Watch Dogs

Watch Dogs is a solid open world game that is hampered by simply being unremarkable in many areas. The much vaunted hacking system under delivers the promise of a completely fresh take on the genre, but the core gameplay is still fun enough to make Watch Dogs a decent game, even with some cut corners and somewhat repetitive mission design.

Watch Dogs takes place in present day Chicago, where a government-imposed surveillance system called cTOS blankets the city and the surrounding areas, tying together seemingly all of the cameras, computers and phones in the vicinity. You play as Aiden Pearce, one of the many hackers who has learned to exploit this system for personal gain. When a score goes wrong and a hit is put out on Aiden with horrible consequences, Aiden sets out to track down who ordered the strike against him.

With the ability to hack the cTOS system, Aiden is able to use much of the monitored tech to his advantage, whether it be in combat, car chases, or in gathering information. As you walk around Chicago, bringing out your phone allows you to get info on every single Chicagoan in Aiden’s sight. You’ll see salaries, hobbies, possible previous convictions and general dark secrets. These are usually randomly generated and outside of missions typically don’t have any real significance beyond the occasional ATM hack that gains Aiden extra money, but it is a unique aspect to Watch Dogs that does help to give the world some extra life. When chasing a target or fleeing from one, Aiden can hack many things to gain an advantage, including disrupting traffic lights and creating electric. In combat scenarios, Aiden can hack communication systems to incapacitate and get the drop his enemies, and can even hack into and explode the batteries in some enemies’ phones.

The pre-release push for Watch Dogs was that hacking would create a fresh open world experience unlike anything we’d ever seen, one only possible on next-generation systems, and many hoped Watch Dogs would set the bar for the next console cycle. In actuality, a lot of the gameplay differs little from standard open world gameplay. While the hacking can be fun and does serve to add some variety to the gameplay, it ends up feeling somewhat cursory to the main action in combat scenarios. While your hacking abilities can often give you the edge in combat, I often found myself taking out huge groups of enemies with the traditional weapons at your disposal. The hacking abilities in stealth sections usually amounts to hacking into cameras to spot enemies, which isn’t exactly groundbreaking either. Much of the actual gameplay ends up feeling pretty similar to other open world games of this nature.

While the combat itself feels satisfying enough and general movement is responsive, the mission design of Watch Dogs isn’t especially great. Most of the missions in the main storyline fall into one of four categories: Aiden either has to A) Infiltrate an area/chase a car to take out a target, B) infiltrate an area/chase a car to hack a specific object, C) keep pace with enemies in order to hear information, or D) escort an ally through enemy territory. While the actual shooting and controls feel good, you don’t actually do much new in Watch Dogs – Instead of setting a standard for a next-generation of games, Watch Dogs features stale, repetitive missions with potentially interesting hacking gimmicks thrown in the mix.

There are other areas where the game doesn’t feel quite up to snuff. The graphics don’t look awful, but they don’t look great either – there is nothing here graphically that will make you sit back and think that the next generation has arrived. A lot of corners have been cut on the smaller details as well; window reflections are poorly faked, poles always uniformly collapse the same way after being hit by your vehicle, and for some reason there are no police boats even though there is an abundance of water in the world (this makes escaping police pretty easy, as you hack and disable pursuing helicopters). While Aiden’s movement on foot feels fine, the vehicle handling/physics does not– when going full speed in a small car, you can easily knock back larger oncoming vehicles while losing little momentum yourself, as your car breaks the laws of physics by sliding and bouncing off oncoming cars instead of colliding with them. This makes it easier to chase after a target, but it seems like a concession to compensate for the general poor handling of the vehicles themselves.

The pre-release push that Watch Dogs would be a bench mark for the next generation puts it under intense scrutiny, and even with the added development time due to its delays, it just doesn’t hold up to it. It also doesn’t help that Watch Dogs came out so soon after Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto V (which Ubisoft took direct shots at in an advertising campaign stating “two months are long enough to visit Los Santos, come to Chicago”), an immensely ambitious open world game that got so many things right. Even without the fervor leading up to its release, Watch Dogs still wouldn’t have been a great game. The story, while uneven, had enough highs and unique aspects to keep me engaged, and the gameplay, while not groundbreaking, felt good enough to warrant a rental or an on-sale purchase. Watch Dogs isn’t a bad game, it just isn’t the great one so many had hoped.