A guilty pleasure if ever there was one. Almost half a year on and I keep going back to it, mopping up side missions on the long journey to a Platinum Trophy. It might be a little rough around the edges but The Saboteur deserves your attention.

NB: You’ll need this voucher code to get the 15% discount required: FTSL15-1

• Click here to buy The Saboteur for £12.75 on PS3 from Tesco Entertainment

You are Sean Devlin, an Irish racing car driver who becomes The Saboteur on his road to revenge against the Nazis. While the visuals are painfully average and the open-world gameplay offers nothing new, you might just get find yourself sucked right in anyway with fun gun battles and the optional stealth approach.

A neatly condensed Paris and its nearby countryside make up the landscape of the game. You help out members of the French resistance and British spies to help liberate Paris and send the Germans scurrying back to sausage country.

Missions are standard open-world fare: bring this, blow-up that, drive here, protect her, kill him and so on. The main element that sets the game apart from the GTAs of this world is the way stealth is encouraged by stealing Nazi uniforms and seeing how deep into a mission you can get without getting caught. This can be a tense experience as even walking past enemy soldiers puts them on edge. They’re so bloody paranoid it’s a miracle they even made it out of Germany without killing each other.

If you do get caught out it’s not game over as you can blast your way through most missions as it only takes a few bullets to drop ze Germans as this side of the game has a light arcadey feel. Once you fully grasp the stealth system available, you can start to really enjoy it and the more in-game perks you unlock the easier it gets too. Working out how to distract guards and blow up multiple targets while remaining undetected is a real thrill.

Devlin can climb any building, much like the Assassin’s Creed games. It’s not as smooth, but it gets the job done. Driving around is great fun too, with the car handling and speeds generally ignoring the limitations of the time setting and going for squealing tires and glorious hand-brake turns.

There’s no getting around many of the game’s rough edges. The accents and dialogue make a mockery of the line between awful and hamming it up for laughs. You’re never sure which it is. The graphics have a distinct lack of polish too, especially the buildings of Paris themselves, which are incredibly bland and look more like last-gen models. You get used to seeing the frame rate stutter occasionally, or if you’re really lucky a flying car float past. This put a bit of a downer on the games unique art-style that has heavily occupied areas in black and white, with colour returning once it was liberated. It wasn’t exactly Okami though.

Despite the above though, you might just get hooked into the game thanks to the Freeplay challenges. These are simple tasks, such as blowing up searchlights, sniper towers and fueling stations, or finding supply boxes. There are hundreds of these dotted around and you’ll be hunting them down long after the story has finished.

Check out Matt’s full review here.

Thanks to carson321 at HotUkDeals for the find