MeltingComet's Watch Dogs review

This game shined for me during some sequences: The stealth (Which, yes, was a tad easy), gang spot takeovers, and convoys. The problem is, you have access to all of those just a few hours into the game. Clean all that up and you're left with some very bad driving and annoying movement controls.

I want to like the game so much but I never got around to beating it. Beyond a couple of bad points, the game is fairly solid but it doesn't hold me at all.
I actually want to get back around to it some day.

Edit: In fact, I remember getting it to scratch the GTAV itch. W_D was on sale and gTAV was still 60$+the mandatory shark cards. I got GTAV several weeks later and W_D didn't scratch the itch anymore, not with a proper GTA available.

This is a pretty accurate account of what the game is about. I was going to get around to reviewing this game at some point, but I think now you've pretty much covered everything I would say.

I think people are a little hard on this game though; there is an overall consensus that it's a fun game (even if it is uninspired), and that's what games are for, so Ubisoft managed a victory on that front.

The only thing the really stuck out and bothered me about this game (aside from technical issues, like the awful driving) was how Aidan Pierce was a highly unbelievable character. You touched on that in your review a little bit; he is kind of a disturbed hypocrite at the core, and that's a weak place for the primary protagonist to be in; but further, the player can make Aiden stomp around Chicago with a grenade launcher and kill random people for fun if they want to, yet the story will still pigeon-hole you into this idea that Aidan is a noble vigilante even if he's a bit troubled.

He's also a bit larger-than-life. Hackers typically tend to be nerdy, sedentary shut-ins who would rather be behind a keyboard than go outside, and yet Aidan has the constitution of a pro athelete, he's a master of parkour, he's an expert at hand-to-hand combat, has the skills of a race car driver, and apparently is skilled with military-grade weaponry. Who the hell has time to be all of these things at once?

I really, really did not like Aidan. I got the game near release and was one of the first people to meme him out the gate, editing an image macro of him on his phone that said something akin to "Noble Vigilante - Steals 3,000 dollars from a kidney donor" considering you can siphon money from EVERYONE.

LOL... No kidding.

I wrote a guide for the game, available right here on this site, and enjoyed it immensely. Yes, even the driving. I liked it more than just about anybody, I think, even after playing through a bunch of extra content that most people didn't touch.

I'm definitely psyched for the upcoming sequel, but I can admit that Watch_Dogs wasn't perfect by any stretch. I just feel like it became popular to hate the game and that made people dig deep to find things to hate about it, or to exaggerate how offensive some of its weaknesses were.

To be absolutely clear, I'm NOT saying this review or anyone in the feedback topic here is guilty of that (actually, the discussion here has been terrific), but I definitely did see it happening around the Internet at large, close to the game's release. Sometimes, I wonder why a lot of people can't just have fun with games anymore.

Side note: when I played Watch_Dogs, I had previously played Sleeping Dogs, and to me the two games had a lot of similarities, more than the similarities between Watch_Dogs and Grand Theft Auto V. And wouldn't you know it? I also liked Sleeping Dogs quite a lot. Amazingly, I'm not even all that big on open world games. I guess the genre just really worked for me around that time. I even made GTA V the first in the franchise that I bothered to finish. How did I have so much time?

I agree with you, Jason. The mob mentality surrounding video games is getting a bit ridiculous. It's the reason I don't post reviews on Steam much anymore; the amount of negativity I get every time I hold a contrary opinion is hardly worth it.

I definitely agree with that. Then again, I've noticed an inability to accept that others have contrary opinions almost anywhere on the internet. Even here. (It's just too bad we don't still have the Disqus comments. Those were hilarious in a soul-blackening kind of way.)