Watch Dogs Review

I’ve had recent discussions with gamer friends about upcoming games, and the unsettling trend of online multiplayer taking precedence over real gameplay.  If this sounds like I am coming down hard on multiplayer gaming, then you have good instincts.  No one seems to care about campaigns or quality storylines any longer.  One of my friends hasn’t played COD since Modern Warfare dropped.  Why?  Because for those of us who enjoy genuine gaming, most new games offer us very little.  Remember Ghosts?  Four hours of campaign.  Embarrassing.

However, there have been a few games on my radar lately, Watch Dogs, a product of UbiSoft Montreal, being one of them.  The premise is that Aiden Pearce, hacker and digital thief extraordinaire, is pulling a job in a fancy hotel with his partner, Damien.  While wandering around the hotel with a gadget that pulls information from wireless devices, effectively hijacking personal information and in turn offering up bank account numbers and whatnot, they come across a device nearby that sets off alarms on their computers.  Aiden wants to call off the heist, but his partner’s curiosity gets the better of him, and they are discovered by an unknown individual who wants to teach them a lesson.

 
 

The stranger sends a professional to take out Aiden’s niece, which he successfully accomplishes.  This sends Aiden on a year-long quest for justice, and that’s where the game begins for us players.  We become Aiden Pearce as he faces the hit man who killed his niece and tries to get information out of him.  When Aiden finds out that the man doesn’t know who hired him for the hit, he leaves him in the basement of the crowded baseball stadium and attempts to make his way out.  That’s where we take full control of the vigilant, Aiden Pearce.

 

In this sandbox-style world, computers are king.  Much like the real world, everything is run on computer systems.  And for a professional hacker like Aiden, who has code running through his blood, the world is his oyster.  By focusing on electronics, such as security system panels, video surveillance cameras, street lights, or any other electronic device that surrounds you at any given point, you have the ability to manipulate the world around you and bend it to your whims.  Need a street light to go out causing a pileup?  No problem.  Want the entire baseball stadium’s system to go down causing a blackout?  You’ll get your chance.

This game is a lot like Grand Theft Auto with a nod towards those of us who loved Hackers.  It has the standard gameplay found in many sandbox driving games.  You drive to a destination on your map, start a mission, and then go fulfill that mission causing as little (or as much) damage as possible along the way.  But unlike a lot of games that focus on multiplayer as the main attraction, Watch Dogs is all story.  Yes, there’s multiplayer.  But if you want to be entertained while you watch the world burn, then Watch Dogs doesn’t disappoint.  Aiden’s mission to bring down the people responsible for his niece’s death is the driving force behind the game, and the story is driven by pure emotion.

 
 

Watch Dogs is a next-gen game.  Yes, it is available for Xbox 360 and PS3, but those ports are nothing compared to the quality of graphics on a fully loaded computer or a next-gen console.  Chicago never looked so crisp and detailed as it does in this game.  Just watching the rain fall on the streets of the Windy City is mesmerizing.  Each individual drop hits, splashes, and causes the roadway to look genuinely slick with water.  Reflections are super realistic, the lighting engine is very convincing, and the developers have put a lot of time and effort into making a game that feels and looks as real as a game can without sacrificing storyline or gameplay.

I have to give a nod to the guys and gals who built the city of Chicago.  They did a hell of a job recreating it, and having been there on a couple of occasions, I was able to pick out places in the game that I’d been to in real life.  You can also go to famous landmarks and locations and “check in”, as you would on social media.  This feels like it has a touch of pandering to it, but nothing I can complain about, as it doesn’t affect the gameplay in the least.

 

Some of the best moments occur when you put Aiden’s hacking skills to work.  I love being chased by police only to see their cars launched fifty feet in the air after I hacked into the city’s underground gas mains causing an explosion directly underneath a cruiser.  There’s a lot of fun to be had with that kind of power at your fingertips.  I spent a good portion of my gaming experience just hacking into things for fun to see what kind of chaos I could cause.  The hacking skills are great fun to play with, and are an essential tool to move the game forward.

 

You can customize Aiden’s skillsets as you go using skill trees that allow you to improve Aiden’s driving, hacking, combat, and crafting skills.  Yes, crafting.  You can pick up electronic parts to create everything from bombs to EMP devices.

One of my only qualms with this game is that even though it’s more current than the games that obviously inspired it, it’s still using the same format as before.  Personally, I’ve grown bored with the GTA-style gameplay of mission, drive, kill, return.  It’s boring and redundant.  It’s past time we move on from this format of gameplay.  My other issue is that there’s very little foot traffic.  With the exception of an occasional pedestrian, the game is all but barren of people on foot in certain areas.  Chicago is packed with people, folks.  Prototype did a better job of showing us for the herd of cattle we really are.  However, when you are profiling people for potential crimes, I could imagine that having the streets crawling with people would make that particular aspect of gameplay very difficult.  So perhaps this decision was made in favor of better gameplay and not aesthetics.

 

There is a multiplayer aspect to the game, and this one actually seemed fun to me.  Many of the side hacking missions offer online gameplay, where other players can invade your game and attempt to hijack your character’s information.  In turn, you have to kill them before they can escape and are gone forever.  And since you are always online, this can happen at any given moment as your character progresses.  But never fear, you get to do invade other people’s games as well.  The thing is, it always seems to happen when you’re neck deep in a mission.  It never happens when you’re standing by the big chrome bean acting like a tourist.  It’s a multiplayer style that needs some work, but I would love to see more of it in other games.

 

That being said, I personally loved this game because of the hacking aspect.  I could forget about the GTA gaming style when I had control of the digital world around me, and even though it did recycle a lot of skills found in the recent Batman game series as well as sampling from Assassin’s Creed, it sets itself apart by leading the player down an emotional road full of blind turns and amazing graphics.  I highly recommend Watch Dogs for anyone who loves sandbox, and is a fan of GTA, Batman, or the Assassin’s Creed series.  It’s a new take on an already established platform.  Been done before?  Yes.  But so has ice cream.  And we always get excited when a new flavor comes out.