Watch Dogs (PC) review "Such hacking. Very Wow."

Watch_Dogs is a mixed bag of a game. There's a lot of unnecessary junk that doesn't need to be in the game, but it's in there because Ubisoft! But Watch_Dogs is really a decent example as to the problematic and disorganized development house that is Triple AAA gaming. You'll see why.

Watch_Dogs faces a huge identity crisis. It legit doesn’t know what it wants to be. A Deus-Ex clone in a open-world game? GTA with bad driving? A Ubisoft Sandbox game? The game feels so incoherent because of how poorly structured all of its game mechanics are. When it wants to play like a cool Deus-Ex game, the useless upgrades and level design make it seem otherwise. When it wants to be a open-world driving game like GTA? The driving is incredibly poor and the world itself is monotonous to go through.
What basically comes out of this huge identity crisis is that Watch_Dogs tries to be just OK at everything, and not great at anything. Its RPG Mechanics are half-baked and don’t do anything, its gunplay feels insanely average and has zero punch to it, its random side-activities are not really fun (but they’re functional). I can go on and on, but I think you’ve already gotten the point.

It doesn’t help that the game seems to be way too easy. The silenced weapons don’t have any limit, meaning you can just silently kill guards with a single headshot. It really made a lot of the supposed stealth sections easy, but that’s not to say I had to stealth them either. Protagonist Aidan feels like he has way too little HP, yet is somehow still indestructible due to it being really easy to gun down everyone with ridiculously powerful weapons. The game really could had worked out fine if it encouraged stealth, but it’s a lot more reliable (yet a lot less fun) to just shoot everyone with your massive 5-star weapons.

The big mechanic of the game, which is the (dank) hacking seems to heavily rely on whatever hackable objects and items are placed by the level designers. It’s cool, but it feels so underutilized because the level designers didn’t build a lot of the levels to encourage playing around with the hackables. Sometimes, you can remotely open doors and find passcodes by just remotely hacking. Other times, you have no room to work around with and have to solely rely on your OP weapons to get through the job.

The game has a lot of side crap to do. Whether or not it’s engaging is really up to the player, but it felt like unnecessary filler to me. There are stupidly easy and boring minigames to play, uninteresting courier/car stealth missions, and the typical checklist of Ubisoft Viewpoints, Towers, and etc. It’s ultimately not worth going for the 100%, as it becomes absolutely boring and monotonous.

Its story clearly takes a huge dive half way through as well. The story starts off surprisingly fine, with a interesting vigilante plot that actively poked fun at Aidan Pierce for being a hypocritical sociopath (and there’s an absolutely despicable villain that’s really well done at that point), but at the half-way mark, it trades all of that for stupid hacking hijinks and poorly timed betrayals and twists.



Its soundtrack is surprisingly decent, but its radio soundtrack is god awful. Unlike GTA, I found myself constantly trying to shut the radio off. Voice actors come off as either sounding dull or completely asleep, and the sound design is a absolute mixed bag.

The game’s visuals are honestly fine. It isn’t as visually amazing as the E3 demo but I didn’t expect it to be as such. The only thing that was really throwing me off were the character models, but otherwise, the textures and objects (especially when it’s raining) looks nice.

The PC’s optimization is certainly better than at launch, but it’s far from the best. The game would constantly stutter or eat up my CPU cores (I have a quad-core CPU and it only distributes most of its power to one of them, stressing out the entire computer). Performance is far from reliable, and when I was playing I noticed a lot of dips in framerate, which was annoying. Despite finishing it on PC, I later got myself a Xbox 360 copy of the game, because I really didn’t want to deal with the computer performance at that point.



I want to stress that Watch_Dogs is not a bad game. It’s just not an interesting game. Watch_Dogs is a game that tries to be fine for just about everybody, but in doing so makes for one of the most mediocre games I have ever played. The game is poorly designed and cluttered, has no idea what to do with its story and characters, and compromises so much of it's potential just so it can appeal to as many people as possible. It’s certainly not bad, but the game’s overall design just feels so... not there.

---

Pros:

---

The first half of the game has a surprisingly decent story that's interesting. The villain is actually pretty damn unlikeable, and because of the things he does, the tension really ramps up.

When the level design wants to permit it, hacking can really be strategic and make the game much more dynamic.

Chicago looks pretty nice and somewhat realistic.

For what it is, it's a fun timewaster to drive and screw around.

---

Nitpicks:

---

There's a lot of side-content, which is nice, but a lot of it is basically deadpan filler.

Radio soundtrack is absolutely garbage, but the in-game soundtrack is decent.

The leveling system is completely unnecessary.

The UI is slow and drab. The Smartphone menu is too slow to feel intuitive.

---

Cons:

---

The second-half of the story gets really stupid, swapping out the interesting "vigilante" story for stupid hacking heists and uninteresting plot points.

The entire cast of characters are either incredibly forgettable or are downright unbearable.

The gunplay feels boring, awful, and does not have a satisfying punch to it.

The stealth in the game is really good, but the game actively discourages it. Which is an absolute shame.

Watch_Dogs has no idea what kind of game it wants, and it's messy design shows that very clearly.

The game is far from a challenge, and Aidan (despite having low HP) can easily still tank down a lot of enemies in his path due to overpowered weapons and horrible enemy AI.

Watch_Dogs is a decent bargain-bin buy, but you could go with less average and boring choices.

Community review by MeltingComet (July 29, 2016) MeltingComet/Nikoback is a game developer, game reviewer, and speedrunner. You can find his work @ nikobackgames.weebly.com