Watch Dogs has been one of the most talked about games for a long time now, especially with the delay to its release date, but with the recent launch of the game, we finally got a chance to play it for ourselves in full. We genuinely expected it to be the kind of game that reinvented the open-world city-based action game, and while it’s definitely very playable and incredibly addictive at times, it just falls short of being the world-beating game that it looked like being when it was first announced more than a year ago.
As a result, our review is a bit of a mixed bag, with a whole lot of positives and the odd one or two negatives that just take the sheen off what could have otherwise been one of the best games of the year. We’re still enjoying playing the game, as it’s a big and sprawling effort, but it isn’t quit dominating our play time in the way we expected it to do, leaving us returning to other adventures in games like Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag than those of Watch Dogs.
Storyline
The storyline is pretty slick, seeing you take on the role of hacking genius Aiden Pearce as he finds himself going toe-to-toe with Chicago’s grizzly underbelly crime scene to avenge the death of his niece and protect his sister and nephew. With some fighting mad skills, his ability to hack into the city’s centralised command system (ctOS) and a growing arsenal behind him he becomes the city’s vigilante, taking down the bad guys and avoiding getting collared by the cops in the process.
The story develops pretty well as the truth behind the attack on his family begins to play out. A lot of the characterisation is convincing and the setting of Chicago works well in tandem with the dark storyline. However, the vigilante concept that’s built into the plot sort of breaks down when you find yourself with no alternative but to either gun down or cleverly blow up armed guards at ctOS towers throughout the city to gain access to additional district systems.
It kind of leaves things a bit too muddled in terms of the general plot direction, as Aiden seems neither good enough nor bad enough to really root for. It feels a bit like the schlock brutality of GTA, but with a good guy holding the gun, so it doesn’t quite fit.
While the sequences are fast paced and action packed, they don’t need to be quite so blatant in their kill count against what come across as fairly innocent armed guards. It could have easily been a smarter experience if they’d built it into the plot that ctOS guards were on the wrong side of the criminal divide more overtly early on, or dialed things up as the story came together.
Equally, they could have used the sneak feature or an ability to incapacitate guards without necessarily killing them, or they could have developed a process that results in your actions having more of an impact on your vigilante status (do too many bad deeds and the public will start to turn on you and turn you in). Either way, it just doesn’t work as well as it could in terms of the central character traits of Aiden as it is.
Gameplay
One thing you should know before picking up the game is that there’s one hell of a lot packed into it. We didn’t necessarily appreciate this instantly, but the more you play, the more possibilities you find, with a significant main campaign to hack your way through, as well as a raft of side missions and games.
The gameplay is that of a third person perspective action adventure with some similarities to the general make-up of Grand Theft Auto and the Assassin’s Creed series. However, there’s a pretty significant difference for Watch Dogs, as it comes with an innovative hacking concept that sees you control almost every aspect of the city from the train system and traffic lights to surveillance cameras, traffic bollards, ATM machines and every person in the city’s details. This creates a very unique gameplay that opens up new way of progressing through the game, making it stand out well against other, similar third person games.
Perhaps the best example of this is the need to mentally shift your game progression style to use the hacking system with as much smarts as possible to make it through. For example, if you’ve got to get into a heavily guarded building to hack someone’s phone, it’s not a case of just wading in with all guns blazing, as this will just get you killed quickly, or take a fair few attempts to make it through. Instead, you might need to hack into the surveillance cameras to get access to the security code to hack a system or someone’s phone, before using ctOS command to control car alarms, guard headsets, doors, forklifts and electrical detonations to cleverly maneouvre the guards to take them out without getting into a blazing and self harming gun battle. As soon as you make the mental switch to take this into account the game becomes a whole lot more fluid, allowing you to progress more seamlessly. That’s not to say that gun fights or a little brawling aren’t necessary every now and again, it’s just that you need to keep remembering that you control the city. Instead of trying to shoot down a well armoured guard that appears from nowhere, you’re way better off initiating an electrical charge behind him to set off an explosion and eliminate him with ease.
When you do get into the fight sequences, these work pretty well in general. The brawler side of the equation is fairly linear as Aiden performs a very quick and effective take-down with a simple press of a button when you’re close enough to one of the criminals or ctOS guards. This is added to with a pretty significant variety guns and explosives. The weapon aim function can take a bit of getting used to, and can frustrate at times, but it’s functional when you get to grips with its more fiddly elements.
The main missions see you performing a large range of activities that spans from driving a pair of bleeding criminals across town to hunting down a train to save your nephew and infiltrating a prison to warn someone off from grassing you in. The intensity for the missions builds slowly, but steadily, so you really get the sense that you’re getting deeper and deeper into the heart of the city’s underworld. There’s also a good size to the campaign section, giving it a lot of longevity, and while it’s not the longest campaign out there, it’s definitely not a quick burn through.
Side missions build on the scale of the game giving you a significant number of crooks to take down to boost your vigilante status, as well as a series of hacking contracts to complete. These are a whole lot of fun, delivering on quick kicks for the game, especially the criminal convoy missions where you need to put a stop to a gang of criminals en route in cars and vans to some shady dealing or another.
As a result of the vehicle based campaign and side missions, driving plays a large part in Watch Dogs, but just as in the rest of the game the differentiating factor is the hacking capability. What this means is that as well as having to master your skills behind the wheel, you’ll also need to hone them in combination with hacking traffic lights, road blocks, gates and bridges.
This makes for some very exciting moments of pin point driving and perfectly timed hacks to escape the police or take down a criminal convoy. When you get this right you get a pretty big hit of adrenaline and sense of achievement as the black vans following you find themselves smashing into rising barricades that you’ve just safely driven over, resulting in a slow-mo shot of the collision.
The driving itself is a lot of fun, but not always particularly accurate, as steering can be a little too skittish. However, there are a fair few vehicles to choose from, each with their positives and negatives, so picking the right one can be the difference between a quick mission completion and a protracted battle that could end in your own fiery death.
If that wasn’t enough gameplay to keep the Watch Dogs fire burning brightly for months to come, there’s the added longevity of side games to keep you smiling. Some are epic, like the digital trip games that see you taking control of a massive mechanical spider marauding all over the city or jumping across the neighbourhoods on giant bouncing flowers, while others are annoyingly addictive, like the frustrating “find the ball” game.
If you want to get the magic 100% complete mark in the progress tracker, you’re going to have to do pretty well in each of the side games. However, there’s bound to be the odd one or two of them that end up being an ongoing feature for you as you return to give your flower bouncing or mecha-spider control skills a thorough testing.
Perhaps the most disappointing element of the game is the online multi-player options, which range from trailing a player to full on street races. However, they’re just not that impressive and don’t really take advantage of the full potential of the game. They’re also prone to be a bit buggy as other players jolt and twitch in and out of position to detract from the experience.
Graphics
While the graphics do look very cool in the PS4, Xbox ONE and PC versions of the game, the fact that it’s been developed for the PS3 and Xbox 360 has possibly held it back just a fraction. As a result, the look and feel of the game isn’t quite as mind blowing as we’d been hoping it would be.
That’s not to say that it doesn’t look phenomenal at times, with amazing detail and very cool variances to texture depending on the time of day or the weather, it’s just that it could have been even better if it had been worked on as a game just for next gen. The biggest example of this is the range of the draw distance in the game, which feels like a bit of a step backwards for Ubisoft if we’re honest.
We haven’t seen it in their games since playing Assassin’s Creed III on the Wii U, and we thought they’d gotten rid of it entirely from Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag onwards, but in Watch Dogs you should expect to see vehicles and the occasional object suddenly appear out of nowhere. It’s something that we spotted in the crowd scenes for the recent gameplay demos at E3 for Assassin’s Creed: Unity, so hopefully it’s something that the developers are planning to sort out still.
Overall review
Watch Dogs may not be perfect, but it’s definitely fun and addictive. There’s a lot of gameplay to get through, so it’ll keep you playing for a while and you can’t fault the unique qualities of the game as it delivers a new experience to the gaming world.
If you’re thinking about giving the app a go too, we’d throw in a bit of caution as it’s a long way from being an enthralling experience. If anything, we’d probably guess that the main game took so much of the developers’ time and effort that the fringe elements, like online multiplayer and the app, didn’t stand much of a chance.
For any Nintendo fans out there, the good news is that Watch Dogs on the Wii U went on to be released on the 21st November 2014.
Watch Dogs review: 4.1/5
