This review contains spoilers
Pretty competent open world game. The shooting and driving are both fine, and the stealth isn't amazing, but work as well as any other game in this style.
The whole hacking ability definitely gives it its own identity, but the implementation is a bit mixed. One one hand it can lead to a lot of unique abilities, particularly in car chases, and I have to give them credit for giving every single NPC their own scan data, and many of them have phone calls you can listen in to, just for fun (I'm sure there's some copy/pasted ones just due to the sheer amount, but I didn't notice it). Unfortunately this mechanic also leads to some of the more boring sections of gameplay, like jumping from camera to camera. The unlocking puzzles are decent, but definitely get very repetitive.
One of my favourite uses of the entire hacking theme is the end mission which not only has the enemy with the ability to use your powers to try to roadblock you, but even manages to create fake objective points so you need to try and follow the real ones.
The story wasn't particularly amazing, but to be fair I wasn't paying attention for a lot of it. My least favourite part was Aiden's voice. He has a very grating voice.
As in a lot of Ubisoft games they give you a ton of side activities, which you can completely ignore if you want, or use them to break up the pace of story missions. They do get a bit tiresome if you're going for 100%, but that's really on the player and I know not many people are as dumb as me to do that, so I having a bunch of stuff you can do when you want a break from the story is just a straight positive imo.
Online is also still surprisingly active, I was able to jump into any of the online modes very fast. I found the online fun enough, with some interesting ideas, but it's not enough to make me turn the game back on after beating it.
Overall I found Watch Dogs to be a fun and fresh, if not mind-blowingly innovative as you might expect, take on the open world, third person, cover shooting, car stealing genre. The weakest point is the story, which might not have even been that bad with some better voice acting from the main character.
The whole hacking ability definitely gives it its own identity, but the implementation is a bit mixed. One one hand it can lead to a lot of unique abilities, particularly in car chases, and I have to give them credit for giving every single NPC their own scan data, and many of them have phone calls you can listen in to, just for fun (I'm sure there's some copy/pasted ones just due to the sheer amount, but I didn't notice it). Unfortunately this mechanic also leads to some of the more boring sections of gameplay, like jumping from camera to camera. The unlocking puzzles are decent, but definitely get very repetitive.
One of my favourite uses of the entire hacking theme is the end mission which not only has the enemy with the ability to use your powers to try to roadblock you, but even manages to create fake objective points so you need to try and follow the real ones.
The story wasn't particularly amazing, but to be fair I wasn't paying attention for a lot of it. My least favourite part was Aiden's voice. He has a very grating voice.
As in a lot of Ubisoft games they give you a ton of side activities, which you can completely ignore if you want, or use them to break up the pace of story missions. They do get a bit tiresome if you're going for 100%, but that's really on the player and I know not many people are as dumb as me to do that, so I having a bunch of stuff you can do when you want a break from the story is just a straight positive imo.
Online is also still surprisingly active, I was able to jump into any of the online modes very fast. I found the online fun enough, with some interesting ideas, but it's not enough to make me turn the game back on after beating it.
Overall I found Watch Dogs to be a fun and fresh, if not mind-blowingly innovative as you might expect, take on the open world, third person, cover shooting, car stealing genre. The weakest point is the story, which might not have even been that bad with some better voice acting from the main character.