Let Slip These Dogs of Watch
To situate my response for you, I am a middling video game player. I've been playing video games since the days of Pong and when arcades ruled the world, but my first foray into the console market was with the PS3/360 era games. I play video games to enjoy them; I like a challenge but do not like to be frustrated by them. Having said all that, here are my thoughts on Watch Dogs which I played on the PS4.
The game looks good, but we haven't yet hit the promise of this generation. Nothing in the graphic presentation of the game distinguishes it from any of the games released on the PS3 late in that console's life.
There are some nice touches in the mechanics of Watch Dogs. The camera hacking that allows the player to move around the area and locate points of interest or hacking points works rather well.
There do seem to be plenty of side-quest options available. I wasn't able to access them all for reasons I cannot quite explain. Several of them appeared on the map, but the prompt said the mission was "not available at this time." The constant crime in progress missions caused a light sense of frustration for me. On three occasions, I found that I didn't get to the area in time and the missions disappeared. On a couple of other times, I accidentally hid in the path that the criminal was going to take and frightened him off. While that might seem like a good thing, it resulted in zero benefit for me. On the other occasions where I happened to be in a place where I was hidden from the criminal, the event happened so fast that the victim was killed, and all I could do to make amends for it was to beat down the villain of the mini-mission. I also lost that mission's award as well because the police appeared and gave chase. I couldn't get away from them no matter how hard I tried. Ultimately, they ended up shooting me, causing a restart.
The game does have a mechanic for escaping the police or someone else who is giving chase, but I found that it didn't work as well as I might have liked. The ability to raise posts in the ground or change streetlights seem to have great potential except that they require better timing than I was ever able to muster, especially when fighting with the car to avoid running over pedestrians or colliding with other cars as I tried to escape.
The privacy invasion missions provided great world-building in that I was able to look in on the lives of the people of Chicago. Putting aside the quandary caused by voyeurism, there were some touching moments, some comedic moments and some terribly sad ones. I still haven't figured out if I was supposed to exit the scene before the alert countdown completed or not as nothing seemed to happen in either case. This is typical of Ubisoft in that its games don't offer feedback very well nor do they really explain how they want missions or objectives completed.
Gunplay feels mediocre (and I write this just finished playing Bioshock 2). During one of the criminal convoy missions—on the heels of having such a difficult time in stopping the bad guys on two other occasions—I chose to stay on foot and start firing a weapon at the cars as they came down the path. What followed was my shooting and not being able to hit much at all. At one point, I drew my shotgun and tried to shoot in close-quarters; however, I couldn't get the weapon to discharge. Thinking it might be that I was out of ammo, I opened the menu for it, but discovered that the weapon had ammo in it. I can't say for sure if it was a glitch or what, but I couldn't get that weapon to fire.
The frustration with this game started for me during the first mission where I had to deliver a car to a specific area with minimal damage. The cars do not handle that well. I don't play many driving games, so I don't have any point of reference on how differently they might handle in games dedicated to driving, but in this game, they tend to drift and act like they want to grab the road and, at the same time, slide across the road. I repeated the first leg of that mission seven times before I finally hit a checkpoint. Adding insult to injury, I failed one of those times because I rolled past the checkpoint and couldn't stop before the time ticked down. The second leg of the mission went better for me, though I had to repeat that four times before I could complete it.
A great problem with these style missions is that they seem to expect an awareness of the map and routes that I might have were I actually living in the area, but during the opening hour in a virtual space I cannot be expected to know anything to the degree needed to complete the mission without multiple fails. The game simply said "do it again" until I've learned a route that I will never have to complete again in the game, so why make me learn it to get through this one point?
Ultimately, the game is not for me. I need look no further than the second mission of the game to make my case; in fact, I cannot look any further than the second mission of the game because I was unable to get past that mission. The fail state for this mission, a driving/escort mission (rest easy, the escort is in the car) requires the player to reach a certain point (and I imagine that it would be only the first checkpoint in a larger mission), is whenever a police vehicle becomes suspicious of you (read: all the time). Your only mechanic against this happening is to stop the car and turn it off—low to you who do not park in a way that your driving instructor would not approve.
I was caught when I didn't park in an appropriate parking spot. I was caught when a police car paused too long to look in my general direction. I was caught when I tried to use the street lights to help break off a patrol's route. I was caught when I raised the pylons to block the police car's ability to get near me. I was caught when I tried to haul ass down the road. The game never gave me any indication that I failed because I was in a bad spot, parked at a bad angle, riding down a main thoroughfare, riding down a side road, or anything. The game gave me no hint as to how I might otherwise complete the mission without failing. I tried to complete this mission for over an hour and a half before shutting down the game and realizing that I would be able to get no further in it.
Needless to say, I cannot recommend this game, and I want my $60.00 back.
