What's This?
Image: Ubisoft
2014-05-27 14:30:17 UTC
Watch Dogs stole the show at gaming conventions two years ago, and many gamers have looked to it as potentially the first game to exemplify the potential of the new PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles.
When it was delayed from its original holiday 2013 release window, gamers became suspicious that Watch Dogs wouldn't live up to the hype. Now it's here — out Tuesday for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC and Wii U.
The premise is fresh. The city of Chicago has deployed ctOS, an operating system that runs all of the city’s utilities and gadgets, from cellular networks to transportation infrastructure to power grids. You play Aiden Pearce, a tech-savvy street thug whose botched job leads to a family tragedy and a quest for revenge. Mix that in with some cutting edge graphics and it sounds like a strong offering.
So are the gameplay and story as exciting as the premise and tech?
Your phone can give you details about everyone around you in Watch Dogs.
Guns or gadgets?
Like many top-tier, triple-A games, Watch Dogs combines elements from popular ones that came before it. In this case, the relatives are Grand Theft Auto, Deus Ex and iPad stealth game Republique.
Most missions task you with breaking into some enemy compound and stealing information from computers locked within. You can blast in with a machine gun, tearing through waves of guards until nothing stands but you and your objective. Or you can sneak in, using silenced weapons, distracting gadgets and melee takedowns to misdirect or incapacitate guards quietly as you work your way in.
If neither of those classic video game approaches appeals to you, you can, in many cases, do much of your work without even entering the compound. Using your mobile phone, you can hack into the security systems and hop from device to device until you reach your end goal. Many missions demand that you use a mixture of these techniques.
This choice often gives you some control over what you want your Watch Dogs experience to be. That said, there were a few missions in which I stealthily took out all the guards, only to be assaulted by waves of reinforcements as if I'd triggered the alarm. This was usually so the developers could throw high octane action set pieces at the player.
The city of Chicago in Watch Dogs.
It’s sometimes frustrating when you don’t get to choose, but there's variety if nothing else. Thankfully, all three gameplay styles are at least as fun as they are in any other games. The hacking is probably the best in any game outside of Republique.
Outside the missions, you’ll be driving around an ultra-detailed, open-world recreation of Chicago. Your hacker phone allows you to manipulate everything in the city, from the bridges over the Chicago River to individuals’ cell phones to the city’s entire power grid.
Even if you’re tired of open-world driving games, these new abilities should draw you back in. It's simply way too much fun to use the city to your advantage in this way. Everything about Watch Dogs’ basic gameplay feels fantastic.
Chi-town hustle
Watch Dogs is set in Chicago, so as with Infamous Second Son and its Seattle setting, you have to give it props for picking an interesting city that doesn’t get much attention in video games.
As a former Chicago native, I can assure you that the touristy parts — the downtown Loop area, Navy Pier and Millennium Park — are recreated with such eerie accuracy that I became homesick playing it.
Of course, a few small details are off. For example, downtown is dotted with street vendors and newsstands, which are illegal in the city of Chicago. The farther you travel from the city center and into the neighborhoods where Chicagoans really live, the more dissimilar from reality it becomes. You encounter a lot of hills and even mountains — both things that just don’t exist in the plains of Illinois.
But some creative license is perfectly acceptable, and the scrappy, Midwestern, sometimes corrupt and violent spirit of the city is captured completely.
There are numerous side activities, some of which use the city in fun, interesting ways. There’s a Foursquare-like side game whereby you can check in to various tourist hot spots for rewards and tidbits on Chicago history. You can even become mayor!
The Chicago of Watch Dogs is rivaled only by Grand Theft Auto V’s LA analog Los Santos in realism. Just the chance to explore it and play with its moving parts can justify the purchase of the game.
The only complaint you can level against the game is that the visual fidelity could be better. While the effects and art assets are great, the game runs at 900p resolution on the PS4 and 720p on the Xbox One. We saw Infamous Second Son pull off 1080p with a similarly detailed city, so we can’t give Ubisoft a pass on missing that mark.
The problematic tale
Watch Dogs touches on some prescient themes: unchecked government surveillance, inner city violence, internet hacker culture, and Chicago’s history of political corruption. There's a lot in the story to get you thinking.
Unfortunately, the game doesn't go beyond touching on those themes, because it's transfixed by a poorly executed narrative about revenge. Player character Aiden Pearce is selfish, inconsistent, and unrelatable. Thanks to thin characterization and mediocre voice acting, his quest never rang true to me. He’s so preoccupied with bringing justice to those who brought tragedy to his family, he never stops to consider the obvious fact that the blame really lies with him. The script travels there on a couple of occasions, but the idea never sticks.
That’s the lesser of the two major problems with the story, though. Female characters are repeatedly killed, enslaved or captured to further motivate Aiden’s journey. It would be one thing if it happened once, but it is pervasive throughout the experience. There are other red flags in the dialogue and in the fringes of the story. Plus, Aiden’s willful ignorance as to the consequences of his actions for the women around him doesn’t help.
Given that the treatment of women is one of the most active conversations in the gaming industry today, it's unsettling and disappointing to see a game rest on such cliched tropes. It's hard not to read the prominence of those storytelling devices in Watch Dogs as lazy at best, or misogynist at worst.
The heart of the story is Watch Dogs’ weakest link, despite some strong supporting characters and themes. For some players, this will just be something they can ignore. For others, the weak central character and his and the writers' treatment of women will be too off-putting to handle.
A new approach to multiplayer
If there’s been one big trend in console games over the past couple of years, it's that the lines between single-player and multi-player are blurring. Watch Dogs is the best example of this yet. The multiplayer is awesomely entertaining.
Most game modes sound like they’re straight out of Grand Theft Auto: You’re matched up against a few players to fight over an objective or race in the game’s open world. The addition of the hacking skills make those modes feel completely new, though, and you’ll never stop laughing at the crazy situations those wild cards generate.
There’s one mode that fits into that trend of merging gameplay, simply called “online hacking”. At any time, your character’s world could be invaded by another player. He or she has to find you and hack your phone from a few feet away, then stay hidden until the data finishes downloading.
If you find that player before the download completes, you have to kill him or her before any escape can be made. Alternately, you can queue up to invade someone else's game instead.
The cost of losing doesn't really impact the single-player game, so you can ignore this if you want. But that'd be a mistake, because the cat and mouse game is one of the best things Watch Dogs brings to the table.
There aren’t a ton of deep progression options for multiplayer — just enough to get you interested — but that’s okay, because no two encounters with another player will ever be the same. That’ll keep you coming for more seamless online antics.
Watch Dogs
The Good
Every gameplay element, from driving to shooting to hacking to stealth, feels fantastic • Features a large, stunning recreation of the city of Chicago for players to explore • Inventive multi-player that creates all sorts of emergent fun • Tons of satisfying side mission content will keep you entertained for weeks
The Bad
The protagonist is an unrelatable, paper-thin character who can’t keep us invested in the story • Uses female characters as expendable plot devices to fuel the male protagonist’s revenge • A few story missions strip agency from stealth-minded players to force scripted action set pieces
The Bottom Line
Watch Dogs’ creative blending of proven ideas and excellent execution make it one of the best and most inventive open-world games in years — it's just too bad the premise is marred by a poorly written protagonist and backwards story elements.
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