It's a tough situation for developers. You want your fans to think you're bringing them the moon with a new game, but with those sorts of lofty promises, you sometimes oversell your own product. When played in a vacuum, Watch Dogs is a very good sandbox game. But as it exists in this world where it's meant to be a earth-shattering original IP and the birth of a new uber-franchise, it comes up short in many noticeable areas. It can often feel more derivate than innovative, despite its array of new hacking toys, and may disappoint some expecting more than it delivers.
Watch Dogs takes us to near-future Chicago, where the only real technological advancement appears to be the fact that every electronic device known to man can now be hacked with a press of a button on a smart phone, thanks to a new city-wide operating system, ctOS. As such, this development has given rise to a legion of superhackers like our lead, Aiden Pearce.
We don't know much about Aiden, and still don't by the end of the game. When we meet him, he's lead hacker in an electronic heist gone wrong, and soon we're flashed into the future 11 months where his niece has been accidentally killed by those seeking revenge for the botched job. Now he's turned the tables and is after their heads.
Not content with fighting his own demons, Aiden also uses his technical prowess to become something like a pre-cog out of Minority Report, using data analytics to predict crimes before they happen. The city is already calling him 'the vigilante' and Aiden spends the course of the game hacking into the hearts and minds of Chicago by cleaning up the streets. By the end you'll be a beloved hero or feared murderer, though the game fails to clearly state what effect the minimalistic karma system actually has on gameplay. Mercifully, there are no 'good and evil' branching skill trees to be found.
Aiden's life is thrown for a loop yet again when his old partner resurfaces to threaten his still-grieving family. In order to ensure their safety, Aiden is at his partner's beck and call, doing everything from sneaky cybersleuthing to murdering hundreds of people with automatic weapons. In the process, he starts to unravel a vast conspiracy uniting Chicago's mob presence, Southside street gangs and power-hungry megacorporations in one huge grand scheme to do...something. It will take the entire game to figure out what, and there are scarce few clues along the way.
The first thing you'll discover about Watch Dogs is that it's going to be far more like Grand Theft Auto than you were probably anticipating. It's being sold as a game based around hacking and subterfuge, but in practice, nearly every other mission devolves into massive shootouts behind chest-high walls.
Hacking has not completely reinvented the sandbox crime game here, it's simply seasoned it. Sometimes quite nicely, but other times its touch is so light you'll barely notice it.
At this point it has to be said that if you're one of those people who hates when TV shows or movies use 'hacking' as a deus ex machina for pivotal plot points, turn around and run as far away from Watch Dogs as you can. The hacking in the game makes almost no earthly amount of sense, is full of genre clichés, and the plot is stuffed with so much nonsense technical mumbo jumbo, you'll be bleeding it out of your eyeballs by the end.
With that said, players should be perfectly willing to ignore all of that if the central mechanic of 'hack everything' makes for a fun play experience. And it does, much of the time.
The hacking mechanic is used in three primary ways. Open combat, car chases, and puzzles. The last item will remind many of Assassin's Creed's climbing challenges that were as simple as working your way up an eagle eye tower, or hopping around some giant historical landmark. Aiden will often be tasked with hopping through security camera feeds, invading door lock overrides and downloading whatever needs to be stolen for the data gods to rejoice. It's not exactly a barrel of laughs, but it breaks up the action and can be genuinely challenging at times. I will say that I wish they'd come up with a less played out 'in the system' hacking mechanic than the famous 'connecting tubes' school of hacking, as that seems to be the only way video games know how to represent it. Considering the entire game is based on the concept, a little variety and creativity would have gone a long way there.
Hacking can also be used on the fly, namely during the endless amount of car chases you'll find yourself in as you either have to flee the cops or gangs, or hunt someone down yourself. This is where things split pretty heavily from games like GTA and Saints Row. There is no drive-by mechanic, so you can't just empty an Uzi into a rival car's engine block as a method of problem solving.
Rather, you have to rely on the city of Chicago itself to be your guardian. As you fly through the city, you can hack street lights, divider rods, spike strips and even gas mains to cause your enemies to total their cars. It takes some patience getting used to this system, and it can be frustrating early on. Trying to ram your way out of trouble or simply outrun pursuers just isn't an option. Realistically, the only way you can beat these sections is by hacking, and some of the events can be tough to time correctly. Early in the game, it's borderline impossible to beat a few of the chase sequences and side-missions with a meager hacking skill tree, and it can be irritating to try and get the timing and strategy down. Eventually, you'll learn how to use the game's slow motion mechanic (pressing R3) to pinpoint the timing for proper takedowns, and its exhilarating to watch a pursuing SUV get pancaked by an semi-truck because you flipped the light at the right moment.
This is where the Watch Dogs' central concept shines. I love the fact that this is the only way out of these situations, as it forces players to make use of the game's primary mechanic, and damn well near master it by the time they reach the insanely tough missions near the end of the game.
If only I could say the same for open combat.
Posted by Unknown on Tuesday, May 27, 2014 - Rating: 4.5
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