Saboteur II: Avenging Angel

The Good
I was happy with the remake or rather touched up and extended first Saboteur game, in my review pointing out that it seemed possibly how Clive would've made it if he'd been able to back then. The same was done for Saboteur II. If I was to just judge the game by the original content, I'd say it's fine, probably as good as the original content of Saboteur!.

Nina the Ninja, sister of "Saboteur" in the first game, has been given greater martial arts ability i.e chop, front kick, low kick, forward flying kick and somersault leap. The opponents are larger this time, robots resembling very tall spacemen, programmed to perform martial arts and shoot jets of flame and instead of dogs, large pumas and also in the caves low down, bats.

Saboteur II resembles popular '80s home computer game series Impossible Mission and Impossible Mission II with its code gathering, large array of rooms/floors and lift travel. There's also some swimming right at the bottom level, though it's not an essential part of the game. There are still throwing weapons to be picked up, you begin with a shuriken like in Saboteur, but the other weapons mostly differ from the first game. Added to Nina's motorbike escape, smashing through the outer fence, is a short animation showing the bike coming through the forest towards the player, which I find rewarding to see at the end of every difficult mission.

The Bad
Having played through the whole game, I'm a bit unsatisfied. I know that the original Saboteur II was different from the original Saboteur, having missions rather than difficulty levels, though each mission was like a harder repeat of the previous mission. The fact that in the end you have to do the same as what you had to do in the original game, collect 14 code chips (paper tape codes in the original) feed them to the rocket's computer, turn off the electric fence then escape by motorbike, makes all the added content, meant to give the game a bit of story, a bit redundant and misleading. I mean, at the final mission you can discover a wormhole and actually be teleported into space, but then you find that to complete the mission you still have to perform the relative drudgery of finding all the code fragments. So it reduces everything else to sort of fun, bonus content, not essential. Also I'll note that the addition of a map and the ability to save your progress would've been nice.

The Bottom Line
Good game overall, recommended, just not as good as the re-release of Saboteur.