I have literally thousands of games to catch up on – award-winners, hidden gems, childhood favorites I never finished (and yes, that is unfortunately a correct usage of “literally”). The amount of untouched stuff in my Steam library is genuinely embarrassing. But fuck that, because I’m apparently a contrarian allergic to playing things normal people actually enjoy, it’s time for a healthy dose of slavjank to kick off the new year (I was terribly sick for all of January so it doesn’t count okay).
Sabotain: Break The Rules! is a low-budget attempt at cloning Deus Ex from the same studio responsible for Corkscrew RuLes! (capitalization intentional but inexplicable), a Russian Postal 2 expansion pack where you play as a guy who had his penis stolen. Sabotain was never officially released in English – or maybe it was, online documentation is inconsistent and practically nonexistent – but it was translated and even dubbed, so if you install the full English patch on top of the Italian release, you can experience its beautifully half-assed localization in all its glory. With a word salad backstory section in the manual and at least two voice actors to portray its dozens of characters, seasoned European PC game fans will immediately know they’re in for a great time.
Have you ever been playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and thought, “this is okay, but I wish the designers were addicted to meth while developing it”? That’s Sabotain, baby! Ripping the band-aid off now: this game is awful in every conceivable way (except the music, which slaps); that said, despite its considerable length, I couldn’t put it down, which is more than I can say for most games that are actually good. Playing through Sabotain is truly An Experience, and I wanted to chronicle my journey for all to understand what a delightful time it is.
Sabotain starts off strong with a crusty FMV showing all the cool stuff you can allegedly do, screen-tearing and framerate drops baked in of course; the real star here is the intro song, which is pure mid-00’s electronic Euro cheese, complete with the Russian artist singing in English. It’s so fucking good and I say that without a hint of irony. This game already had me smiling before I even reached the main menu, which is great because the main menu is a travesty. No music or sound effects to speak of, a “Run” function that doesn’t actually exist because it’s not bindable, UI that resembles an even less functional Deus Ex: Invisible War, volume sliders that may or may not work – we’re already in the thick of it and we haven’t even clicked “New Game” yet!
Now it’s time to build our character, and obviously I picked the female class who specializes in stealth (a grave mistake). Her name is Alex (just like the main character of Invisible War, hm), and she’s a huge goober with the voice of a wannabe country-western singer, which as a native Texan I obviously love. During character creation, you allocate points into certain stats and skills, and you get bonuses for the ones your gender specializes in. These are the only things you should invest in, as the returns on any unspecialized attribute are laughable. You also absolutely should not dump all your points into stealth like I did, as it’s unusable 99% of the time. I thought this was supposed to be a Deus Ex knock-off dammit!!!
Sometimes the skill system seems completely pointless, but at other times it’s obnoxiously essential. If you don’t have enough points in a weapon type, good luck killing anything – you can direct hit a normal unarmored human enemy in the face with a rocket launcher, and if you haven’t allocated an arbitrary number of points toward explosives, the guy won’t even break a sweat. Meanwhile, I never put a single point in Gala Boost (Sabotain’s equivalent to bullet time), and it was still able to trivialize nearly every battle I came across. Side note: there’s an unarmed stat, but I don’t think you can actually punch people in this game. Leave a comment below if I’m stupid and you were able to beat the whole game by fisting enemies.
Our adventure begins as the heroic Professional Assassin Alex lands her spaceship in the starport of Miracle City, a sprawling dystopian metropolis under the control of the Galactic Confederation. Alex is an agent for the ominously-named Empire, and has been tasked with destroying the Hungry Bulls food factory for reasons that are hard to discern due to the poorly-localized text log; I think they’re putting a mind control chemical in the food or something? Unable to interact with any of the NPCs bustling about the place, she heads for the transport shuttle at the edge of the plaza, traveling to the Tired Bulls district to meet her informant, Rod.
This is the moment you’ll realize that when I said Miracle City was “sprawling,” what I meant was it is entirely made up of huge, empty zones filled with indistinct streets, random enemies, and friendly NPCs who only spout the same 5-10 canned lines ad nauseum. There are buildings you can enter, but unless they’re marked as a current goal for the main quest, you won’t actually be able to do anything inside them. The official advertising copy claims there are “countless side quests” that, alongside the main missions, “guarantee at least 40 hours of fun-filled enjoyment,” but I did not see a single one during my 25-hour playthrough. I’m the kind of guy who likes to explore every single inch of every single map (which is probably why games take me months if not years to finish), but after the first couple districts I realized there was nothing to find outside of a scant few goodie crates, and just started beelining toward objectives.
On the way to the bar where Rod resides, you will probably notice the car dealership, Miracle City Motors, although unlike all the other important locations there are no street signs pointing toward it. The vehicles here are ungodly expensive given Sabotain’s economy, but they’re practically necessary unless you enjoy spending 10 minutes walking down barren roads four times an hour. If you’re playing legitimately, it will probably take somewhere in the ballpark of 10 hours before you can afford even the cheapest car, but around that same time you’ll be able to get a better one for free anyway. If you aren’t a masochist like I am, you could instead just buy a car from the outset via cheating yourself a bunch of money by pressing [Ctrl] + [Alt] + [:] + [F3] a few times.
The cars do not control particularly well, utilizing the keyboard only with no camera movement, but they also don’t really need to do anything other than get you from point A to B faster, and in that regard they serve their purpose valiantly (except for when they glitch out and become locked to 44 km/h for some reason). The moment you get behind the wheel of one of these bad boys you’ll be mowing down pedestrians like there’s no tomorrow – not on purpose, mind you, it’s just that the streets are really cramped and the NPCs love walking directly in front of your vehicle. It’s okay, though, because ramming someone with your car at full speed does very little damage, and the cops are totally fine with being run over as long as they survive the ordeal. I assume they did this because the AI traffic is incredibly stupid and frequently collides with enemies, so if cars actually killed people you’d never have to do any fighting in the overworld (what a loss that would be). But don’t worry, if a car hits you, you’ll be launched hundreds of feet into the air, and while Sabotain doesn’t otherwise seem to have fall damage, you will most certainly die upon landing (usually outside of the map).
Finally, it’s time to meet the illustrious Rod, owner and proprietor of the Take It Easy bar (logo written in Comic Sans). Rod is your typical large, greasy, wifebeater-wearing Russian quest-giver, but he’s actually one of the game’s more gentlemanly characters, in that he doesn’t immediately hit on Alex the moment she says “hello.” The male voice actor seems slightly less apathetic than usual in this role, but only just. Greeting him, you are given six(!) whole dialogue options:
How are you?
Vodka tonic, please.
What do they call you?
Interesting place. Curious atmosphere.
Maybe you can help me find some information.
I lost my lighter.
Get used to these prompts, because they are the only conversation starters in the game, and outside of the vodka and lighter ones, show up for nearly every NPC you can interact with. Do you even need to ask if they just recycle the exact same line delivery every single time?
Much like the hotel owner JC Denton says “what a shame” to, Rod is worried about his missing daughter. She’s been kidnapped, or maybe not, he isn’t sure, though he knows exactly where she is regardless, which leads Alex to the first of several levels you’d think would play like an immersive sim but don’t. She’s being held in the backrooms (not those ones) by the Voodoo Club’s owner, and in Deus Ex you’d have several options here. Do you sneak in via the rear entrance or sewers? Do you bribe or talk your way past the guards? Do you lockpick the staff door and waltz in directly? Do you just walk through the front door, murder everyone in the building, and shoot the door open? Well, there’s no alternate entrances and you can’t pick locks (even though you get a lockpick later, which seems to do nothing); it’s quite possible that the rampage option would be viable here, but considering how the game later soft-locked me for not talking to the correct NPC the correct way at the correct time, I’m not so sure I’d suggest trying it. You can’t talk your way past the guards or bribe them, but you do need to talk to them, at which point Alex threatens them into letting her in the back. This conversation ends with two dialogue options, one of which seems to imply she’ll kill the guy while the other sounds like she’ll let him live. In the plot twist of the century, both options spare him. Disappointing!
The club’s staff area is one of the few sections where you can actually use stealth. Don’t even bother trying to crouch because it makes you move at a snail’s pace and the enemies will still spot you from a mile away; you must instead use the Sneak command, which turns you invisible for a painfully brief time, and slap them in the face with whatever melee weapon you have at this point. The range is pathetic, so you’ll need to practically be touching them, but that’s okay because they can’t notice you during the 0.5 seconds your cloaking device is active. After navigating the single small hallway to the single small staff room, simply bonk the bad guy on the head to save Rod’s daughter, who is only capable of saying the word “daddy” due to all the drugs she’s taken.
Rod is now your BFF and has some hot goss for you about the food factory, but he also directs you to an ex-employee who has even hotter goss (and a map) to give. This part seems to be optional but I doubt it actually is, so now you must venture to the next district, which is called, I shit you not, “Dirty Cancers.” (At one point, a character refers to it as “Dirty Dancers” in a voice clip, which I can only assume was the intended name. Or maybe they just misspoke in that line!) Our new friend lives in a complex the street sign calls “Dirty Apartments,” and his apartment number is smeared on the door in blood. Despite this, he’s probably the nicest guy in the whole game; he got fired from his job for giving their excess food to the homeless instead of throwing it away, aww. It’s time to ruin his ex-boss’ life by exposing him as a cheater (the sex kind)!
Every NPC in the Scarlet Place district (sometimes called the Red Dust district) is hostile. They will shoot you on sight, there are a lot of them, and they constantly respawn. Half of them couldn’t hit the broad side of an Amazon fulfillment center, but the rest will immediately take you down with pinpoint accuracy from maximum object load distance. Thankfully, you can find a metal chest very close to the entrance with some of the game’s best light armor in it (keep in mind you’ve probably been playing two hours tops at this point) – you’ll most certainly need it here unless you cheated (or grinded I guess) your way to an early car.
Combat in Sabotain consists mostly of shooting enemies in the head with whichever guns you’re proficient in (forget about even trying melee), because it can take up to 50(!) body shots to kill someone. Even then, some enemies will randomly soak up to 10 headshots before going down, and you have to lead them ever so slightly since your bullets are just a hair slower than hitscan for reasons. Ammo is hilariously abundant so at least resource management isn’t an issue, but you might end up emptying a full clip just trying to hit certain enemies even once, because the AI will occasionally decide to start moving in the opposite direction the instant your cursor so much as grazes them. This is the moment you’ll most likely realize just how broken the bullet time ability is. You’ll be pressing that key waaaaay more often here than you ever did in Max Payne or F.E.A.R., believe me.
At the brothel, you hire a prostitute for free (how do they stay in business!?) and she just casually tells you how to gain access to their entire client list with full dox as if you’ve been friends for years. Long story short, you must navigate the hellish streets once again to go to another fucking building to meet some asshole named T. Grey who’s always simping for Alex even though he never looks directly at her because he’s a cool aloof hackerman. He gives you a fake “membership” card, which I guess makes you an honorary prostitute… or maybe pimp??? So you go back to the brothel and the madam completely forgot you were just there 30 minutes ago and apparently doesn’t know who her own employees are so she gives you the full client list like it’s nothing.
You tell the factory manager’s wife he was cheating on her and of course she already hated him but this was the last straw. Dirty Apartment Guy is overjoyed and gives you the hottest goss about the food factory, but for some reason Alex thinks she needs help to pull off the job, so she has to join the Mercenary Guild to find a few partners. To join the guild, you must prove your loyalty to a racist Jamaican(?) caricature by killing a guy while he’s being transported from prison. The dialogue sequence states that he’s a witness for the state and you need to assassinate him to appease a powerful drug kingpin, but the following gameplay scenario and objective screen contradict this by saying he actually is the drug kingpin. Whatever the case, murdering an unarmed man doesn’t prove much challenge, especially when you have two unkillable NPCs with you (just kidding, their poor pathing immediately gets them stuck inside the front gate).
The two mercs, Phantom and Wildcat, also end up being your partners for the food factory job. They warn Alex of the dangers involved in double-crossing the Guild’s boss, droning on about how they’ll need to get approval from her before they can do the job. Alex is adamant that she doesn’t play by anyone’s rules (hence the game’s subtitle), but eventually caves when her new friends aren’t willing to help unless she obeys protocol. Getting approval from the boss takes less time than the aforementioned conversation and then she’s never seen or heard from again.
We still need to obtain explosives powerful enough to demolish a huge steel building, which means making a deal with a corrupt military official who really wants to have sex with you and also Wildcat. The deal falls through because you aren’t willing to raw-dog him right there on his kitchen table, so he has to be eliminated. You cannot leave until you talk to Wildcat after executing him, but if you pick the wrong dialogue option you still can’t leave, or talk to her again, so because I was quick-saving every minute due to the game’s general instability, I ended up soft-locking myself and had to load a manual save from the previous night.
The epic mission we’ve been building up to for hours consists of walking into a factory the size of a school library, shooting maybe eight guards, then planting the bomb in a random spot. Did you really think we’d need partners, a (non-functioning) map, and intel on the location to pull off this job? I long for that kind of innocence.
With what I will generously call Act 1 completed, a new story arc begins – this one involves Alex being tailed by mysterious government agents, though you never actually see her being followed in either cutscene or gameplay. After about an hour of running back and forth trying to deduce who your stalkers are, eventually you “trick them” into “following you” into a secluded warehouse (in actuality you just enter the warehouse and their car is already inside). Kill the feds and retrieve some evidence from their vehicle as the game instructs, by which it of course means their corpses. This reveals the mastermind behind the plan, who you also kill. It’s kind of fuzzy, but I think you then go to their underground headquarters and slaughter everyone there in retaliation. None of this is ever mentioned again, but you do get a free muscle car for your trouble if you can figure out which of the bunker’s 20 identical doors is openable.
Now it’s time to infiltrate the Confederate army. Even though they apparently know Alex is the one who blew up their food factory, not three hours ago sending government spooks after her in return, General Grinders of the Empire believes she is somehow the best candidate to weasel her way into their ranks as a double agent (this goes off without a hitch of course). Unfortunately, she’ll first have to prove herself by entering unsanctioned arena deathmatches! Why does the governing body of Miracle City require potential recruits to fight to the death in an illegal underground coliseum before they can enlist? I dunno man, why did I play this game and decide to write a whole essay about it?
The recruitment arena is probably Sabotain’s low point, which is really saying something. You have to win three matches to progress: a free-for-all, a race, and a team battle. I hope you put points into both light and heavy weapons, because if you didn’t, you’re gonna have a bad time. The race is pretty much impossible to lose – you have 60 seconds to cross a map that you can briskly stroll through in about 25 seconds. The free-for-all is just more of the same from the game’s other combat encounters, only you have to get kills faster than your AI competitors. The team deathmatch though? Oh god. Every enemy and NPC wears armor, but you are naked. The enemies will one-hit you with sniper rifles or quad-barrel shotguns the moment you step out of cover. Your teammates are mostly useless, and while everyone else respawns, if you die, it’s game over. And just when you think you’ve finally scraped by with a hard-earned victory, the game throws another curveball at you.
Upon scoring the final hit, you will immediately be treated to a “You’re Winner!” message and an email announcing your victory. Do not be fooled – you can still get murked and end up forced to restart for the next 15 or so seconds until the game decides to free your soul from its arena-based prison. This is to be expected from any good piece of slavjank and I was prepared for it from the start. What I wasn’t prepared for was my entire team turning hostile the instant the game declared me the winner. If you see that victory message while surrounded by friends, you’re dead. They will immediately turn 180 degrees to surgically snipe you with rocket launchers from across the map, and if you aren’t far enough away from them, you probably won’t even realize they were the murderers. Eventually, I figured out what was going on, and decided to hide in a far corner while praying my teammates would get the last kill – it’s the only way to finish this segment without cheats.
This all brings us back to the advertising copy once again, which promises “Multiplayer support in various game modes via LAN or the Internet.” This is a lie, as Sabotain doesn’t feature multiplayer in any capacity; that said, I do think they intended to have an online mode, and these single-player arena matches are the remnants of that abandoned concept. Now, I’m not sure why you’d want to play an arena shooter with Sabotain mechanics, but Deus Ex is one of my all-time favorite games and I’m not sure why you’d want to play an arena shooter with its mechanics either, so sure, why not. Also, I couldn’t figure out where else to include this observation, but the Underground City (where these battles take place) prominently features a sizable combat arena-looking structure, and it’s never actually used for anything in the game.
Now that you’ve proven yourself, you’ll begin obtaining missions from Colonel Bogg, sometimes referred to as General Bogg. These include such exciting adventures as “kill everyone in drug lab” and “wait until 10:00pm, then kill everyone in drug lab” (yes, Sabotain has a real-time day/night cycle, and yes, there are multiple points where you’re forced to wait 10+ real-world minutes for progression). Several hours of busywork later, General Colonel Bogg commends you for valiantly placing a bomb in a drug dealer’s car while he was out taking a leak in an alley, and then it’s time for Act 2’s head-scratching climax – we’re going to kidnap a doctor. Kinda. It’s complicated.
Dr. Han (no relation) is working on a project involving… nanotechnology? Maybe? Sorry, I for some reason watched both Argylle and Madame Web after finishing this game, and that particular cocktail has caused enough of my braincells to die that I’m rapidly forgetting things I did two weeks ago. Completely unrelated to your work as a double agent, General Grinders tasks you with kidnapping Han; to complete this particular mission, Alex will need to prepare by buying a bunch of stolen industrial-strength flashlights, pumping his daughter for information, and seducing him. Spoiler alert: none of these things factor into the actual kidnapping at all.
Rod’s daughter returns, now capable of normal speech, to help you locate Dr. Han’s daughter at the casino across the street from the university because they’re friends or something. She doesn’t introduce you to her, though; she instead fucks off to play slots while Han’s daughter tells you to get lost. The only way she’ll let you speak with her is if you’re good enough at one of those timed light-stopping machines that reward you with tickets at Chuck E. Cheese. This minigame is, needless to say, fucking horrendous, and ate 22,000 out of the 45,000 credits I had when I started. It’s very loud, very RNG-dependent, and very frustrating. I almost dropped the game here. But I didn’t, which treated me to an amazing 10+-minute conversation in which Alex lies about being in a secret relationship with Dr. Han, causing his daughter to trauma dump about her mom leaving him, or maybe dying, in return. Eventually, she informs us of her father’s home address, information that is never utilized in any way.
Traveling to a dive bar, Alex must now seduce Dr. Han by carefully selecting the correct options in his dialogue tree. Just kidding – there are no options, only a linear set of painful responses to everything he says. Eventually, she invites him out on a date somewhere. This has no correlation to where he gets kidnapped either, and of course the date never actually happens. Instead, you find him chilling in yet another drug lab, and then you’re required to make The Choice. Supposedly, the original plan for Deus Ex would have let the player choose to side with either the Resistance or UNATCO; truly, Avalon Style Entertainment makes Ion Storm look like total amateurs, because you actually do get to choose who you side with in this game!
Let me set the scene: sterile gray floor, walls, and ceiling lie in front of you, and a huge text dump explains that you must now decide whether you want to stay with the Empire or switch sides to the Confederation. This is a tough call, as you have absolutely no fucking idea what each side stands for. I chose the Empire, mostly because they don’t seem to put poison in people’s food, but also because I didn’t want my bestie Rod to be mad at me. :(
The Empire route is easily the most finished of the three (yes, there’s a third – we’ll get to that, don’t worry). While it does have a couple moments where the devs forgot to replace dummy text with actual dialogue, a handful of unvoiced lines, and one mission that just gets skipped because they never actually made it, its issues are less egregious than those of the other two factions; unfortunately, it’s also a bit blander as a result. Kidnapping Dr. Han involves killing all the Confederate soldiers and then escorting him to exit – he actually leads the way for you and doesn’t resist at all, almost like he wants to be taken prisoner! He and his daughter are never seen nor heard from again after this.
A low-res FMV featuring our first proper look at General Grinders, whose visage truly lives up to his name, kicks off Act 3. (There may have also been another scene with him earlier, I’m sorry my memory is hazy.) I don’t actually know what’s being said in this cutscene because it’s in Italian with no subtitles, but I assume it’s about your promotion within the Empire’s ranks. Now you have to go sabotage the Sputnik Control Center so they can nuke Miracle City from orbit, which mostly involves talking to some random lady who works there about her boy problems at a diner. She tells you the name of her favorite movie, which is the password to shut down the forcefield I guess. Then you have to go to a bunch of different labs to learn about the Confederates’ illicit experiments on aliens and mutants; one of them features an unholy amount of suicide bombers who hide behind boxes and instantly kill you unless you’re wearing the game’s second-best heavy armor, which you can conveniently find halfway through this particular lab. You then poison the city’s water supply, cripple its stock market, and execute some guys from a construction(?) company because Grinders is a true psychopath who thinks dropping nukes isn’t enough. Now that I think about it, some of these things might have actually been Alex’s idea.
All this culminates with asking the planet’s singular TV news network to broadcast an anti-Confederation propaganda video, even though you’re going to genocide everyone living there anyway so it can't actually have any effect on the population’s thoughts. Unfortunately, you get tricked into an ambush by your reporter contact, who is secretly working for President Castor; instead, you’ll have to convince the Rebels, a third faction you probably won’t even know exists until 90% completion, to help you put it on the air instead. There was also a bit that involved purchasing a painfully slow car for 20+ grand in there somewhere, but I must have been falling asleep at the time because I can’t remember when that actually happened.
Alex apologizes to Rod and Highspeed (another hackerman she had prior dealings with who wasn’t important enough to mention until now), for potentially killing them alongside all their friends and entire extended families, drives back to her spaceship, and… that’s it. Grinders verbally gives everyone the finger and blows up the city, possibly the whole planet. The end! A nice 30-second Italian-only FMV and no credits, just kicked straight back to the main menu after your successful atomization of hundreds of thousands of civilians. I guess the Imperials really were the bad guys, huh.
Reloading one of my many manual saves (I’m not taking any chances with a game like this), I decided to go ahead and try the Confederation route. This one… also starts with you kidnapping Dr. Han. Or maybe you’re rescuing him this time. It plays out almost exactly the same as the Empire version with some model swaps for enemies/friendlies, but surprisingly this is one of the only segments that isn’t entirely unique to its own path. I genuinely expected the whole thing to just be a palette swap of the Empire route, but it seems Sabotain loves finding new ways to impress me. The Confederate storyline is a little more broken than the previous one, but thankfully also much weirder and less dour. You still never hear from Dr. Han or his daughter again, though.
General Colonel Major Bogg now has a new mission for his best agent: acquire the secret of teleportation from the native Voodoo people. Just as I thought this game was about to get racist on me again, I realized that they were just old Russian guys who wear cloaks and robes instead of armor. Cool. Sometimes you can see them hanging out in the middle of street, but they disappear before you walk close enough to see their faces. But now you get to finally interact with them… how exciting!
It really isn’t exciting at all. A door under the theme park takes you to a giant winding path comprised of old tree trunks, and you better believe it takes 10 minutes to walk across the whole thing… at least, I think it would take that long, because even though this is technically an interior, it still let me spawn my car and zoom through. Eat exhaust fumes, nature!
Inside the Great Voodoo Tree where the three or so clan members live, Alex is told that they’ll only help her if she steals something from a museum that used to belong to them. This heist takes approximately 30 seconds; all you do is walk up to the thing and grab it out of its display case in broad daylight. After that, the Voodoo guys agree to tell her how to teleport the entire Confederate army into the Empire leader’s house. But this isn’t good enough for Master Sergeant Boggs – no, he needs you to slaughter the Rebels in cold blood before he’s willing to go to war against the Empire. So now you become a triple agent, pretending to work for the Rebels while actually working for the Confederation while still pretending to work for the Empire maybe.
The Rebels trick you into helping them break their boss out of prison and then disappear. Then you go looking for them and they capture you. The boss’ son is in love with you despite never having met you before, and he presents you with Another Choice: do you continue working for the Confederation, or flip sides again three hours after you did the first time? My desire to not fuck this guy outweighed my desire to see justice done, so I stuck with the Confederates at first. He still let me out of jail regardless, allowing me to immediately slaughter his cohorts.
For your valor in eradicating the Rebel scourge, Private First Class Corporal Boggs rewards you with the game’s best heavy armor in a cutscene that looks like it was animated using Garry’s Mod. Congratulations, you are now invincible! I guess its armor rating is 100% because you literally cannot take damage while wearing it. Boggs-sensei then informs you that the unhinged Rebel headquarters massacre wasn’t enough – their true leader, the Coordinator, still breathes. Like all other mysteries in Sabotain, Rod knows the top secret steps that must be taken to meet with him. In the interest of avoiding redundancy, I haven’t mentioned the sheer volume of times you ask Rod for information no other character knows. You’re visiting him like every other mission, I swear to God, and he starts flirting with you more and more each time despite being 30+ years your senior and married with a kid. His seeming-omnipotence is foreshadowing, by the way.
Now you have to get genetic modification surgery so you can look like a rebel (with almost exactly the same model as Phantom from earlier), which completely negates that awesome armor you just acquired, then call the Coordinator on a specific frequency using a specific method to hear from him around 5-10 real-world minutes later. Surprise! It’s a trap, and you get arrested by the same faction you’re currently working for because they think you’re a Rebel now and Bogg Bogg won’t vouch for you or whatever. But don’t worry, one of the prison guards helps you escape for some reason, and also gives you evidence to prove your innocence.
Double plot twist time!! Rod is the Coordinator and Colonel Boggs is secretly working for the Empire. The Rod twist makes sense, I guess, but the Boggs shit is completely fucking stupid because if he was actually working for the Empire the whole time why did you have to prove yourself in the arena challenges and betray the Empire to continue working with him? Couldn’t Grinders have just planted you under his command to begin with? I can’t believe this absolute horseshit. If I owned a physical copy of this game I’d take a dump on the disc like I was the angriest gamer you’d ever heard.
You finally get to meet Castor, the Confederate President, for the first time, and he almost immediately believes you when you tell him Rod and Boggie are traitors. After they’re rounded up and arrested/maybe executed off-screen, it’s time to return to the Voodoo Tree so you can actually learn the secret of teleportation for real this time (why couldn’t we get this earlier to use as a fast travel function?????). You then teleport directly into the Empire’s main headquarters to arrest their prime minister/dictator/whatever he is and congratulations, you’ve finished the Confederation route! But we’re not done just yet, are we…
The Rebel route is definitely the “good” one; morally I mean, not in terms of design. I hesitate to call it the “true” route because it’s by far the least finished and functional of the three, but it has the most satisfying ending (by Sabotain standards, of course). All you have to do is agree to snog the weird guy who fell in love with you at first sight while you were imprisoned, and then you can at last get to work properly circumventing authority instead of just choosing between flavors of fascism.
This path largely boils down to planning and executing a huge jailbreak. It’s far less interesting than it sounds. You have to build up a crew for the job, which you do by driving to a person’s house, talking to them, doing a menial task in exchange for their help, then driving back to their house and talking to them again. One of these involves convincing a gang leader to let a guy’s daughter quit the gang, which is only notable because the nightclub she resides in plays the game’s opening song so loud you can’t hear the voice acting. It’s a banger, but I recommend not playing this part with headphones unless you want your ears to be destroyed by someone singing “I REALLY MISS YOU I SUGAR SUGAR MISS YOU” over and over.
Half the dialogue in this part of the game was never correctly implemented, which makes most conversations turn into the following:
Alex: Randomguy01?
Random Guy #1: Yes?
Alex: I’ll come back later.
I won’t go into more detail about this part because the brain damage caused both by watching the aforementioned films and by subsequently replaying Umbrella Chronicles has made me forget most of what happened, but needless to say none of it was at all exciting. It mostly just consisted of running back and forth “talking” to NPCs who spoke via said dummy text.
Now that you’ve assembled the Rebel Avengers – Getaway Driver, Inside Man, and three other people who don’t actually do anything – it’s time to liberate your new friends from the local prison. This consists of walking into the building, descending the huge staircase, shooting 10 or so guards, talking to the prisoners whose cell doors were conveniently left open for you, climbing back up to the entrance, realizing you can’t leave that way for some reason, walking all the way down to the basement, and exiting through the laser tag arena-looking “labyrinth” the prison inexplicably has.
With the Rebel leader and his henchmen free, you get to do the genetic modification and TV broadcast missions again (yay…), and then it’s off to kill President Castor to return control of Miracle City to the people – viva la revolución! He hides in his bunker under the White House, which is floating in midair and wouldn’t have room for a basement, where you get the armor that makes you invincible again and finish the game five minutes later.
The Coordinator is never encountered or even mentioned in this route despite his status as overlord of the Rebels and Alex’s longstanding working relationship with Rod, but don’t worry, at least we get to see her kiss the guy who randomly showed up to save her and then never appeared again until now. At least there’s some sort of personal resolution for the protagonist this time, I guess.
Sabotain doesn’t feature a New Game+ mode, but the max character level is 300 even though you’ll have barely entered the 100’s upon completion of any given route. The only way to obtain experience points outside of missions is by killing enemies, which awards a pittance of EXP assuming you’re lucky enough to get any at all. There are also probably a million credits-worth of “unique” vehicles to buy, so if you hate yourself enough to become the first person to ever go for True 100% in this game, you can easily enjoy over 1,000 hours of Sabotain!
As I approach 6,500 words in this review no one will read for a game no one will play, I start to think about my own mortality in relationship to the lifespan of art. We still read Moby Dick and watch Casablanca, we still listen to Aretha Franklin and play Super Mario Bros., but who is thinking about Sabotain 20 years later? Heck, who was even thinking about it the year it came out? I’m not trying to say this game is some kind of unsung classic that deserved better, but despite its unfinished nature and inherently flawed core, I do believe it came from an earnest team who genuinely put their hearts into it. Or maybe not, considering they also made Corkscrew RuLes, and, well…
But for the sake of argument, let’s pretend I’m right and this game’s badness was a product of inexperience, lacking budget, and/or a terrible publisher. What does that mean for the people who spent multiple years of their lives working on it? Obviously, not everyone is capable of or even really allowed to make timeless art, but the things we create are destined to outgrow and outlive us. When they don’t, it’s one of the most painful feelings imaginable. Once I finally finish something I’m proud of enough to publicly release, I don’t know if anyone outside my own personal sphere will even care. It’s scary to think about the relentless march of time in our relatively short lives; you can never know how long you truly have to left to make even the smallest mark upon our world. And it’s terribly depressing to think that so much sincere art ends up ignored at best or as a video essay/social media punching bag at worst.
To that end, I think it’s valuable to earnestly engage with “bad” art. I’ve ragged on Sabotain a lot in this review, but I went into it with an open mind, and you know what? I enjoyed it! I had a good time! Don’t let the low rating I gave this game fool you, I actually quite liked playing through it and recapping my experience here for y’all. Not in a “so bad it’s good” or “what could have been” way, but just by taking it for what it is – a poorly designed, unfinished mess of great ideas implemented terribly and awful ideas implemented worse. All the backhanded compliments and sarcastic praise may have been mean, but they were unironic; Sabotain’s innumerable flaws made for a memorable, entertaining journey.
I hope the people who worked on this game don’t feel like they wasted the years spent developing it. I hope they’re happy with their lives right now and are proud of accomplishing something, no matter how it turned out. And I hope weirdos like me will continue engaging with their creation, even if only out of morbid curiosity.
Thanks for reading! Writing this inspired me to compile a list of games I’m aware of that don’t seem to be particularly well-known. I can’t guarantee all of them will be good, but I’d love to shine a spotlight on creators who may have fallen under the radar in the past! You can find it here: https://backloggd.com/u/Djungelskog/list/mysterious-unknowable-games/
Sabotain: Break The Rules! is a low-budget attempt at cloning Deus Ex from the same studio responsible for Corkscrew RuLes! (capitalization intentional but inexplicable), a Russian Postal 2 expansion pack where you play as a guy who had his penis stolen. Sabotain was never officially released in English – or maybe it was, online documentation is inconsistent and practically nonexistent – but it was translated and even dubbed, so if you install the full English patch on top of the Italian release, you can experience its beautifully half-assed localization in all its glory. With a word salad backstory section in the manual and at least two voice actors to portray its dozens of characters, seasoned European PC game fans will immediately know they’re in for a great time.
Have you ever been playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and thought, “this is okay, but I wish the designers were addicted to meth while developing it”? That’s Sabotain, baby! Ripping the band-aid off now: this game is awful in every conceivable way (except the music, which slaps); that said, despite its considerable length, I couldn’t put it down, which is more than I can say for most games that are actually good. Playing through Sabotain is truly An Experience, and I wanted to chronicle my journey for all to understand what a delightful time it is.
Sabotain starts off strong with a crusty FMV showing all the cool stuff you can allegedly do, screen-tearing and framerate drops baked in of course; the real star here is the intro song, which is pure mid-00’s electronic Euro cheese, complete with the Russian artist singing in English. It’s so fucking good and I say that without a hint of irony. This game already had me smiling before I even reached the main menu, which is great because the main menu is a travesty. No music or sound effects to speak of, a “Run” function that doesn’t actually exist because it’s not bindable, UI that resembles an even less functional Deus Ex: Invisible War, volume sliders that may or may not work – we’re already in the thick of it and we haven’t even clicked “New Game” yet!
Now it’s time to build our character, and obviously I picked the female class who specializes in stealth (a grave mistake). Her name is Alex (just like the main character of Invisible War, hm), and she’s a huge goober with the voice of a wannabe country-western singer, which as a native Texan I obviously love. During character creation, you allocate points into certain stats and skills, and you get bonuses for the ones your gender specializes in. These are the only things you should invest in, as the returns on any unspecialized attribute are laughable. You also absolutely should not dump all your points into stealth like I did, as it’s unusable 99% of the time. I thought this was supposed to be a Deus Ex knock-off dammit!!!
Sometimes the skill system seems completely pointless, but at other times it’s obnoxiously essential. If you don’t have enough points in a weapon type, good luck killing anything – you can direct hit a normal unarmored human enemy in the face with a rocket launcher, and if you haven’t allocated an arbitrary number of points toward explosives, the guy won’t even break a sweat. Meanwhile, I never put a single point in Gala Boost (Sabotain’s equivalent to bullet time), and it was still able to trivialize nearly every battle I came across. Side note: there’s an unarmed stat, but I don’t think you can actually punch people in this game. Leave a comment below if I’m stupid and you were able to beat the whole game by fisting enemies.
Our adventure begins as the heroic Professional Assassin Alex lands her spaceship in the starport of Miracle City, a sprawling dystopian metropolis under the control of the Galactic Confederation. Alex is an agent for the ominously-named Empire, and has been tasked with destroying the Hungry Bulls food factory for reasons that are hard to discern due to the poorly-localized text log; I think they’re putting a mind control chemical in the food or something? Unable to interact with any of the NPCs bustling about the place, she heads for the transport shuttle at the edge of the plaza, traveling to the Tired Bulls district to meet her informant, Rod.
This is the moment you’ll realize that when I said Miracle City was “sprawling,” what I meant was it is entirely made up of huge, empty zones filled with indistinct streets, random enemies, and friendly NPCs who only spout the same 5-10 canned lines ad nauseum. There are buildings you can enter, but unless they’re marked as a current goal for the main quest, you won’t actually be able to do anything inside them. The official advertising copy claims there are “countless side quests” that, alongside the main missions, “guarantee at least 40 hours of fun-filled enjoyment,” but I did not see a single one during my 25-hour playthrough. I’m the kind of guy who likes to explore every single inch of every single map (which is probably why games take me months if not years to finish), but after the first couple districts I realized there was nothing to find outside of a scant few goodie crates, and just started beelining toward objectives.
On the way to the bar where Rod resides, you will probably notice the car dealership, Miracle City Motors, although unlike all the other important locations there are no street signs pointing toward it. The vehicles here are ungodly expensive given Sabotain’s economy, but they’re practically necessary unless you enjoy spending 10 minutes walking down barren roads four times an hour. If you’re playing legitimately, it will probably take somewhere in the ballpark of 10 hours before you can afford even the cheapest car, but around that same time you’ll be able to get a better one for free anyway. If you aren’t a masochist like I am, you could instead just buy a car from the outset via cheating yourself a bunch of money by pressing [Ctrl] + [Alt] + [:] + [F3] a few times.
The cars do not control particularly well, utilizing the keyboard only with no camera movement, but they also don’t really need to do anything other than get you from point A to B faster, and in that regard they serve their purpose valiantly (except for when they glitch out and become locked to 44 km/h for some reason). The moment you get behind the wheel of one of these bad boys you’ll be mowing down pedestrians like there’s no tomorrow – not on purpose, mind you, it’s just that the streets are really cramped and the NPCs love walking directly in front of your vehicle. It’s okay, though, because ramming someone with your car at full speed does very little damage, and the cops are totally fine with being run over as long as they survive the ordeal. I assume they did this because the AI traffic is incredibly stupid and frequently collides with enemies, so if cars actually killed people you’d never have to do any fighting in the overworld (what a loss that would be). But don’t worry, if a car hits you, you’ll be launched hundreds of feet into the air, and while Sabotain doesn’t otherwise seem to have fall damage, you will most certainly die upon landing (usually outside of the map).
Finally, it’s time to meet the illustrious Rod, owner and proprietor of the Take It Easy bar (logo written in Comic Sans). Rod is your typical large, greasy, wifebeater-wearing Russian quest-giver, but he’s actually one of the game’s more gentlemanly characters, in that he doesn’t immediately hit on Alex the moment she says “hello.” The male voice actor seems slightly less apathetic than usual in this role, but only just. Greeting him, you are given six(!) whole dialogue options:
How are you?
Vodka tonic, please.
What do they call you?
Interesting place. Curious atmosphere.
Maybe you can help me find some information.
I lost my lighter.
Get used to these prompts, because they are the only conversation starters in the game, and outside of the vodka and lighter ones, show up for nearly every NPC you can interact with. Do you even need to ask if they just recycle the exact same line delivery every single time?
Much like the hotel owner JC Denton says “what a shame” to, Rod is worried about his missing daughter. She’s been kidnapped, or maybe not, he isn’t sure, though he knows exactly where she is regardless, which leads Alex to the first of several levels you’d think would play like an immersive sim but don’t. She’s being held in the backrooms (not those ones) by the Voodoo Club’s owner, and in Deus Ex you’d have several options here. Do you sneak in via the rear entrance or sewers? Do you bribe or talk your way past the guards? Do you lockpick the staff door and waltz in directly? Do you just walk through the front door, murder everyone in the building, and shoot the door open? Well, there’s no alternate entrances and you can’t pick locks (even though you get a lockpick later, which seems to do nothing); it’s quite possible that the rampage option would be viable here, but considering how the game later soft-locked me for not talking to the correct NPC the correct way at the correct time, I’m not so sure I’d suggest trying it. You can’t talk your way past the guards or bribe them, but you do need to talk to them, at which point Alex threatens them into letting her in the back. This conversation ends with two dialogue options, one of which seems to imply she’ll kill the guy while the other sounds like she’ll let him live. In the plot twist of the century, both options spare him. Disappointing!
The club’s staff area is one of the few sections where you can actually use stealth. Don’t even bother trying to crouch because it makes you move at a snail’s pace and the enemies will still spot you from a mile away; you must instead use the Sneak command, which turns you invisible for a painfully brief time, and slap them in the face with whatever melee weapon you have at this point. The range is pathetic, so you’ll need to practically be touching them, but that’s okay because they can’t notice you during the 0.5 seconds your cloaking device is active. After navigating the single small hallway to the single small staff room, simply bonk the bad guy on the head to save Rod’s daughter, who is only capable of saying the word “daddy” due to all the drugs she’s taken.
Rod is now your BFF and has some hot goss for you about the food factory, but he also directs you to an ex-employee who has even hotter goss (and a map) to give. This part seems to be optional but I doubt it actually is, so now you must venture to the next district, which is called, I shit you not, “Dirty Cancers.” (At one point, a character refers to it as “Dirty Dancers” in a voice clip, which I can only assume was the intended name. Or maybe they just misspoke in that line!) Our new friend lives in a complex the street sign calls “Dirty Apartments,” and his apartment number is smeared on the door in blood. Despite this, he’s probably the nicest guy in the whole game; he got fired from his job for giving their excess food to the homeless instead of throwing it away, aww. It’s time to ruin his ex-boss’ life by exposing him as a cheater (the sex kind)!
Every NPC in the Scarlet Place district (sometimes called the Red Dust district) is hostile. They will shoot you on sight, there are a lot of them, and they constantly respawn. Half of them couldn’t hit the broad side of an Amazon fulfillment center, but the rest will immediately take you down with pinpoint accuracy from maximum object load distance. Thankfully, you can find a metal chest very close to the entrance with some of the game’s best light armor in it (keep in mind you’ve probably been playing two hours tops at this point) – you’ll most certainly need it here unless you cheated (or grinded I guess) your way to an early car.
Combat in Sabotain consists mostly of shooting enemies in the head with whichever guns you’re proficient in (forget about even trying melee), because it can take up to 50(!) body shots to kill someone. Even then, some enemies will randomly soak up to 10 headshots before going down, and you have to lead them ever so slightly since your bullets are just a hair slower than hitscan for reasons. Ammo is hilariously abundant so at least resource management isn’t an issue, but you might end up emptying a full clip just trying to hit certain enemies even once, because the AI will occasionally decide to start moving in the opposite direction the instant your cursor so much as grazes them. This is the moment you’ll most likely realize just how broken the bullet time ability is. You’ll be pressing that key waaaaay more often here than you ever did in Max Payne or F.E.A.R., believe me.
At the brothel, you hire a prostitute for free (how do they stay in business!?) and she just casually tells you how to gain access to their entire client list with full dox as if you’ve been friends for years. Long story short, you must navigate the hellish streets once again to go to another fucking building to meet some asshole named T. Grey who’s always simping for Alex even though he never looks directly at her because he’s a cool aloof hackerman. He gives you a fake “membership” card, which I guess makes you an honorary prostitute… or maybe pimp??? So you go back to the brothel and the madam completely forgot you were just there 30 minutes ago and apparently doesn’t know who her own employees are so she gives you the full client list like it’s nothing.
You tell the factory manager’s wife he was cheating on her and of course she already hated him but this was the last straw. Dirty Apartment Guy is overjoyed and gives you the hottest goss about the food factory, but for some reason Alex thinks she needs help to pull off the job, so she has to join the Mercenary Guild to find a few partners. To join the guild, you must prove your loyalty to a racist Jamaican(?) caricature by killing a guy while he’s being transported from prison. The dialogue sequence states that he’s a witness for the state and you need to assassinate him to appease a powerful drug kingpin, but the following gameplay scenario and objective screen contradict this by saying he actually is the drug kingpin. Whatever the case, murdering an unarmed man doesn’t prove much challenge, especially when you have two unkillable NPCs with you (just kidding, their poor pathing immediately gets them stuck inside the front gate).
The two mercs, Phantom and Wildcat, also end up being your partners for the food factory job. They warn Alex of the dangers involved in double-crossing the Guild’s boss, droning on about how they’ll need to get approval from her before they can do the job. Alex is adamant that she doesn’t play by anyone’s rules (hence the game’s subtitle), but eventually caves when her new friends aren’t willing to help unless she obeys protocol. Getting approval from the boss takes less time than the aforementioned conversation and then she’s never seen or heard from again.
We still need to obtain explosives powerful enough to demolish a huge steel building, which means making a deal with a corrupt military official who really wants to have sex with you and also Wildcat. The deal falls through because you aren’t willing to raw-dog him right there on his kitchen table, so he has to be eliminated. You cannot leave until you talk to Wildcat after executing him, but if you pick the wrong dialogue option you still can’t leave, or talk to her again, so because I was quick-saving every minute due to the game’s general instability, I ended up soft-locking myself and had to load a manual save from the previous night.
The epic mission we’ve been building up to for hours consists of walking into a factory the size of a school library, shooting maybe eight guards, then planting the bomb in a random spot. Did you really think we’d need partners, a (non-functioning) map, and intel on the location to pull off this job? I long for that kind of innocence.
With what I will generously call Act 1 completed, a new story arc begins – this one involves Alex being tailed by mysterious government agents, though you never actually see her being followed in either cutscene or gameplay. After about an hour of running back and forth trying to deduce who your stalkers are, eventually you “trick them” into “following you” into a secluded warehouse (in actuality you just enter the warehouse and their car is already inside). Kill the feds and retrieve some evidence from their vehicle as the game instructs, by which it of course means their corpses. This reveals the mastermind behind the plan, who you also kill. It’s kind of fuzzy, but I think you then go to their underground headquarters and slaughter everyone there in retaliation. None of this is ever mentioned again, but you do get a free muscle car for your trouble if you can figure out which of the bunker’s 20 identical doors is openable.
Now it’s time to infiltrate the Confederate army. Even though they apparently know Alex is the one who blew up their food factory, not three hours ago sending government spooks after her in return, General Grinders of the Empire believes she is somehow the best candidate to weasel her way into their ranks as a double agent (this goes off without a hitch of course). Unfortunately, she’ll first have to prove herself by entering unsanctioned arena deathmatches! Why does the governing body of Miracle City require potential recruits to fight to the death in an illegal underground coliseum before they can enlist? I dunno man, why did I play this game and decide to write a whole essay about it?
The recruitment arena is probably Sabotain’s low point, which is really saying something. You have to win three matches to progress: a free-for-all, a race, and a team battle. I hope you put points into both light and heavy weapons, because if you didn’t, you’re gonna have a bad time. The race is pretty much impossible to lose – you have 60 seconds to cross a map that you can briskly stroll through in about 25 seconds. The free-for-all is just more of the same from the game’s other combat encounters, only you have to get kills faster than your AI competitors. The team deathmatch though? Oh god. Every enemy and NPC wears armor, but you are naked. The enemies will one-hit you with sniper rifles or quad-barrel shotguns the moment you step out of cover. Your teammates are mostly useless, and while everyone else respawns, if you die, it’s game over. And just when you think you’ve finally scraped by with a hard-earned victory, the game throws another curveball at you.
Upon scoring the final hit, you will immediately be treated to a “You’re Winner!” message and an email announcing your victory. Do not be fooled – you can still get murked and end up forced to restart for the next 15 or so seconds until the game decides to free your soul from its arena-based prison. This is to be expected from any good piece of slavjank and I was prepared for it from the start. What I wasn’t prepared for was my entire team turning hostile the instant the game declared me the winner. If you see that victory message while surrounded by friends, you’re dead. They will immediately turn 180 degrees to surgically snipe you with rocket launchers from across the map, and if you aren’t far enough away from them, you probably won’t even realize they were the murderers. Eventually, I figured out what was going on, and decided to hide in a far corner while praying my teammates would get the last kill – it’s the only way to finish this segment without cheats.
This all brings us back to the advertising copy once again, which promises “Multiplayer support in various game modes via LAN or the Internet.” This is a lie, as Sabotain doesn’t feature multiplayer in any capacity; that said, I do think they intended to have an online mode, and these single-player arena matches are the remnants of that abandoned concept. Now, I’m not sure why you’d want to play an arena shooter with Sabotain mechanics, but Deus Ex is one of my all-time favorite games and I’m not sure why you’d want to play an arena shooter with its mechanics either, so sure, why not. Also, I couldn’t figure out where else to include this observation, but the Underground City (where these battles take place) prominently features a sizable combat arena-looking structure, and it’s never actually used for anything in the game.
Now that you’ve proven yourself, you’ll begin obtaining missions from Colonel Bogg, sometimes referred to as General Bogg. These include such exciting adventures as “kill everyone in drug lab” and “wait until 10:00pm, then kill everyone in drug lab” (yes, Sabotain has a real-time day/night cycle, and yes, there are multiple points where you’re forced to wait 10+ real-world minutes for progression). Several hours of busywork later, General Colonel Bogg commends you for valiantly placing a bomb in a drug dealer’s car while he was out taking a leak in an alley, and then it’s time for Act 2’s head-scratching climax – we’re going to kidnap a doctor. Kinda. It’s complicated.
Dr. Han (no relation) is working on a project involving… nanotechnology? Maybe? Sorry, I for some reason watched both Argylle and Madame Web after finishing this game, and that particular cocktail has caused enough of my braincells to die that I’m rapidly forgetting things I did two weeks ago. Completely unrelated to your work as a double agent, General Grinders tasks you with kidnapping Han; to complete this particular mission, Alex will need to prepare by buying a bunch of stolen industrial-strength flashlights, pumping his daughter for information, and seducing him. Spoiler alert: none of these things factor into the actual kidnapping at all.
Rod’s daughter returns, now capable of normal speech, to help you locate Dr. Han’s daughter at the casino across the street from the university because they’re friends or something. She doesn’t introduce you to her, though; she instead fucks off to play slots while Han’s daughter tells you to get lost. The only way she’ll let you speak with her is if you’re good enough at one of those timed light-stopping machines that reward you with tickets at Chuck E. Cheese. This minigame is, needless to say, fucking horrendous, and ate 22,000 out of the 45,000 credits I had when I started. It’s very loud, very RNG-dependent, and very frustrating. I almost dropped the game here. But I didn’t, which treated me to an amazing 10+-minute conversation in which Alex lies about being in a secret relationship with Dr. Han, causing his daughter to trauma dump about her mom leaving him, or maybe dying, in return. Eventually, she informs us of her father’s home address, information that is never utilized in any way.
Traveling to a dive bar, Alex must now seduce Dr. Han by carefully selecting the correct options in his dialogue tree. Just kidding – there are no options, only a linear set of painful responses to everything he says. Eventually, she invites him out on a date somewhere. This has no correlation to where he gets kidnapped either, and of course the date never actually happens. Instead, you find him chilling in yet another drug lab, and then you’re required to make The Choice. Supposedly, the original plan for Deus Ex would have let the player choose to side with either the Resistance or UNATCO; truly, Avalon Style Entertainment makes Ion Storm look like total amateurs, because you actually do get to choose who you side with in this game!
Let me set the scene: sterile gray floor, walls, and ceiling lie in front of you, and a huge text dump explains that you must now decide whether you want to stay with the Empire or switch sides to the Confederation. This is a tough call, as you have absolutely no fucking idea what each side stands for. I chose the Empire, mostly because they don’t seem to put poison in people’s food, but also because I didn’t want my bestie Rod to be mad at me. :(
The Empire route is easily the most finished of the three (yes, there’s a third – we’ll get to that, don’t worry). While it does have a couple moments where the devs forgot to replace dummy text with actual dialogue, a handful of unvoiced lines, and one mission that just gets skipped because they never actually made it, its issues are less egregious than those of the other two factions; unfortunately, it’s also a bit blander as a result. Kidnapping Dr. Han involves killing all the Confederate soldiers and then escorting him to exit – he actually leads the way for you and doesn’t resist at all, almost like he wants to be taken prisoner! He and his daughter are never seen nor heard from again after this.
A low-res FMV featuring our first proper look at General Grinders, whose visage truly lives up to his name, kicks off Act 3. (There may have also been another scene with him earlier, I’m sorry my memory is hazy.) I don’t actually know what’s being said in this cutscene because it’s in Italian with no subtitles, but I assume it’s about your promotion within the Empire’s ranks. Now you have to go sabotage the Sputnik Control Center so they can nuke Miracle City from orbit, which mostly involves talking to some random lady who works there about her boy problems at a diner. She tells you the name of her favorite movie, which is the password to shut down the forcefield I guess. Then you have to go to a bunch of different labs to learn about the Confederates’ illicit experiments on aliens and mutants; one of them features an unholy amount of suicide bombers who hide behind boxes and instantly kill you unless you’re wearing the game’s second-best heavy armor, which you can conveniently find halfway through this particular lab. You then poison the city’s water supply, cripple its stock market, and execute some guys from a construction(?) company because Grinders is a true psychopath who thinks dropping nukes isn’t enough. Now that I think about it, some of these things might have actually been Alex’s idea.
All this culminates with asking the planet’s singular TV news network to broadcast an anti-Confederation propaganda video, even though you’re going to genocide everyone living there anyway so it can't actually have any effect on the population’s thoughts. Unfortunately, you get tricked into an ambush by your reporter contact, who is secretly working for President Castor; instead, you’ll have to convince the Rebels, a third faction you probably won’t even know exists until 90% completion, to help you put it on the air instead. There was also a bit that involved purchasing a painfully slow car for 20+ grand in there somewhere, but I must have been falling asleep at the time because I can’t remember when that actually happened.
Alex apologizes to Rod and Highspeed (another hackerman she had prior dealings with who wasn’t important enough to mention until now), for potentially killing them alongside all their friends and entire extended families, drives back to her spaceship, and… that’s it. Grinders verbally gives everyone the finger and blows up the city, possibly the whole planet. The end! A nice 30-second Italian-only FMV and no credits, just kicked straight back to the main menu after your successful atomization of hundreds of thousands of civilians. I guess the Imperials really were the bad guys, huh.
Reloading one of my many manual saves (I’m not taking any chances with a game like this), I decided to go ahead and try the Confederation route. This one… also starts with you kidnapping Dr. Han. Or maybe you’re rescuing him this time. It plays out almost exactly the same as the Empire version with some model swaps for enemies/friendlies, but surprisingly this is one of the only segments that isn’t entirely unique to its own path. I genuinely expected the whole thing to just be a palette swap of the Empire route, but it seems Sabotain loves finding new ways to impress me. The Confederate storyline is a little more broken than the previous one, but thankfully also much weirder and less dour. You still never hear from Dr. Han or his daughter again, though.
General Colonel Major Bogg now has a new mission for his best agent: acquire the secret of teleportation from the native Voodoo people. Just as I thought this game was about to get racist on me again, I realized that they were just old Russian guys who wear cloaks and robes instead of armor. Cool. Sometimes you can see them hanging out in the middle of street, but they disappear before you walk close enough to see their faces. But now you get to finally interact with them… how exciting!
It really isn’t exciting at all. A door under the theme park takes you to a giant winding path comprised of old tree trunks, and you better believe it takes 10 minutes to walk across the whole thing… at least, I think it would take that long, because even though this is technically an interior, it still let me spawn my car and zoom through. Eat exhaust fumes, nature!
Inside the Great Voodoo Tree where the three or so clan members live, Alex is told that they’ll only help her if she steals something from a museum that used to belong to them. This heist takes approximately 30 seconds; all you do is walk up to the thing and grab it out of its display case in broad daylight. After that, the Voodoo guys agree to tell her how to teleport the entire Confederate army into the Empire leader’s house. But this isn’t good enough for Master Sergeant Boggs – no, he needs you to slaughter the Rebels in cold blood before he’s willing to go to war against the Empire. So now you become a triple agent, pretending to work for the Rebels while actually working for the Confederation while still pretending to work for the Empire maybe.
The Rebels trick you into helping them break their boss out of prison and then disappear. Then you go looking for them and they capture you. The boss’ son is in love with you despite never having met you before, and he presents you with Another Choice: do you continue working for the Confederation, or flip sides again three hours after you did the first time? My desire to not fuck this guy outweighed my desire to see justice done, so I stuck with the Confederates at first. He still let me out of jail regardless, allowing me to immediately slaughter his cohorts.
For your valor in eradicating the Rebel scourge, Private First Class Corporal Boggs rewards you with the game’s best heavy armor in a cutscene that looks like it was animated using Garry’s Mod. Congratulations, you are now invincible! I guess its armor rating is 100% because you literally cannot take damage while wearing it. Boggs-sensei then informs you that the unhinged Rebel headquarters massacre wasn’t enough – their true leader, the Coordinator, still breathes. Like all other mysteries in Sabotain, Rod knows the top secret steps that must be taken to meet with him. In the interest of avoiding redundancy, I haven’t mentioned the sheer volume of times you ask Rod for information no other character knows. You’re visiting him like every other mission, I swear to God, and he starts flirting with you more and more each time despite being 30+ years your senior and married with a kid. His seeming-omnipotence is foreshadowing, by the way.
Now you have to get genetic modification surgery so you can look like a rebel (with almost exactly the same model as Phantom from earlier), which completely negates that awesome armor you just acquired, then call the Coordinator on a specific frequency using a specific method to hear from him around 5-10 real-world minutes later. Surprise! It’s a trap, and you get arrested by the same faction you’re currently working for because they think you’re a Rebel now and Bogg Bogg won’t vouch for you or whatever. But don’t worry, one of the prison guards helps you escape for some reason, and also gives you evidence to prove your innocence.
Double plot twist time!! Rod is the Coordinator and Colonel Boggs is secretly working for the Empire. The Rod twist makes sense, I guess, but the Boggs shit is completely fucking stupid because if he was actually working for the Empire the whole time why did you have to prove yourself in the arena challenges and betray the Empire to continue working with him? Couldn’t Grinders have just planted you under his command to begin with? I can’t believe this absolute horseshit. If I owned a physical copy of this game I’d take a dump on the disc like I was the angriest gamer you’d ever heard.
You finally get to meet Castor, the Confederate President, for the first time, and he almost immediately believes you when you tell him Rod and Boggie are traitors. After they’re rounded up and arrested/maybe executed off-screen, it’s time to return to the Voodoo Tree so you can actually learn the secret of teleportation for real this time (why couldn’t we get this earlier to use as a fast travel function?????). You then teleport directly into the Empire’s main headquarters to arrest their prime minister/dictator/whatever he is and congratulations, you’ve finished the Confederation route! But we’re not done just yet, are we…
The Rebel route is definitely the “good” one; morally I mean, not in terms of design. I hesitate to call it the “true” route because it’s by far the least finished and functional of the three, but it has the most satisfying ending (by Sabotain standards, of course). All you have to do is agree to snog the weird guy who fell in love with you at first sight while you were imprisoned, and then you can at last get to work properly circumventing authority instead of just choosing between flavors of fascism.
This path largely boils down to planning and executing a huge jailbreak. It’s far less interesting than it sounds. You have to build up a crew for the job, which you do by driving to a person’s house, talking to them, doing a menial task in exchange for their help, then driving back to their house and talking to them again. One of these involves convincing a gang leader to let a guy’s daughter quit the gang, which is only notable because the nightclub she resides in plays the game’s opening song so loud you can’t hear the voice acting. It’s a banger, but I recommend not playing this part with headphones unless you want your ears to be destroyed by someone singing “I REALLY MISS YOU I SUGAR SUGAR MISS YOU” over and over.
Half the dialogue in this part of the game was never correctly implemented, which makes most conversations turn into the following:
Alex: Randomguy01?
Random Guy #1: Yes?
Alex: I’ll come back later.
I won’t go into more detail about this part because the brain damage caused both by watching the aforementioned films and by subsequently replaying Umbrella Chronicles has made me forget most of what happened, but needless to say none of it was at all exciting. It mostly just consisted of running back and forth “talking” to NPCs who spoke via said dummy text.
Now that you’ve assembled the Rebel Avengers – Getaway Driver, Inside Man, and three other people who don’t actually do anything – it’s time to liberate your new friends from the local prison. This consists of walking into the building, descending the huge staircase, shooting 10 or so guards, talking to the prisoners whose cell doors were conveniently left open for you, climbing back up to the entrance, realizing you can’t leave that way for some reason, walking all the way down to the basement, and exiting through the laser tag arena-looking “labyrinth” the prison inexplicably has.
With the Rebel leader and his henchmen free, you get to do the genetic modification and TV broadcast missions again (yay…), and then it’s off to kill President Castor to return control of Miracle City to the people – viva la revolución! He hides in his bunker under the White House, which is floating in midair and wouldn’t have room for a basement, where you get the armor that makes you invincible again and finish the game five minutes later.
The Coordinator is never encountered or even mentioned in this route despite his status as overlord of the Rebels and Alex’s longstanding working relationship with Rod, but don’t worry, at least we get to see her kiss the guy who randomly showed up to save her and then never appeared again until now. At least there’s some sort of personal resolution for the protagonist this time, I guess.
Sabotain doesn’t feature a New Game+ mode, but the max character level is 300 even though you’ll have barely entered the 100’s upon completion of any given route. The only way to obtain experience points outside of missions is by killing enemies, which awards a pittance of EXP assuming you’re lucky enough to get any at all. There are also probably a million credits-worth of “unique” vehicles to buy, so if you hate yourself enough to become the first person to ever go for True 100% in this game, you can easily enjoy over 1,000 hours of Sabotain!
As I approach 6,500 words in this review no one will read for a game no one will play, I start to think about my own mortality in relationship to the lifespan of art. We still read Moby Dick and watch Casablanca, we still listen to Aretha Franklin and play Super Mario Bros., but who is thinking about Sabotain 20 years later? Heck, who was even thinking about it the year it came out? I’m not trying to say this game is some kind of unsung classic that deserved better, but despite its unfinished nature and inherently flawed core, I do believe it came from an earnest team who genuinely put their hearts into it. Or maybe not, considering they also made Corkscrew RuLes, and, well…
But for the sake of argument, let’s pretend I’m right and this game’s badness was a product of inexperience, lacking budget, and/or a terrible publisher. What does that mean for the people who spent multiple years of their lives working on it? Obviously, not everyone is capable of or even really allowed to make timeless art, but the things we create are destined to outgrow and outlive us. When they don’t, it’s one of the most painful feelings imaginable. Once I finally finish something I’m proud of enough to publicly release, I don’t know if anyone outside my own personal sphere will even care. It’s scary to think about the relentless march of time in our relatively short lives; you can never know how long you truly have to left to make even the smallest mark upon our world. And it’s terribly depressing to think that so much sincere art ends up ignored at best or as a video essay/social media punching bag at worst.
To that end, I think it’s valuable to earnestly engage with “bad” art. I’ve ragged on Sabotain a lot in this review, but I went into it with an open mind, and you know what? I enjoyed it! I had a good time! Don’t let the low rating I gave this game fool you, I actually quite liked playing through it and recapping my experience here for y’all. Not in a “so bad it’s good” or “what could have been” way, but just by taking it for what it is – a poorly designed, unfinished mess of great ideas implemented terribly and awful ideas implemented worse. All the backhanded compliments and sarcastic praise may have been mean, but they were unironic; Sabotain’s innumerable flaws made for a memorable, entertaining journey.
I hope the people who worked on this game don’t feel like they wasted the years spent developing it. I hope they’re happy with their lives right now and are proud of accomplishing something, no matter how it turned out. And I hope weirdos like me will continue engaging with their creation, even if only out of morbid curiosity.
Thanks for reading! Writing this inspired me to compile a list of games I’m aware of that don’t seem to be particularly well-known. I can’t guarantee all of them will be good, but I’d love to shine a spotlight on creators who may have fallen under the radar in the past! You can find it here: https://backloggd.com/u/Djungelskog/list/mysterious-unknowable-games/