12 Hugely Underrated Open-World Games You Totally Missed

7. The Saboteur

Talk about your delicious melting pot of ideas. How about Assassin's Creed's freeform climbing and mission design, Sin City's black and white aesthetic peppered with spots of colour - and third-person Just Cause-style hip-fire gunplay? Sound tasty? It is, very. Created by Pandemic Studios (who you might remember from the fun-yet-totally-overlooked Full Spectrum Warrior games), it's safe to say they know how to create worlds that balance your insertion options with some satisfying gameplay mechanics. The team had previously released the brilliant Mercenaries 2 in 2008, so for Saboteur's tale of Irishman Sean Devlin getting stuck into the underbelly of Nazi-occupied France and altering things one stealthy mission at a time, it immediately stood out both visually and especially in a narrative sense. For whatever reason this didn't catch on (possibly due to Assassin's Creed II releasing in the same year and dwarfing all other third-person action-adventures),The Saboteur is still a cracking late-2000s powerhouse of innovative visual ideas backed up with solid gunplay and rewarding experimentation.