean Devlin. There are plenty of twists and turns in the main story, but even the side stories offer some neat dialogue and characters in addition to the action they provide. It would've been easy to just make Sean a stereotypical Irish thug with no heart, but the writers at the ill-fated Pandemic really took care of him for this one. The voice acting is a bit of a mess, with terrible fake accents thrown all over the place for most of the minor characters, but it's still enjoyable for the most part.

The developers went to great lengths to reproduce Paris as a playable map, almost a lttle too big for the sake of making things fun. The map is huge, and objectives are often far apart from one another, so it can take a while to get from one point to another. This wouldn't be such a big deal if the controls for driving weren't so loose and difficult, though I do suppose that cars back then didn't have power steering like we take for granted today. Buildings are another head scratcher if you prefer to travel along rooftops, since the climbing controls are awkward and finding the right ledges can be a chore if you didn't plan your route right.

There's a lengthy campaign and a lot of unlocks and collectables. One could easily spend 40 hours lost in this game, collecting every car, maxing out their stats, finding every high point and item. The Saboteur is a completionist's friend, but people unfamiliar with the game should be warned: It does get top-heavy at points. In between all the customization, the story, the gameplay mechanics and the sharp directions that it can take at points, and the unlockables, the pacing of it all just seems wrong. The Assassins Creed games (here I go) at least introduced these elements as the game went on. The Saboteur gives you everything you need to know within the first three hours of play, with so much information getting dumped in that you'll be wondering if you're playing the game right or not.

Regardless, there's a good game to be found underneath all of this. If you're a sucker for stealth gameplay, or sandbox type games, or even third-person shooters, you're going to find a lot to love in The Saboteur, especially with its story.

One final note: EA is still trying to stick it to Used Game Retailers the same way it did with Dragon Age: Origins, in the sense that it gives out free Downloadable Content with each purchase. For The Saboteur, it actually works against its gameplay mechanics, by adding more hiding spaces and allowing you to earn money faster. Sure, it unlocks naked breasts for the many strippers in the game, but the DLC makes the game much easier than it should be. The promise of free DLC shouldn't sway you into buying the game in this case, what lies in the package to begin with should.