I know I’m slow to the punch on reviewing Watch_Dogs. It had a huge hype train following it after some great showings at E3 a few years back, and when it was released, there was a bit of backlash for it not living up to the hype. At least from what I remember. And there were some arguments about the graphics not resembling the prerelease footage and such. But now that I have a PS4, I can finally review it and I don’t need to deal with all that prerelease hype.
Story
Watch_Dogs follows Aiden Pearce, a hacker in futuristic Chicago who breaks into people’s bank accounts and takes their money. He and his buddy try to steal money from a hotel, which angers the wrong people, and who decide to attack Aiden’s family. His niece is killed in the assault, and Aiden blames himself. Now, he seeks justice and vengeance for his family, not letting anything get in his way.
Aiden’s motivation throughout this entire story is to avenge his niece. He obviously doesn’t take losses well, and his character is very confusing in that he murders a ton of people just to avenge one person. Sure I understand that it’s his niece, but I mean where are your morals? His sister on the other hand, the actual mother of the killed child, seems to be handling things quite well. I don’t know how we’re supposed to relate to this dude who just kills tons of people out of blind rage and revenge. In the game itself it tries to prevent you from harming civlians by having a bit of a morality system in the game. Like Sleeping Dogs, if you kill or injure civilians or police officers, you gain a bit of negativity, and are percieved a bit more evil, but it’s pretty much pointless.
The story isn’t bad in the game though, but I do wish the characters could’ve been more interesting. Aiden is a bit empty, and he is pretty boring compared to other characters in games like Saints Row or GTA. Supporting characters aren’t really fleshed out enough either. They just show up to fix a problem or to make a new one. A good example of this lack of depth is that the game introduces a new character a little over halfway through the plot who looks to be a new bigger threat to Aiden, but the dude is only there for two missions and he’s gone. It’s obvious he was just there to artificially pad out the game to make it longer, and that’s just lazy from Ubisoft. Other people like the crazy redneck hacker guy is just forced into the plot to resolve some issues. There’s just not enough time to be introduced to all these characters, and they all feel shoehorned in because of it. Things move very quickly in this plot, and a lot of things feel really rushed.
Gameplay
The main draw of Watch dogs is the ability to hack into the city. You can change street lights, raise blockers, blow up steam pipes, hack into phones, hack into cameras, raise bridges, all to just stop a bad guy that you’re chasing, or that’s chasing you. Doing all of these are fun, but outside of missions, there isn’t really much use for a lot of the hacks. You don’t want to be starting police chases because then you’d be losing morality points, so there’s not really a reason to be using it while free roaming.
You can run into random missions though, where you can stop crimes, or assault gang hideouts, and stuff like that. Those are fun and add some more replayability to the game.
You get money in the game by hacking into bank accounts and by completing missions. I barely spend money in other free roaming games, but in this one, I actually never bought anything once. There is literally no use for money. You can buy weapons, but you’ll never need to because enemies drop them and weapons always seem to have a unlimited stream of ammo. And you can’t spend money on anything else that I could see. Maybe the Car on Demand app costs money but I never needed to check it out since fast cars are abundant and never far away. You can’t customize anything about Aiden either, so I guess money, and by extension things that give you money, are all just completely worthless.
The upgrade system is also a bit useless, outside of the hacking skill tree. You can improve your driving skill by, say, upgrading so that you resist tire blowouts, but I think I only had a blowout once in the entire game. You can also upgrade the length that you’re in bullet time while driving, which I still didn’t use that much while playing the game. In the combat skill tree you can do things like improve your weapon switch speed, or steady your aim, but I never needed to do that either since I never felt like I wasn’t able to hit people, or switch weapons fast enough.
The online though is one of the best parts of this game. You can be randomly invaded by other players who hack into your phone and start downloading your data, and you have to find them and kill them. The game doesn’t explicitly tell you you’ve been invaded either, so you don’t know you’re being hacked until they start downloading your data. It’s easy to figure out if someone is in your game though, because your bullet time for your car doesn’t work, and going into the menus or the map doesn’t pause the game. It’s fun being surprised by someone though, so I personally try to avoid finding out if anyone is in.
You can also be invaded and followed. This never happened to me, but I did it to someone else. You have to track a target, and watch them. I’m guessing nobody did it to me because it isn’t as fun as the other online modes. It’s a lot harder, and a bit more boring compared to the regular hacking invasion, so I can see why it’s not as popular.
You can also participate in races and a kind of hold onto the flag game. Races are pretty much what you would expect them to be. Get from point a to point b, trying to use your hacks to mess people up. The flag holding game requires you to hack a file. There’s only one in the game, so each team is trying to get a hold of it. You can take the file when it’s like 99% done being hacked, and win the game by holding onto it when it hits 100%. So if your team fails horribly for the entire game, but you happen to kill the hacker and take it away from him when it’s about to be done, you can win. I don’t really agree with that, but I guess there’s not much you can do if you don’t want the games to last an excruciatingly long time.
So the online is really fun, but the gameplay is pretty standard. You can’t fly helicopters or airplanes, but the inclusion of upgrades and hacking makes up for it. It’s nice to mix up the basic formula once in awhile, but I wish there was more interesting things happening in free roaming that you didn’t have to be prompted into doing.
Graphics and Design
Watch dogs is made by Ubisoft, who also make Assassin’s Creed. Assassin’s creed has developed really good techy graphics, because a lot of the time it takes place while you’re in the Animus. This good understanding of glitchy design bled over into Watch Dogs really well, where they pull off a lot of cool effects that all fit into the atmosphere of this game.
The music in this game is really great as well. It all fits perfectly and I never thought any of it sounded bad or out of place.
The game’s graphics itself though doesn’t blow me away, and while it all does look good, it’s pretty much standard for triple A freeroaming games. The more unique locations such as the overgrown warehouse area, and the bayou where you find the redneck hacker, are a bit more interesting. There is pretty much no reason to go the sticks though when there’s only a couple missions that take place there, and there’s nothing to do in the warehouse area except go into your base
Conclusion
Watch Dogs isn’t as special or revolutionary as Ubisoft would want us to believe. The plot is pretty standard, the characters are pretty standard, and the game is pretty standard. Standard isn’t bad though. The online gamemodes were really fun to play, the hacking was pretty interesting, and I really enjoyed the entire game. I wouldn’t say it brings enough new to the table to interest anyone who doesn’t already like freeroaming games, but what it does bring is solid and fun, and a nice break from GTA.
7/10
