Watch Dogs – Not All It’s Hyped Up to Be

It took me awhile to get around to it, but I’ve finally managed to get some time in with Ubisoft’s recent urban exploration and cyber-terrorism game, Watch_Dogs. I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting from the game, but I’m also not entirely sure what it is that I got. Watch Dogs is all over the place in terms of what it offers and I’m not exceptionally impressed by any of it. Well, maybe the spider tank mini-game. That thing is fun and indulges my desire to go on a crazy rampage in a piece of high-tech hardware bristling with weapons. Sadly, the rest of the game isn’t quite that exciting. Perhaps I was expecting too much from the story or maybe it’s just not for me, but either way it left me feeling a little flat.

I am aware of the whole PC visual downgrade controversy, but for this review I played Watch Dogs on Xbox One, so the visuals that experienced were probably as good as it was going to get on the hardware without dropping the frame rate. That still doesn’t stop the game from crashing more often than other console games that I’ve played. Regardless, I wouldn’t call Watch Dogs stunning on Xbox, but certainly on par with other recent AAA games. The control scheme was decently suited to console play and didn’t feel particularly clunky except during high-speed chases. (More on that in a minute.) Dialogue is acted about as well as it’s written and our protagonist isn’t the most likable guy to begin with. The game is definitely an open playground for completionists as there are a lot of secondary missions and quests to complete that unlock additional storylines or in-game items. Stopping crime (which often requires the theft of vehicles to accomplish), solving murders, hacking into people’s homes, playing VR or AR mini games, or just checking in via a pseudo-Foursquare network (including mayorships) are some of the many distractions from the main quest that are regularly available.

I mentioned the mini-games in Watch Dogs and there are a few of them to be tried. Digital trips is a hub for 4 different games and includes my favorite, Spider Tank. You pilot a wall-crawling, missile-shooting, city-smashing, walking tank and you’re given objectives to fulfill. Of course, those objectives are all about taking your aggression to 11, like smashing twelve police cars or shooting down the helicopter. Complete objectives, get XP to level up, and then spend skill points upgrading your tank so you can do it all again. Gotta love going on a rampage through Chicago. The other mini-games are fun as well, but I’ll happily just spend a few more hours in my terrifying eight-legged tank.

Dropping cargo on people still makes you a murderer.

Sadly, that main story isn’t going to complete itself, so I can’t just play mini-games all day. Unfortunately, I just couldn’t get behind the protagonist, Aiden Pearce. He’s about as far as you can get from being a sympathetic character. He starts the game stealing information, but the job goes awry and he’s found out. Flash forward and a hit is put out on him which leads to the accidental death of his niece. So of course chasing after those people for revenge is the best option. Surprise! Things go poorly and the rest of his family is put in danger. Pearce is not a nice guy and it turns out that bad things keep happening to him. I just can’t bring myself to care about him as a character. The female cohort that joins the cast early on is basically a toned-down girl-with-a-dragon-tattoo clone. There’s probably a dragon somewhere among her other tattoos and piercings. If media has taught us anything, it’s that hackers are blunt loners, punk-rock chicks, or mask-wearing psychopaths. My guess is that the people who know how to write likeable, charismatic characters were busy with the new Assassin’s Creed game.

I said I’d talk about driving in Watch Dogs; it wasn’t particularly great. That, however, could be due to the vehicles themselves handling like anything from a large brick to a refrigerator on wheels—the kind Indiana Jones might hide in to save himself from a nuclear blast—being driven by a man who was gripping the steering wheel between his teeth. Sure, these gumption-fueled annihilation sleds work great, at least up until you need to turn. At that point you’re either simulating refrigerator sledding in warm molasses or sliding an ice rink, depending on the handling rating of your chosen delivery method. Luckily the cars couldn’t give a good sliding fuck of a concern because even the most economical vehicles can sideswipe a stoplight or telephone pole out of the ground (to help stabilize it during a turn) and keep right on trucking. What I’m saying is that the driving mechanics could have used some fine tuning. Though to be fair, driving fast down the freeway or railroad tracks (or anywhere without sharp turns) is exhilarating. Even taking a motorcycle through parks can be fun if you use stairs as a ramp to launch yourself in the air, thanks to the game’s wholly unrealistic physics.

I’m not trying to say that Watch Dogs is a bad game. I just don’t feel like it’s a game that knows what it’s supposed to be and that makes it hard for me to say if I think it’s doing a good job or not. It’s somewhere between GTA, Assassin’s Creed, and a bad movie about hackers. I didn’t care for the drop-in multiplayer, but I’m not a big fan of PvP to begin with. While it certainly has its good points, Watch Dogs just ends up feeling like a mediocre game among an ever-expanding sea of similar-quality titles. I’m glad that I sat down to experience it for myself, but now I just want Ubisoft to hurry up and get Assassin’s Creed Unity out even more.