Watch Dogs

You’re walking along a street, phone in hand, all bored-looking, hacking pieces of information about Chicago’s residents by just looking at them. You overhear a pedestrian talk with a vague Canadian accent, you hack a homeless person’s rich bank account, and you steal yet another mediocre track from a music-enthusiast; and then, 5 minutes of this, it loses its novelty and you’re off to either shoot, or drive in a very standard open-world game.

First revealed in E3 2012, Watch_Dogs promised to be the defining next generation experience, and then the PS3 and Xbox 360 logos showed up. Due to not owning a next-gen console yet, I decided to play Watch_Dogs on my 360, and see just how “cross-gen” this cross-gen game is.

Watch_Dogs is a story about vengeance. You play as Aiden Pearce, a protagonist who is a black-cape away from being Batman himself. Aiden was involved in a hacking job that went south, and things quickly escalated soon-after. A hit was ordered on Aiden and his family; Aiden managed to survive the hit, but his 7 year old niece died in the car crash. A year later, Aiden is pissed and is after the people responsible.

The story has some good beats, and it climaxes and ends rather decently. It’s a shame that the voice-acting is not all there, and the facial-animations and lip-syncing are sub-par at best. That sets the theme for all of Watch_Dogs, a game that has potential to be so much more than it is.

You see promising moments in Watch_Dogs, but it fails time and time again to stand-out as something original. Instead, it relies on old open-world game tropes. Drive to this point, shoot some guys, escape the cops. Neither the shooting nor the driving feel great, either. It’s almost as if the developers lost confidence in what sets Watch_Dogs apart, and fell back on standard open-world mission design.

You can hack to manipulate or trigger events in the environment, or hack the communications devices worn by enemies to distract them. Hack the traffic lights in an intersection to cause a 42 car pile-up, or hack spikes, steam-pipes or electrical panels to take down escaping targets; none of these are interestingly taken advantage of, instead, you stare at the screen until you see “neutralize” and hit X to hack one of these things and get one more cop car off your tail.

You can also hack cameras and get a vantage point, to either find a hack-box hidden in the environment, or guide a character to safety. The latter is frustrating due to the AI’s absolute refusal to do anything on their own. If they are spotted, they will stand there and just stare at the dude who’s shooting them to death. It’s disappointing.

Outside of combat, you can press X to bring up the profiler, and see the details of every NPC’s life, including a “fun-fact” about them. You can use this to hack their ATM accounts, get a new car, or steal music off their equivalent of iPod. It’s novel, but just like everything else that sets Watch_Dogs apart, is not used in very interesting ways.

Watch_Dogs being Ubisoft Montreal’s first set-in-present-day open-world crime game, there are a couple of rookie mistakes. For example, a camera that is way too close to the action, a disappointing soundtrack that starts the song over everytime you get in or out of a car, and a control-scheme that is troubling at best.

When the then-next-generation now-current-generation consoles were announced, there was an argument over the terms “cross-gen” and “split-gen”. Whatever that entails, in this case here, it means a technical bust. Playing Watch_Dogs on a 360 was not pleasant. The world looks washed out, there are amazingly horrible pop-ups all over the place, and load times reminiscent of that of Fable 2. Drive fast, and hear your 360 roar trying to load all the textures in time, which, often doesn’t.

There is fun to be had in Watch_Dogs, the story is solid and worth seeing-through, and the action can be fun at times when Watch_Dogs takes advantage of its hook, and not its mediocre cover and shooting mechanics. Hack an enemy’s mounted camera, then hack the grenade his buddy has, and watch them freak-out as it explodes and kills their entire group. It’s moments like this that makes the rest of Watch_Dogs rather bland and boring. Here’s hoping they pull an Assassins Creed 2 with the sequel.