I just downloaded Saboteur for Win 10. I then click on play & the game does not start? Any ideas?

Where did you install it? Did you install via Galaxy or the stand-alone installer? Did you try running it in Compatibility mode? Do you get any error messages?

it doesn't start for me either.

Never figured out why.

For me the only conclusion i've seen and experienced is that the game has trouble to run on PC's with more than 4 cores.

It didn't work on my 6 core I7 but then i tried it in my older Quad core and suddenly the game ran fine, i have no idea why but the game hasn't been fixed since release.

The reason most likely being that EA axed the dev team immediately after they finished the game. Rather sad.

Looks like there's lots of discussion here on the topic, including the cores issue:

https://www.gog.com/forum/the_saboteur/game_does_not_start_at_all/page1

It even says so under the system requirements:

Hmm i haven't looked at the description in a while and i'm pretty sure that warning wasn't there years ago but yes that's the issue and also the game is buggy as hell, barely playable at some points so i don't recommend buying it tbh, not sure if it should even be on GOG in this state.

There's a fix in that thread too. Apparently changing a single byte in the game's executable fixes the issue. Something about the game gathering info about each core but not allocating enough memory for more than 4 cores - the change skips over that step. GoG should really implement that for their version.

I did play it on an older PC and I did encounter one game breaking bug (which thankfully fixed itself when I quit the game and reloaded where I left off).

And yes, the game should 100% be on gog. I played it to 100% completion, sunk over 100 hours into the game and it belongs into my personal top 5 on this site. Yes, there's bugs, but for the most part they're benevolent bugs that just add to the batshit insane fun to be had with this game.

Besides reading through this thread, you can check out the game specific forum:

https://www.gog.com/forum -> in the bottom left search bar, search "saboteur"

and/or contact Support:

https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us

I might have been unlucky with the game but yes it's fun and deserve to be here, i liked overall and thought it was a good game but not great for me personally even excluding the bugs.

I encountered screen tearings, black screen while racing and a few quest bugs.

Maybe I was just extraordinarily lucky, since none of these happened to me. I only encountered bugs in the form of gameplay oddities that had me burst out laughing almost constantly. One time I drove into a cow with a tank and rather than killing the cow, this somehow made my tank cannon start spinning like a helicopter blade. Just weird, hilarious stuff like that.

Ever heard about processor affinity?
Good, make a shortcut to your game:

%COMSPEC% /C start /affinity X /path/to/Saboteur.exe

where X is a bit mask If you need to run your software with 4 cores only, set affinity to F. Simple ; p
Otherwise use Process Lasso. Yes, the free version will work for you and it's quite good. Use to used it on Windows for managing processes for ages.

And the game is well worth playing. One of my favorite ; p