Watch Dogs Review

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.