Ubisoft's latest open-world series puts players in the role of a hacker fighting crime as a vigilante in a city where everyone and everything is connected by technology. With the help of your trusty cellphone the world becomes your playground, allowing you to interact with various parts of the environment around you in new ways. You can do some nifty stuff, but unfortunately Ubisoft Montreal failed to come up with any new, inventive scenarios to capitalize on this. At the end of the day the game just boils down to another open-world experience filled with tailing missions and bland side-activities.
There's a lot of content here. However, I found none of it to be very interesting. The side-activities are dull and the story missions are the same chase and infiltration challenges we've seen time and time again. To make matters worse they rarely make good use of your cool hacking abilities. I do appreciate how outside of a few mandatory stealth levels you are given the freedom to approach objectives however you would like. Both the sneaky and guns blazing approaches feel great. Choosing to go all stealthy is where the hacker theme really shines. Systematically taking out enemies by hacking cameras from a distance and screwing with the environments is a lot of fun and encourages smart thinking and creativity. It's a lot like the Batman: Arkham games. Combat is smooth and even features a bullet time ability that feels ripped right from Max Payne.
This sort of brings me into my next point. You'll notice that Watch Dogs is borrowing from a lot of better games. You can feel traces of Grand Theft Auto in the world and even Ubisoft's own Assassin's Creed series in the very structure and activity design. This all leads to a sense of déjà vu and over familiarity that keeps Watch Dogs from ever really taking off. You've seen a lot of this before and it was better there. Especially since the game gets a lot of little things wrong. For example, driving is loose, awkward, and imprecise making chases and tail missions a pain. Getting chased by the police is a much too aggravating experience due to how annoyingly persistent they are and how long it takes to for them to loose interest once you finally due manage to slip out of their view. Oddly enough, there's also a reputation system that seems to serve no purpose at all. It's inclusion is a mystery that only seems to be in place because other open-world games have had them. Despite high production values and excellent work from the voice actors, the story is bland and uninteresting.
To go with the always connected theme the game carries, you have the ability to jump into multiplayer content at any time while playing. You can access this stuff from your phone or stumble upon it randomly while exploring. Like the rest of the side-content I gave it a try but just wasn't compelled to actually do any of it. That's the game's real problem. There's nothing that actually hooks you.
Ubisoft Montreal chose to stick to the standard open-world tropes. There are some good ideas here and fun moments, but the majority of my enjoyment came from just randomly walking around the incredibly detailed and well-made city and hacking people's implants for free stuff. The actual missions and challenges left me wanting as they usually failed to take advantage of the hacking abilities the game gifts to players. A shame, because when you are using them Watch Dogs can be pretty fun because that's when it's at it's most original. As it stands, this is an overly familiar experience that gives you cool hacking abilities and largely fails to make them feel special at all. It's not bad, but you simply have a lot of better options out there.
6/10
There's a lot of content here. However, I found none of it to be very interesting. The side-activities are dull and the story missions are the same chase and infiltration challenges we've seen time and time again. To make matters worse they rarely make good use of your cool hacking abilities. I do appreciate how outside of a few mandatory stealth levels you are given the freedom to approach objectives however you would like. Both the sneaky and guns blazing approaches feel great. Choosing to go all stealthy is where the hacker theme really shines. Systematically taking out enemies by hacking cameras from a distance and screwing with the environments is a lot of fun and encourages smart thinking and creativity. It's a lot like the Batman: Arkham games. Combat is smooth and even features a bullet time ability that feels ripped right from Max Payne.
This sort of brings me into my next point. You'll notice that Watch Dogs is borrowing from a lot of better games. You can feel traces of Grand Theft Auto in the world and even Ubisoft's own Assassin's Creed series in the very structure and activity design. This all leads to a sense of déjà vu and over familiarity that keeps Watch Dogs from ever really taking off. You've seen a lot of this before and it was better there. Especially since the game gets a lot of little things wrong. For example, driving is loose, awkward, and imprecise making chases and tail missions a pain. Getting chased by the police is a much too aggravating experience due to how annoyingly persistent they are and how long it takes to for them to loose interest once you finally due manage to slip out of their view. Oddly enough, there's also a reputation system that seems to serve no purpose at all. It's inclusion is a mystery that only seems to be in place because other open-world games have had them. Despite high production values and excellent work from the voice actors, the story is bland and uninteresting.
To go with the always connected theme the game carries, you have the ability to jump into multiplayer content at any time while playing. You can access this stuff from your phone or stumble upon it randomly while exploring. Like the rest of the side-content I gave it a try but just wasn't compelled to actually do any of it. That's the game's real problem. There's nothing that actually hooks you.
Ubisoft Montreal chose to stick to the standard open-world tropes. There are some good ideas here and fun moments, but the majority of my enjoyment came from just randomly walking around the incredibly detailed and well-made city and hacking people's implants for free stuff. The actual missions and challenges left me wanting as they usually failed to take advantage of the hacking abilities the game gifts to players. A shame, because when you are using them Watch Dogs can be pretty fun because that's when it's at it's most original. As it stands, this is an overly familiar experience that gives you cool hacking abilities and largely fails to make them feel special at all. It's not bad, but you simply have a lot of better options out there.
6/10