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| "Your money or your life?" |
In my first few hours with Watch Dogs, I was
pretty bored and disappointed. It played like a Grand Theft Auto clone with a
hacking gimmick and really poor driving mechanics. But after I got past the
first few side missions and finally took on the main story line in full, I
discovered a sandbox game with more fun stuff to do than in any other one I can
remember.
The story is average for the genre, which is
actually a step up for Ubisoft. After the disastrous scriptwriting missteps in
the Assassin's Creed series and the abysmal second half of Far Cry 3, I was
convinced that Ubisoft was incapable of tying a story together coherently.
Watch Dogs doesn't take many chances in completing its arc, but it's
acceptable.
You take on the role of Aiden Pearce, a master
hacker living in the “Smart city” of Chicago. Yep, all of Chicago is wired into
the network, called ctOS, and hackers like us are all over the place taking
advantage of the situation. For all the rhetoric I've read claiming that
Liberty City is the main Character of Grand Theft Auto 4, it pales in
comparison to the living, breathing Chicago in Watch Dogs. Any time you have
your phone out, which you almost always should, you can get basic information
on every citizen in the city. Some of them have decent bank accounts, so you
can hack their money right into your account and make a withdrawal at the
closest ATM.
Your phone also clues you into potential
crimes in the area, and some of these missions, especially “Gang Hideout,” are
just as fun as anything I played last generation. Ubisoft has managed to take
the very best aspects of GTA, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Assassin's Creed, even
Metal Gear Solid (!) to create a unique sandbox experience. It's usually a bad
idea to go into missions just blasting away at everything; there are all kinds
of things in the environment that you can hack to confuse the enemy, blow him
up, or knock him down.
Of course, you can play shoot-'em-up if you
want to, and some missions require you to kill enemies to get through. This
game is NOT for anyone under the age of seventeen. Amazingly, the combat is as
intense and brutal as some of the best third person shooters out there. You
have the classic “bullet time” ability, called “focus” in Watch Dogs, which
lets you slow time for a little while so you have the upper hand in battle.
What makes focus so cool in this game is the ability to use it while driving.
As you're escaping a group of enemies or chasing some down, there are many
objects in the environment to help you in your task; hack a streetlight to get
traffic moving in both directions. Open a drawbridge and make a wicked getaway
jump. Some of these opportunities come and go very quickly, so when you're
driving in slow motion, you can arrange some awesome set-pieces of virtual
mayhem that never disappoint.
The music in Watch Dogs is top-notch as well.
The tunes are just fine when you're driving around, but it's the contextual
music that is special. When you're approaching a possible crime scene, trying
not to be seen, the music is straight out of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I took
on an infiltration mission in an abandoned part of town, and the ambient
tapping of synthetic drums fit the scene perfectly.
A lot of missions involve hacking your way
into high-security areas for sensitive information. Getting in undetected,
without killing anyone, is an absolute high. In some of the missions, you're
discovered by default after getting the information, and the escape scenes are
pure gold. I felt like I was Jason Bourne at times, using all kinds of crazy
driving techniques and special hacking abilities to get away.
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| "Damn. I can't breath in this thing!" |
One of the main problems in Watch Dogs is the
hero Aiden. We never get a clear picture of who he is or why he's motivated to
do so many things that are contradictive to how he acts in the main story
missions. There are even a few baffling side missions involving psychedelics
that seem liked they were focus-grouped into the game in an effort to imitate
Saints Row and a few missions from GTAV. It's not game breaking, but there's a
lot of room for improvement.
The graphics are nice, especially when you
consider how much memory and processing power is going to making the entire city
come alive. I played Watch Dogs on my Playstation 4, and the videos I've seen
of the last-gen versions certainly take a graphical hit in the lighting
department, and there's a lot of pop-up, making fast driving sequences even
more difficult. Gameplay, as far as I could tell, was not different at all from
the current generation versions.
Online play is a blast, which shocked the hell
out of me. I usually like to keep my game experiences private and offline. But
instead of having a bunch of stupid Team Deathmatch or Capture the Flag online
quests, Ubisoft went in a much smarter and fun direction. After you complete
about 20% of the story missions, you will be able to participate in a variety
of online contests like street racing. The best part about online play is the
ability to hack and be hacked. One time I was minding my own business, and I
get a message that a real life person jumped into my game, stealing information
from my account. Hey man, this stuff is personal! I tried to hunt him down, but
he got away. I wasn't punished for failing to catch him, it just changed my
online profile numbers a little. I even jumped into another person's game and
profiled him for some bonus profile numbers. It's a great idea and very well
implemented.
I don't blame Ubisoft for wanting to cash in
on this wonderful new IP. Not only are there versions for the 360, PS3, PS4,
and Xbox1, but they're going to be releasing a WiiU version later this year.
They're going to make a lot of money selling it on all those platforms, and I'm
happy that so many people will get to experience it. Naturally, the gamer in me
wants to know what it will look like when they're developing the inevitable
sequel exclusively for current-gen consoles. With sixteen times more memory and
a whole lot more processing power, Watch Dogs would have been even better.
I recommend this game for anyone who wants a
deep gaming experience. The controls will take a few minutes to get used to,
but it certainly doesn't have a punishing difficulty or learning curve. Before
you know it, you'll be hacking all over Chicago, loving every minute of it.
- by Tom McDaniel
The hype for Watch Dogs was through the roof after E3 2012. It hadn't begun to subside until a couple of years later when footage lacking the same ultra-high-end graphical polish of the E3 reveal started to emerge. My hype skyrocketed and crashed along with the drip feed promo material leading up to its release. Nothing was impressing me anymore. The game looked dull beyond redemption. Upon the day of release I just happened to win a contest which afforded me Watch Dogs for exactly three whole dollars and some change. Why not?
What began as a pretty good passage of time slowly became my absolute favorite game since the launch of the PS4. Watch Dogs is an addiction.
I hadn't rewatched the 2012 gameplay reveal until just recently after enduring outcries regarding a supposed failure to deliver on promises. I highly recommend anyone do themselves the favor of giving the reveal another watch and realize that the biggest thing missing from the version we have in our homes is the gorgeous visuals. Nearly 100% of the gameplay mechanics are entirely replicated in the full game and then some. Something can indeed be said for the all-too-common practice of overpromising visual fidelity at E3 presentations, but I can't help but call out the irrationality of the argument that the gameplay itself has somehow been nerfed. The amount of high-quality content available to you in Watch Dogs is legitimately intimidating.
I can't get enough of it.
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| "How did you not see that the bag said Aiden's lunch?" |
This is why the comparisons need to Grand Theft Auto need stop. GTA is as appropriate a comparison as Halo is to Call of Duty. That's the problem with much of the critiques against Watch Dogs, it's not being judged for what it actually is, but what GTA does and Watch Dogs does not. The gameplay True, Ubisoft should have done more to set itself apart from the horde of previous sandbox titles, but considering that development for many IPs typically start off as one thing and ultimately end up being another, Watch Dogs being no exception, it should be perfectly understandable that its unique tone/style wasn't quite figured out until much later in its production.
While the story is just average for Tom, I found it just above average. There is some lost deeper cyberpunk potential in the story following back alley hackers in a subtle big brother atmosphere which I hope to see cranked to 11 in the next iteration. Granted, it's very slow, but once it gets kicking, Watch Dogs goes into some pretty dark territory that I think would serve a sequel very well. Then, perhaps, we'll get those unbelievable graphics, and a stronger identity that is truly and only Watch Dogs, and comparisons to anything else will be trite at best.
Watch Dogs is a must play. While I agree completely with Tom's final decision on the score, as there are some frequent nuisances in the controls and subdued overall potential, the fun factor alone gets a 10 from me and lives up to the hype. Stop missing out. Stop regurgitating the hate spewed on the internet, buy a copy yourself, experiment with as much as possible, dive deep into it, and you'll see just why we can't stop gushing over it.