Edit:Added Spoiler to the title since I discuss somewhat spoilery stuff in the game.

Don’t judge me but I’ve been playing a plethora of Ubisoft games. Two of which, Watch Dogs and AC: Unity, are considered to be less than stellar in terms of quality. Without further ado and in order here are my thoughts.

Watch Dogs – Xbox One

Watch Dogs is a game that reminds me a lot of the first Assassin’s Creed. I can see the potential of what the game can be but it ultimately falls short in a lot of places. The game is at its best when everything is working correctly. Hacking Camera’s to get in and out of an area unseen feels great or escaping the cops by tying them up in traffic or disabling their cars with a well-timed road block feels rewarding. However those moments are few and far between and the game becomes increasingly infuriating if you are trying to stealth through sequences.

For a company that has so much experience with stealth games this is probably the worst stealth they have ever done. Not that the levels are overly difficult but I never felt truly rewarded for getting through area’s undetected. In Assassin’s Creed I always felt like sneaking through and getting an undetected assassination felt amazing even if there wasn’t a big reward at the end. It fit in with the theme of the game but I never once felt like Aiden was the god of sneaking and that it was faster to just be a murdering asshole then it was to try and be sneaky or “escape”.

This is especially true after the purchase of any of the games grenade launchers which was the first gun I bought. The gun trivializes almost all chase encounters. Have to take out a transport? Just blow it up. Have to escapes thugs? Just blow up their vehicles? Have an enforcer to take out? Just blow him up. It was a very rare occasion I used any other gun but this just because of how easy it makes everything.

The story for this game started out pretty good in my opinion and then just went nowhere. It’s basically like everything and nothing happens in regards to Aiden. I don’t mind that his motivation is about getting revenge for his niece and saving his family but unless you uncover a lot of the recordings you don’t get a lot of history on Quinn, Iraq, or Damien. I had no clue who Rose Washington was until the very end of the game and didn’t care one bit about her tie to Mayor Rushmore. A lot of it just feels cobbled together especially Clara and Dedsec’s motivations in the main story. By the time you realize what is going on with Clara she's dead. I think the game could have benefited from a much more linear story rather than the branching paths they tried to interweave into one cohesive story.

My least favorite part of the game came in the form of the last mission. Good god what a colossal nightmare that was. Not only do you not have the majority of your hacking systems, the UI and screen glitch out making it near impossible to see where you need to go. Add in 4 star police chase and CTOS scans up the ass it was just complete and utter chaos to get through. That’s probably what the developers were going through but in every mission prior to that you have at least the majority of control on what is going on around with you. It would have been cool to have some sort of hack battle with Damien instead of the pandemonium that ensued with that mission.

Overall though it piqued my interest in what this franchise could do. I don’t think the game is a bad game but it’s far from a good game either. I’m glad I played it but I truly feel that the game could do with a bit more focus on the story and leave some of the stuff you do in the middle of act 3 and 4 to side missions.

Assassin’s Creed: Unity

With that completed I moved on to one of the two Assassin’s Creed games I have played. I will probably get to Rogue at some point as I have seen it discounted for a nice price on PC. I tend to put about 60-80 hours into these games pretty easy as I tend to always feel compelled to collect all the things. As there seems to be more things to collect then ever so I may have to curb that a little if I plan to make it through. I’m also not concerned about playing this before Syndicate comes out as I almost never play them on release day anymore.

I’m barely just getting started with this but my initial thoughts on this are fairly positive for the most part. I like the new parkour animations and initially it seems like climbing down is easier and faster. Movement doesn’t seem to be as fluids around windows but it might be something I just need to get used to. Combat seems pretty tight still but I have to get used to the new animations and button timing.

Arno seems to be a capable fellow albeit a somewhat unreliable one. I foresee a lot of changes and growth in him in the coming sequences. I have a few thoughts on the story as I’ve just gotten to the point where he joins the Assassin’s guild. Speaking of, that sequence is pretty damn cool. I loved that his father was always the same distance away as you were running towards him as the ground was breaking away.

We’ll see where I am in a week’s time but so far I’m having a lot of fun with this in comparison to Watch Dogs. I’m curious to see if the multiplayer missions will still have people playing them or not as I think that could still be interesting but even if not I’m okay with just the single player component of everything.

You should play Heroes of Might and Magic V if you want to play Ubisoft games!

Watchdogs is a pretty good game, also Spider Tank. Getting the fat guy to do stuff was cool and aside from being extremely predictable I didn't have many issues with the main story segments at the end (well that one hacker dude was anticlimactic). The side activities are all pretty good and having a magical unoccupied island in the middle of fucking Chicago is hilarious.

I didn't mess around too much with the Digital Trips. I mostly just mainlined the game but all the stuff with Bedbug was great and I wished they had expanded more on T-Bone and Jory. I don't know what it was about that last mission that just irked me. It probably took me a good 5 or 6 tries to get through. I think it was the checkpoint system breaking on me because every time I died or had to restart I had to do all three points over again. It felt like it should have been saving every time I got a new point uploaded with the virus. So every death was repeating the same 10-15 minute segments over again.

Damien's lighthouse was incredibly funny especially with Jory just showing up out of the blue. I thought the ending in general was very anti-climatic especially with all the Maurice stuff. I had completely forgotten about him until they make you play that last sequence again.

@zirilius: I think I may have done better on the last mission because I had done a fair number of the incredibly frustrating convoy missions beforehand so I had a general idea of how to approach a chase sequence in the game.

I thought the lighthouse stuff was really hilarious as well, but it sort of fits right in with the "Video game story" archetype that most games have so it didn't bother me too much.

Maurice was pretty low impact on the whole, just *shrug* worthy. They already killed Clara and she was the only one outside of the Iraq subplot that showed any promise to become a good character.

I think Jordi just had "expensive voice actor" syndrome a la Sleeping Dogs. Looking it up it doesn't seem like he'd actually be that pricey. That's definitely how his character arc went though.

Edit: Well that one other guy who got his own DLC was okay. Memorable enough for me to not remember his name for sure.

Do you think guys watch dogs 2 will be much better? Like AC to AC 2. I really hope so. There is a lot of potential, but the first game left a sour taste for me. I would love to see a female hacker main character but not in the same vein as Clara.Strange that there are no rumors at all for sequel.

Watch_Dogs was a good, but not great game that gets mostly shit on because it didn't match its overhype and because of the dreaded "unlikeable protagonist". That's kind of a shame, because as you alluded to, it had a lot of interesting ideas that simply needed to be capitalized on a bit better. I thought it was a fresher take on the increasingly stale Ubisoft open-world, and I'd actually be fairly interested in a Watch_Dogs 2 (much moreso than iterative AC games at this point). If they refined/expanded some of the "hacking" systems and avoided the ludonarrative dissonance, there could be something special there, and your example of ACII is a good one. I'd throw in Hitman: Codename 47 and Hitman 2: Silent Assassin as another.

I never had interest in Unity. I've enjoyed the AC games for mostly different reasons (yes, even III....maybe especially III), but after Black Flag, I started hitting some major fatigue. I also felt like they really missed the mark tonally with Unity. The French Revolution was bloody as hell, and is one of the greatest historical examples of women kicking ass and taking names. It was a disservice to the period to shoehorn in a bland-ass "mass appeal protagonist" with Arno. Essentially re-writing history to try and make the game more marketable was gross. I'm no feminist, but I found that pretty offputting. Then it released broken as shit. I guess it's "fixed" now, and it may well be an okay game in and of itself. However, when even Ubi themselves are actively throwing it under the bus in promotional shit for Syndicate, that says something. That's as much shit as I'll talk about a game I haven't played, though.

At least Watch_Dogs tried some new things. It didn't fully succeed on making them really shine, but I appreciate the effort. I don't feel like much effort at all went into Unity (or is going into Syndicate). I feel like the AC series these days is purely a cash-grab, even moreso than the CoDs of the world. I don't want to take away from the environments in AC games, because those are generally excellent and the best parts of the games, but there needs to be more appeal than just that. When I feel like they miss the mark (Unity) or choose a setting that I'm just not that interested in (Syndicate), I'm better off just going back and playing one of the other games with virtually identical gameplay in a better setting.

Even the settings feel so "safe" to me. Going back to Unity, they should have upped the violence a ton. Not that I'm way into hyperviolence, but that conflict was brutal, and should have been depicted as such with you hacking limbs off of people as some badass woman who's not taking any more shit. If they were scared of backlash on that, it would have been really easy to reconcile that with some scene of all the devastation and some character introspection as to if it's all worth it. Then you have Syndicate. Now, a seemingly perfect fit for this series is to set it in feudal Japan. That game could be incredible if they did it right. Except Ubi has come out and said this is "boring". Then they go and pick the most overdone and played out setting of late in Victorian England. Yeah, okay.

I hate taking this point of view because it flies in the face of my generally pro-capitalist tendencies and appreciation for the business side of gaming, but fuck, Ubisoft is corporate-ing their games to death, especially the AC games. They feel so....manufactured, for lack of a better word. I can just picture the meeting where a bunch of bean-counter suits hang on every word of some asshole "market research" guy, and then leave this meeting to go stifle any ideas from their team that might be creative or interesting in lieu of what they've been told will make the most money. "You! Make the protagonist more generic." You! Put in more collectibles to pad the game's length and distract people from the crappy story." "You! Figure out how to squeeze in another digital currency and take out pieces of content for pre-orders and DLC."

Granted, this stuff isn't exclusive to Ubisoft or Assassin's Creed, but they're at the forefront of this bullshit. Moreover, when they're releasing these awful promotional videos that insult the viewer's intelligence by expecting us to buy into "favorable" playtests, it's hard to be gung-ho about the future of the franchise or Ubisoft in general. Still, I'm guessing Syndicate will probably sell a ton of copies, and if that happens, Ubisoft will be perfectly fine with the game no matter if it's actually shitty or awesome. It will remain as such until we demand better. I'll step off my soapbox and end my rant now.

@edgaras1103: I do think the potential for a better game is there but unlike AC I don't think the characters, world, or lore is as good in Watch Dogs. There is a lot to like about Watch Dogs the problem is that its modern setting open world puts it in tough company with the likes of Saints Row and GTA. Rumors state that the game is in development but it's probably a couple years out from being on the annualized Ubi-train. http://www.polygon.com/2015/4/30/8520857/watch-dogs-2-development

@fredchuckdave People seemed to like that T-Bone DLC. Might check it out after later but yeah Clara and Iraq were definitely the most interesting. When Clara gets introduced there is a level of intrigue there that is never fully realized. I was really hoping that the the video you kept try to decipher throughout the game would have ended up being her and not some throw away character I barely had any recollection or care for.