******
- Verified Buyer
When it comes to open world sandbox games my usual fare consists of the games that come with a superpowered/sci-fi/fantasy aspect to it, namely Infamous, Prototype, Spider-Man, Batman, and more recently, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. I've never really been into the more crime-focused games that have you playing as Mafia hoods or ghetto gangsters like in Grand Theft Auto or Saints Row; I briefly played Grand Theft Auto III back in the day, but grew frustrated with the crappy controls and gave-up on it. Red Dead Redemption fared much better with me, largely due to the western setting which had a greater appeal. Then came Watch Dogs, which immediately had my attention due to the interesting combination of hacking, surveillance, and vigilante justice which reminded me of a video game version of one of my favorite programs, Person of Interest. A lot of people were disappointed with Watch Dogs since it wasn't as revolutionary as apparently promised and because the graphics weren't as outstandingly gorgeous as they were in the first trailer. In my opinion, the graphics were just fine and the game itself was still a lot of fun...a tad repetitive at times, but still a very enjoyable experience.The main character, an outlaw hacker named Aiden Pearce, is on a quest for vengeance to hunt down the criminals who tried to kill him but ended up killing his 6 year old niece instead. While doing what he can to make sure his younger sister and nephew remain safe, Aiden dives into the criminal underworld to find his niece's killers, normally running into and causing a lot of additional problems along the way. The story wasn't as deep or emotional as something out of Metal Gear Solid, but there was plenty to occupy my attention (and I was pleasantly surprised to see Aiden's family have a more important role in the story instead of just appearing for a couple of missions before being written out). Aiden himself was a more interesting character than other reviewers gave him credit for; yes, he's a bit of a stiff, but given his past experiences, that's understandable. Aiden is a realistically flawed character: he's intelligent and very calm under pressure, yet stubborn. He's also cold and calculating, yet believes in justice and does what he can to help the innocent. Again, he's no Solid Snake, but Aiden Pearce is a character I'd like to see more of in a future installment (which is apparently being planned). The supporting characters were also pretty interesting, though I personally wanted to see a lot more of Jordi Chin, Aiden's hired gun (a.k.a.: fixer) who offers much needed assistance for the right price. Jordi's laid back attitude and dark sense of humor mixed well with Aiden's more serious disposition, but unfortunately Jordi got much less screen time than any of the other supporting characters.As Aiden explores the expansive city of Chicago, he'll exploit the advanced surveillance system known as ctOS to accomplish his goals. In both the main and side-missions, Aiden will be able to infiltrate enemy territory to steal information or get to a specific individual who may have something he needs. Many times you will have the option to infiltrate enemy strongholds through stealth, go in guns blazing, or a satisfying combination of both, although certain missions will require a stealth approach. This was fine by me since the stealth approach in this game was usually the more entertaining option. Aiden can cause all sorts of havoc for his enemies without even having to physically go into their strongholds. By using his super smartphone known as the Profiler, Aiden can take control of any nearby cameras to get a lay of the land and mark his enemies, as well as activate other electronics and machinery to distract or take out enemy sentries. He can overload electrical grids and make them explode into his enemies' faces, he can activate grenades while they're still in the pockets of the enemies carrying them, he can activate fork lifts to get an enemy's attention, and he can even cause cranes to drop containers on top of any unfortunate shmucks who may have wandered underneath them (splat!).When the shooting starts, Aiden will have to turn to his collection of handguns, assault rifles, shotguns, sniper rifles, grenades, and bombs that he will acquire along his journey either by looting them from defeated enemies, or buying them from gun stores or buying parts for crafting from pawn shops. A bullet-time mechanic that runs on a focus meter slows the gameplay down for a moment to allow Aiden to shoot enemies with pinpoint precision. And for up close and personal encounters, Aiden can use his telescopic baton to lay the smackdown on enemies either directly or through stealth. Weapons and other ctOS exploits like jamming communications, causing blackouts, and scanning for nearby enemies to appear on the mini-map can be accessed through a weapon-wheel which is very much like the one in Red Dead Redemption. You have to go through the inventory in real time, which can make things rather intense while you're in the middle of a gunfight. All these weapons, hacks, and other abilities can be upgraded with experience points earned by defeating enemies and completing missions. Puzzles play a relatively small role in this game and pretty much always involve Aiden hacking into secure systems by manipulating access points; basically you're moving several spinning nodes around into just the right positions so that a data stream can reach its intended point. It's actually less complicated than it sounds, but in any case these hacking puzzles were well done and had just the right combination of accessibility and challenge.Fortunately, the more standard hacking of cameras and other environmental features is done with the simple push of a button. When driving around the city, Aiden can manipulate street lights, pop-up road barriers, raise or lower bridges, and even burst steam pipes underneath the streets to cause geyser-like eruptions that are all capable of disabling pursuing vehicles. This is especially useful on cops who will not stop chasing Aiden until he slows them down enough so he can get out of sight and hide somewhere until the search is called off. There were times though where the cops would just keep coming and not let up the chase, which proved annoying. These chases were also further complicated due to the driving controls. This is one aspect of the game that other reviewers were not exaggerating about. The driving controls were definitely rather iffy. Some cars controlled fine, but many other vehicles operated like slick poop, especially with regards to turning. Some vehicles turned sharply with just a slight twitch of the left analog stick, while others refused to turn even if you pushed the left stick all the way to the left or right. It took me a while to get used to the general movement controls for Aiden, but eventually controlling him became second nature. The driving on the other hand normally proved to be quirky at best and problematic at worst. One other minor annoyance with the driving involves pedestrians. Almost every time I drove near a pedestrian, even if I was going barely 1 mile per hour into a parking space, any pedestrians who happened to be walking nearby would jump away and freak out as if I had been drag racing against Vin Diesel in a Fast and Furious movie. Oh, and you can't shoot while driving, which kind of sucks because enemies can shoot you while they're driving.When you want to take a break from the main campaign, there are plenty of collectibles to find and side-missions to take part in. The most common side-missions are the crimes in progress, where Aiden will get a notification on his Profiler of someone preparing to commit a crime, and when Aiden arrives at the designated location, he must find a vantage point and watch the perpetrator or victim (if applicable) and put a stop to whatever crime is about to be committed. These normally involve muggings, assassinations, stalking incidents, and the setting of bombs. There are also some occasional random crimes that pop up without warning that can be dealt with, and like the crimes in progress, these can lead to entertaining foot chases. Sidenote: one strange issue I noticed with the foot chases was that a couple of times the perpetrators would somehow climb and jump over 20 foot walls to get away from me; a strange glitch which should be dealt with in any future sequels. Other side-missions involve attacking criminal convoys and either incapacitating or killing specific targets, which can prove challenging if the targets are surrounded by a large number of armed bodyguards, and there are also gang hideouts to infiltrate so Aiden can show them who's in charge by knocking out their leaders.Fixer contracts, which provide some extra cash, will have Aiden get into a vehicle to act as a decoy to get the cops' attention, chase down other hackers to steal information from them, and drive stolen vehicles to designated drop points before time runs out while trying to avoid taking too much damage. As previously mentioned, there are a large number of collectibles to find all over the city. First, in order to bring up the locations of all these collectibles, Aiden must infiltrate certain ctOS control centers to gain access to a district's infrastructure and be able to profile citizens (and enemies), then he must hack into nearby ctOS control towers to make the district's collectibles show up on the map; the locations of different hideouts where Aiden can sleep, change outfits, and save his progress also pop up after hacking into the ctOS towers. Most of the collectibles are audio logs that provide extra background info on certain characters and additional story elements. Many of these audio logs accompany clues that have to be collected in order to solve certain investigations like locating hidden weapons caches, stopping a human trafficking ring, or hunting down a serial killer. The privacy invasions are "special" collectibles where Aiden can hack into a building's network and watch peoples' private lives unfold through their webcams. These didn't seem to have any point to them other than entertainment value: you could watch a single mother slowly give in to rage as her kids run around screaming like maniacs, watch a guy talk to his girlfriend (a female mannequin) about the possibility of marriage, or watch another guy pressure a hooker to play a deadly game of Russian roulette.There are even mini-games to take part in for those who are interested like shell games, poker, chess, or 3D virtual reality games where you shoot aliens or run through the city collecting coins. The Digital Trips are the most entertaining mini-games, where Aiden will put in an earpiece that sends images to his brain and lets him experience special games as if he were a part of them. These include him playing games where he jumps on giant flowers that pop up all over the city, runs over flame-headed demons in a post-apocalyptic supercar, and sneaks past an army of robots with security cameras for heads. My favorite Digital Trip by far was Spider-Tank, where you take control of a large robotic spider and destroy everything around you while jumping, stomping, and shooting your way through the city. I would love it if Ubisoft would go into their by now inexhaustible "Assassin's Creed fund" and put just a fraction of that money towards a stand-alone game or even DLC for Spider-Tank, with an expanded map and more enemies to destroy (and possibly a decent story). This is highly unlikely, but a gamer can dream, can't he? Another feature I'd like to discuss in Watch Dogs is its reputation system. It's actually rather simple; doing things like killing cops and civilians lowers Aiden's reputation, whereas killing only criminals (or better yet, incapacitating them) and helping civilians raises his reputation. A higher reputation makes it less likely for citizens to call the cops on you if you get involved with shootouts and increases the number of positive news reports of Aiden's activities on the radio. This doesn't affect the game's story, but instead affects actual gameplay.Hacking the phones of citizens to take money from their bank accounts does not affect Aiden's reputation (no one knows you're doing it, afterall), yet I found myself selectively taking money from those who could spare it and staying out of the accounts of citizens who appeared to need it, like the guy undergoing chemotherapy or the waitress saving up money for college. With the Profiler active, every citizen's and criminal's personal info including age, occupation, income, hobbies, or list of crimes (if applicable) can be viewed at your leisure, and the sheer scope of different backgrounds for all the citizens is truly staggering and brings further life into the already lively citizens of Chicago. This option to see citizens' background info once had me actually regretting saving a woman from an attempted mugging after seeing that she had previously been involved in two counts of second degree murder. The last feature for Watch Dogs has to do with its online component. While playing the main game, you can be randomly invaded by other players who will try to hack your phone and then leave with your information, or you can invade other gamers and return the favor. You can also take part in online driving missions and tailing missions where you chase another player and try to download his info. Honestly, I tried the online stuff a couple of times, but I quickly lost interest. The singleplayer campaign kept my undivided attention.The story-based DLC, Bad Blood, has you take on the role of supporting character and Aiden's eventual ally, Raymond Kenney, a.k.a.: T-Bone Grady. His adventure begins a year after the events of the main game with him infiltrating a ctOS control center and causing trouble for Blume, the shady company responsible for creating the system. After making his escape and making preparations to leave the city, T-Bone is drawn back into trouble when an old friend of his is kidnapped and he takes it upon himself to rescue him, which of course leads to more problems that postpone his travel plans. T-Bone will be dealing with the same kind of hacking and shooting missions as Aiden in the main game, but they're no less challenging or fun. He can make use of the same types of ctOS exploits as Aiden with his own Profiler, as well as the same types of weapons; he can also take down enemies up close with a combination of his 2 ft. wrench and taser. One unique gadget in his arsenal is his custom r/c car named Eugene. Functioning in a similar manner to Solid Snake's Metal Gear Mk. II/III from Guns of the Patriots, T-Bone can guide Eugene into enemy territory to get to normally inaccessible areas and to unlock doors or deactivate security systems. Eugene can also incapacitate enemies with its own built-in taser or even blow itself up with packets of C4 to take out a group of enemies in one fell swoop (don't worry, Eugene can be rebuilt with just a couple of spare parts).Like in the main game, T-Bone can take part in side-missions called "street sweeps", where he forms an unofficial alliance with a Chicago detective and accepts some off the books jobs from her to undermine the efforts of the city's most dangerous criminals, mainly gangsters, fixers, and militiamen. These street sweeps consist of blowing up cargo containers, knocking out or occasionally killing specific targets, or downloading stolen information on the city's police department from laptops. These missions have optional objectives like not being spotted, not using weapons, or making sure not to kill any enemies; completing these objectives earns T-Bone some extra cash, but again, they're optional (and sometimes not worth the effort...or even possible). He can also undertake driving contracts where he takes vehicles tied to previous crimes and drives at high speeds to avoid being tracked, drives cars to drop-off points with minimal damage before time runs out, or escorts VIPs to their destinations. Finally, T-Bone has his own set of collectibles to find linked to investigations regarding a manhunt for Aiden Pearce and an ominous threat being issued to the hacker collective DedSec. For a DLC, Bad Blood has a decent amount of content to keep you busy; the main campaign is actually kind of short, but still fun, and the side content is rather plentiful. It also adds an online co-op component where you can complete street sweep missions with another player.In conclusion, Watch Dogs was a worthwhile game to play. It isn't revolutionary, but it's still plenty of fun and the hacking features were very well implemented in a believable manner without appearing like magic or feeling overpowered. There are improvements that could and should be made for the sequel, namely a more involved story with an even stronger focus on character development. Better and smoother driving controls would also be a huge plus. I can see why some gamers were disappointed with the end result of Watch Dogs, however the game did not deserve the overwhelming amount of hate it received when it made its debut (chalk it up to unrealistic expectations and the fact that some gamers simply can't be pleased no matter what). This is a fun game with lots of content and should be recognized as such.
