Quick Look: Watch Dogs

After GTA V i'm burned out on open world games for now. So while is might be doing a couple of interesting things it's not enough to grab me. Might pick this up when it's on sale sometime.

This sure is an open world video game.

Yeah I don't know about this. I'll wait for a sale I guess

If they had spent the hype-train money on the actual development, this could have been a great game. Now it seems like a "meh" game, and I'm done with "meh" games. Time to git gud Ubiplay.

At about 12:20 into the video, watch the left side of the screen VERY CAREFULLY.

Haha, yeah. I was wondering if anybody else noticed that. Was hoping they would too.

This game should have been 200% more sci-fi.

Oh man, Aiden Pearce is such an un-likeable prick. That Christian Bale Batman voice and his "I smoulder with generic rage" attitude...So off-putting.

This game is supposed to make a big important statement about the dangers of a visualized "google" spawned technocracy where everyone is a helpless loot bag of too much information that easily falls into unscrupulous hands and the wolves stalk each other through the concrete forest blah blah blah. Instead this game feels like Sleeping Dogs with less personality or Saints Row 2 with less nutty and slyly offbeat craziness. It's all missions and all told in grim urban-mundane noir tones.

The AI falls short of the mission of making you feel a moral dilemma much like the predator's revenge and paranoia storyline of [Prototype} didn't match up to the soldier AI who ignored you running up a wall and let you turn into their CO in plain site. It just doesn't come together that well. So yeah I think it's a three star open world toybox where the hook doesn't quite justify the new take on the series but shows potential that a sequel might do better.

I don't like that the game is weak on Radeon and the pop in is too slow for motion in the cars like Saint's Row games.

Ubi seems to get these pretentious visions and then fail to live up to them but still end up with some decent basics and mechanics to work with.

Far Cy 3 promised us a grand 'Hills Have Eyes' style island drama and then just gave a good take the territory game much like the predecessors only without the stupid quinine mechanic. Far Cry 3 tried to make a grand if incoherent statement about gamers being mentally trapped in some childish power fantasy paradigm of white young urban uber-people being the center of the universe and given the task of saving some "natives" and getting the girl. Supposedly the game was a satire and a pastiche aiming to subvert these unspoken expectations with the "bad" ending scene. Whatever. I ignored it because it was pompous and felt like it was really just a lame attempt at titillation pretending to be some deep culturally therapeutic critique. In fact it was so silly that it almost seemed like a cornball Kojima stunt trying to get us worried about C3 systems, endless brush wars, and PMCs. Nanomachines son.

Assassin's creed tried to blend history, simulation, and some new world order vs. anarchy sort of secret history. Like other Ubi titles it just ended up being a decent skeleton to hang several variations of the mechanics on.

I really wish Ubi would quit with the grandiose and ridiculous "thinky art" scam they try to sell their games with. I start to feel let down after a while when the end result is always so fragmented and shallow and irrelevant to what's actually good about playing their game. You're grey decisions in this game are whether to loot or kill the peds or not. Whoop. It's not deep. It's down to whim and how real the peds feel, which is frankly not very. I think I identified with the mugs of the border crossers in Papers Please more than the endless stream of procedural noboies like 'Ex-logger Jerry Nauert' who has an over due library book, and $3200 in his phone to grab.

This is a three star start to what might be a five star series eventually with some tweaking and stuff. If it can get over its paper thin high-concept "relevance" hook and focus more on just entertaining the player the next Watch Dogs might be as surprisingly fun as Assassin's Creed 2 was. More bubble gum and less gilded tripe next time, please. And I'd be more pleased with it if it ran well on an i5 and Radeon 7850 and it hadn't been sold to me as the 2nd coming of speculative contemporary techno thriller noir.

Now, I'll blame some on the video compression, but this doesn't look as good as I expected it to, at least not this version. Doesn't look bad though.

The Steam entry has it, not sure what to believe anymore.

So it's every open world game ever. Cool, I'll pass.

Been playing a few hours... so far the most fun I had was figuring out the chess puzzles, that doesn't bode well.

I dunno, I'm still waiting for the special edition that comes with a dog, I can't believe they didn't capitalize on that angle...

Why does this look like a last gen console game?

Why does Jeff drive straight into oncoming cars?

Still has better cop cars than Need for Speed: Most Wanted , fuck that game and how the red link text bleeds into the message I'm continuing this post with.

Holy shit, Spitalfield made it into a videogame. Those dudes aren't even a band anymore.

I tried but I can't even watch the video with Jeff's negativity. I miss the day's where games were just games.

@pancakehumper: Can you please change your avatar to the one the person above you has? Yours looks tacky as hell

Lawrence Arms playing as the first car the carjack is so perfect for Chicago I guess.

@leejunfan83: Normally id buy that, but his attitude seems pretty appropriate for this game. If you expect him to be energetic and positive for another formulaic open world game, then I can't help you with that.

Watch dogs looks incredibly boring.

I can't watch a 1 hour long negative video early in the morning. God I am going to miss Vinny.

Sure isn't anywhere near the level they hyped it up to be, but it still looks like decent fun. I'll still get it now that I am able to manage my expectations and skew them down a bunch.

Also, giant text on the screen: 'Catch Pankae2008 before he evades'!

If it's like every other good open world game ever, then I'm happy to play another good open world game.

Don't really understand the "I miss the days where games were just games" comment in this context. Jeff's judging the game as a video game, gameplay, story etc. That comment is normally reserved for when people bitch about critics talking about social issues in games or similar stuff ("LEAVE POLITICS OUT OF MY VIDEO GAMES #MRA !!!!!!").

i dont see why this game is fun at all. whats so fun in sneaking around, hack everything, avoiding being caught. GTA is way more fun to me. more chaos, car action.

I think I'll finally play Sleeping Dogs instead. This'll be a great game to pick up on a steam sale. Still looks fun, but not exactly what we expected initially. I'll definitely be looking forward to a Watch_Dogs 2.

@leejunfan83: That's fine, but its more about the game being a disappointment, not the critic in this case. But you're blaming Jeff anyway.

I think I'm going to wait for Watch_Dogs 2, the one with the likeable Italian-American protagonist.

what I got from this is its a good fun game just not for jeff and anybody else that wants to jump on the its cool to hate watch dogs bandwagon.

nah it's the critic

@leejunfan83: Oh, okay. I stand corrected.

digital digital digital hax hax hax

This is a dumb comment. The game clearly isn't offering what they said it would. It's okay to be critical of something you know. There is a difference in being critical and being negative.

If you tell people they will receive one of the best open world games ever made with insane next gen stealth gameplay that you've never seen before, then of course people are going to be disappointed when your stealth mechanics are only average and the open world is just another one you've seen a bunch of times before.

There is nothing wrong with that.

I'm playing this on the PC and using my xbox controller and I couldn't agree with Jeff more the controls are super janky to the point where it was just frustrating in combat or in high speed chases.

I don't care about soundtracks in serious games like this. In real life, most music on the radio sucks or is generic so why shouldn't a more "realistic" looking game? In Saints Row or GTA then I want crazy good music.

Jeff seems bad at the combat and driving, lol. I definitely haven't had any issues with that part of the game. Why doesn't he just use the 'x' button to look behind him instead of rotating the camera all the way around and back? I know its a "quick" look, but a lot of the issues Jeff is having with things like stealth is that he apparently has 0 patience. No reason to do that and then complain when you're spotted.

After playing the game for about 6 hours, I'm left with a "meh". It's not a bad game, but it's just not very good. I liked the interaction between Aiden and his sister, but there's pretty much none of it past the first hour. The story after that just kinda falls apart and I don't give a damn about it anymore.

Sleeping Dogs is better. It plays better, has a better story, and has way better wet asphalt.

Robbing people's bank accounts doesn't effect your rep... huh...

Lots of really quesionable behavior in this game treated pretty flippantly. Not sure the narrative is going to be good enough to handle it.

That said, this still looks a lot more appealing to me than any open world game that doesn't involve super powers, saints, or assassins.

I haven't played it yet, but just want to remind people that Jeff has given one of the most negative reviews for this game. Not saying he's wrong, but it would be a shame to see one review put people off buying a game they might enjoy.

That outfit looks dumb as fuck.

Not even the only time that happens. I saw that and another time and I didn't even watch the whole quick look. That was pretty funny though.

@shortbreadtom: What if one review saves them from regretting a purchase?

@ildon: Fair enough, it's just on this video and on the review there are a few people saying they're not gonna buy it because Jeff doesn't like it, as if Jeff's review is the only one on the internet.

Guys, I wouldn't worry about negativity toward a game when it sucks.

@shortbreadtom: People who are regular visitors of the site are going to hopefully have a good read on where their tastes align with Jeff's and where they don't. Plus it's not like he gave it a 1/5. 3/5 is still worth playing for a lot of people.

This just looks so mindbogglingly boring to me, as it always has. I don't see anything to set it out and to make it unique. The hacking seems so stale, rest of it is third person shooting and driving around.

Looks pretty much about like what I was expecting, though perhaps not much more. Looking forward to playing it though.

Also, I get the sense that it is one of those games where you feel underpowered and screw up a lot early on and towards the midpoint, you start to get loaded with skills and gear and it all comes together to look like what you were expecting.