Examination: Watch Dogs
As always, major spoiler alert. You have been warned.
I've been curious about this game since I seen the first videos about it. The basic concept sounded good but the videos brought it home. Delaying it though I'm not sure they actually accomplished making it better, then it would ahve been back then.
I really need to tackle expectation management. This is where Watch Dogs fails miserably on a wider scale. It has strangely a few of the notions from GTA V in it as well.
So the game is you being a hacker on a revenge course. Your niece got killed in an accident because a job went bad and the ones you stole from wanted to kill you. So now you go after those that ordered the hit. It sounds like a solid story, made better by the fact that Aiden is not avenging his wife, but a little girl that wasn't even his. Still slightly tropy, but far enough away to feel different enough. In his quest he hacks, steals and kills his way through the city of Chicago. I've never been there so I can't tell how much it feels realistic. He is a vigilante, keen on kepeing his identity a secret.
And here is where the game already tanks majorly. At the very beginning is a guy that almost gets killed and survives. Later you have to get into prison and convince the guy not to talk. Meanwhile the radio blares at you that the police is hunting for the suspected vigilanty Aiden Pearce. Why the hell did I just go through all the trouble when everyone already knows? That little bit of info that on occasion gets played over the radio just broke so much of the world that it's unfathomable why anyone though this was a good idea. To make matters worse, his sister is apparently rather easy to find. So why did nobody, ever, stake out her place? Or just use one of the thousands of cameras and send a car when the pixelated version of Aiden shows up? Doesn't take a genius for that and it causes a lot of suspension of disbeliefe in even the simple most common sense parts.
So the story is actually not too bad, but just often gets a bit odd. A lot of effort is spent on crap, that just can be seen a mile away, is not worth it. For a quarter of the game you setup some elaborate scheme to get someone into a place that is heavy fortified. In the end you go in anyways. Alone. Why couldn't I just get it over with in the beginning? The player also seems to have quite a lot of explosives, so being able to blow up a wall or a door should be a rather simple task. Yet that doesn't work that way.
Watch Dogs falls into the same trap as GTA, it lines up some nice pay offs and then doesn't pull through. The beginning of the game with the stadium, that would have had potential for epicness, and it was completely squandered. The hunt for the guy that survived was pointless, though the mission was very well done. Most of the things you do for T Bone seem even more pointless or way too simple (the HQ of the company is less secure then one of the CTOS stations?). The biggest let down was the auction and the complete zero impact that had. What happened to the girls? You never hear about it again. You can do side missions and then do one final clean up mission, but that one is not even very original or challenging.
Which brings me to the two main videos. The one where Aiden hacks into some underground place and kills people that sell girls. Well, that doesn't happen. And secondly the club. Yes you go to that club, but for an entirely different reason. The mission with De Marco as seen in the video is interesting and even tactical. What you really have to do is find Defalt, a hacker/DJ in that club. Well it's not hard to tell where he is. But the game will of course not let you just pull your weapon and shoot him, or get close to him. First you need to hack some phones randomly, some cameras unil you hack the camera of his laptop. Then he takes off and now you are allowed to chase him. Again, this entire mission feels bad in so many ways. Let alone that this guy hacked into your "Top Secret and secure bunker" and he hacks everyones data while being a DJ at the same time, seems very weird (also reminds me a lot of DeadMau5).
The love interest which is clearly there is rather down played and then eliminated in a even more stupid and so overly tropy way that I just couldn't believe it when I was made to play through it. Nough said on that one.
Expectations, failed.
So how about the mechanics? Here is hope for Watch Dogs and why I hope they make another one. With better writers and with better principal oversight.
Driving is okish. Cars feel different. though most high performance cars feel just over the top. There is only sliding, spinning out high speed or nothing. So they don't feel as nice to drive as they could. Handling is not too bad either. You can flip cars and total them, but both require an amount of force that feels realistic. It could handle better. Also there is no shooting while driving, which makes a lot of chases and other battles very hard to accomplish. You can hack while driving but not shoot. The hacking while driving works half automated. You don't have to look back to a blocker to trigger it. You just drive over it, and the game will prompt you to push the hack button when the enemy would get caught by a hack of that installation.
Shooting is where the game shines. This feels good and responsive. Hits feel solid. It's sad that most guns are highly inaccurate even with single shots at medium distances and that there is no silenced sniper rilfe (for the player). For good kill shots you need to be close and then the silenced hand gun is your best tool. The only one that tops it is the silenced vector which you get for 5 online rounds of trailing someone. You can die quickly and you can do damage quickly if you aim right. So the fights feel more so that you need to find good cover and positions instead of running in guns blazing. You also want to checkout the area first with cameras and tag all enemies so you can see them even through walls. This makes the combat highly tactical.
General moving about is ok, but for some reason I keep feeling like Aiden should be able to do simple movements from the Assassins Creed series as well, like jumping over a gap and hang on to a ledge. That one move kills a lot of potential. Aiden can only swing himself over an edge, not stand on it and jump forward. He never really jumps over a gap or anything like that anyways. Still gives him a large range of movements in the puzzles at the CTOS towers or when assaulting a position.
I mentioned unlocks. The towers are some (the story forces you to unlock most centers anyways) but there are more collectibles. Some have an impact, like the chess games will allow you to gain maximum skill later in one particular thing. Some unlocks you only get through online play. It feels ok, but could have been done a bit better.
Many of these side things feel very tacked on. Not very coherent either. This gets worse though.
On one side Aiden has this meter that tells him how "good" he is. Killing innocents and cops makes him bad. But also injuring the pedestrians does that. By doing vigilante things like stopping crimes etc, you get "good points" again. Now this has very little impact actually. The only thing that happens is that if you are too bad, that people will randomly call the cops on you. Over all your actions seem to make little impact. You can invade peoples privacy and steal all their money, without any impact whatsoever. Moral system gone wrong.
Which brings me to the online play. You can disable it, but that means you reset your score and you lose any and all unlocks you might have gained that way. That's harsh. It's also forced upon you. You can play a day without a single person attacking you and then 3 in an hour. I think there is a limit, but I haven't seen it yet. Also there is a thing where you can't be invaded on missions. But when you are just trying to unlock a tower, that's free movements and it can happen that you just get invaded a moment before you hit the button. Very annoying when it's hard to get to a spot. Too bad most of the puzzles are that way, you need to find the right spot, get into the right position or hack the right camera. All of it can be interrupted at any given moment. The finding of the culprit who did the invasion is also often just wildly running around and not very interesting. I think the game would have benefitted from those features being completely absent and that effort being invested into a better more coherent story and some better missions.
Watch Dogs is interesting and entertaining. I spent over 37 hours in it and I enjoyed my time. It was sometimes a bit hard to watch, as the game just contradicted itself big time or just made little sense why so much effort for something so small. But in the end it feels like an interesting world to spend time in. It's a good start and I'm eager to see the next entry.











