The Case

The long awaited Watch Dogs has finally been released after delays, graphical downgrades, and two years of intense hype. Since it was shown off at E3 2012, many gamers have been heralding this game as the bringer of a new generation in gaming, hoping for shinier graphics, more in-depth gameplay, and other innovations. Ubisoft has put years of work into this new IP, and has been promising greatness from it, but can it live up to the high expectations?

The Trial

You play as genius hacker Aiden Pearce eleven months after he and his friend were caught trying to hack into the Merlot hotel. As a result, a hit was ordered on Aiden, which resulted in the death of his niece. Aiden vowed to use his hacking knowledge and arsenal to hunt down whoever ordered that hit, or whoever would want to further harm his family. Along the way he meets companions, enemies, and comes face to face with Chicago's crime syndicate. Playing as a hacker in Chicago may be something new, but unfortunately not much else is. An anti-hero trying to get revenge for a loved one is a plot at least as old as Hamlet, and has been done in many other Ubisoft games. The plot and a great deal of Watch Dogs feels run of the mill and cliché as a result.

Characters are also very run of the mill in Watch Dogs. Most of the allies you gather throughout the game are divided up into archetypes we've all seen before. Jordi plays the psychopathic comic relief, T-Bone takes a double shift as the rough-housing bar brawler and the washed up master, Jackson is the annoying kid character, and you even have a damsel in distress. With the exception of the main villain of the game, every character seems one note, and, at the end of the game, wrapping up their story arcs feels forced and tacked on, especially since Aiden’s is already completed.

Even Aiden comes off as just another anti-hero, and an unbelievable one at that. You would think that Aiden would understand the value of a life more than anyone after losing his niece, but after running people over, stealing cars, and shooting completely innocent people you start to get the feeling that Aiden is just as bad, if not worse than any other criminal littering the streets of Chicago. Even story missions have you kill other characters or otherwise achieve what you want at the expense of other people, making Aiden just as much of a villain as anyone else, even when he's painted as a morally grey hero in cutscenes and dialogue.

Combat suffers here too, as it's almost a carbon copy of any cover based shooter. It's as if Ubisoft took the combat of Splinter Cell and just put it in Watch Dogs, but decided to remove the acrobatic aspects and replace them with hacking. Everything from moving from cover to cover, stealth takedowns, to weapon variety is average at best. There is a bullet time mechanic in the form of what the game calls "focus," that feels out of place for Aiden, and only serves to make already easy combat utterly without challenge. The one innovation that Watch Dogs does bring to combat is, of course, hacking. Aiden can cause explosions by overloading something in the environment, or cause a sticky bomb to explode. If you want to take a more stealthy approach, Aiden can hack into surrounding technology with his phone to cause distractions or lure enemies towards where you want them.

Speaking of his phone, the only way to describe that it is magical technology from space. While it can do semi-reasonable things like hack into nearby security cameras, giving Aiden a new line of sight to hack other things, it also does the completely absurd like automatically regenerate battery power, summons vehicles, bursts steam pipes, and hacks into anything vaguely electronic within seconds. And that’s on top of being able to identify everyone in Chicago. Realism aside, it's fun to use and while there aren't as many things to hack into as you would think there would, it gets the job done. Hacking is one of the few things that separates Watch Dogs from other open world games but it’s also something that it could use a lot more of.

Thank God for that open world too, because while Watch Dogs only has a sub-par story and easy combat, it has one hell of an open world. Grand Theft Auto has been modeling their settings after real places for years now, but Watch Dog's version of Chicago feels much more lived in than any city featured in a GTA game. Everything from monuments, to ghettos, to specific streets are all there, and what's most impressive is the amount of people around every corner. This dense population can be profiled too, as every single character that you encounter in game will have a name, an income, and a quirk that you can look up in Aiden's "profile mode," making otherwise lifeless NPCs have some of what Aiden doesn't.

Of course along with that huge, open setting comes a few issues. The most noticeable one is the police, or rather the lack of them. While playing Watch Dogs, I never once saw an active police car patrolling the street. It's hard to tell if this is a design choice allowing the player to have more freedom to do whatever they want without repercussions, but for a game that plays it so straight in a real life setting it doesn't feel like an accurate portrayal of Chicago. The only time the police come chasing after Aiden is if you start shooting people in the streets or if you steal a car, but if you so much as nudge the person calling the police the 911 call is canceled. Even when the police start chasing after you (or if you’re being chased by anyone for that matter), it's easy enough to escape in the world's floatiest cars, and if that doesn't work, just jump into the water, since nobody in Chicago is able to swim. Besides that there are more minor issues like textures popping in and out, writing hovering in front of the signs they're supposed to be on, reflections of a parallel world instead of what's actually in front of it, people and objects flying 50 feet into the air when they're hit with a car, people staring at walls, and issues that don't actually affect gameplay much but do ruin a lot of the realism that Watch Dogs wants to envelop you in.

Since the AI isn't great, it's all down to the multiplayer to make Watch Dogs more of an interesting game, and for the most part it does. There are a total of six multiplayer modes from racing, to tailing, to capture the flag. The one stand out mode though is a cat and mouse type game, where one player can invade another player's world Dark Souls style and try to last about two minutes without killing him or being killed. It's unfortunate that there isn't much co-op, with only one of the game modes being team based, but it does make sense, given the story of Watch Dogs, to exclude it.

Oddly enough though, the best segments of the game don't make sense. Mini-games make up the most fun bits of Watch Dog since you can feel the programmers saying "screw Aiden, screw the story, let's just have fun with it". The most obvious example is the spider tank mini-game, where Aiden has to fight a giant mechanized spider tank rampaging through the city. It doesn't make sense and it has no place in the game, but I'll be damned if it’s not fun. Other side missions like the crimes and gang hideouts can be fun, but you're never appropriately rewarded for doing them, and they're so short that it takes longer to get to the location than to actually do the mission.

The Verdict

All in all, Watch Dogs isn't a bad game, just a very average one. When people started calling it Grand Theft Auto with hacking they were 100% correct, just dead wrong about believing in all the hype it received. It's not as good as some other open world games like GTA V, Saint's Row 4, but if you're truly starved for an open world game and can justify spending $60 for a mediocre game, Watch Dogs will do alright by you.

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