When Watch_Dogs was revealed in 2012, it was unlike anything gamers had ever seen. The brief glimpse of the open-world rendition of Chicago looked like the game had a real, living environment for you to explore. Subsequent video previews and gameplay demos only added to the anticipation. It seemed that the player was free to do anything, and the world would organically present exciting opportunities to shoot, drive, and use the revolutionary hacking mechanic. The near-future plot centered around governments digitally spying on its citizens struck a nerve in people as we were dealing with the same issues. It was a truly next-gen experience.
What we got instead was an everyday action game might have impressed me if it were released two years ago. The visuals were nothing like the jaw-dropping first gameplay demo, and the mechanics could have been copy/pasted from a plethora of similar games. The promising open-world turned out to be a generic city environment with side quests and mini games for when you're not playing through the story. Those "organic" crime-fighting opportunities turned out to be optional side-missions that pop up on your HUD every couple of minutes. I realized about halfway through the campaign that Watch_Dogs could have been a much better game had it not aligned itself with the genre it thinks it can improve upon. By being an open-world action/shooter game, Watch Dogs stacks itself against the likes of Grand Theft Auto, Saints Row, and Sleeping Dogs. It was destined to lose from the start.
I felt at first that maybe I was being too hard on Watch Dogs, because I was blinded by the insane hype that had been building up since E3 in 2012. It obviously never could have delivered on what people were expecting after that bombshell reveal, and hype had died down significantly in the wake of the new console generation, and the six-month delay of the game. The graphics were downgraded significantly since the reveal, but a modder quickly found files in hidden in the game that restore many of the effects and tweaks that were seen in 2012. The declining quality of gameplay videos and trailers leading up to release brought people back down to earth. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that Watch Dogs fails to deliver in a number of crucial areas to make it a good action game.
The story of Watch Dogs revolves around Aiden Pearce, a thief and a hacker who gets caught in a mysterious criminal scheme while robbing the bank accounts of Chicago's most affluent citizens. The ringleader orders a hit (well, not really a "hit," more of a "spook him by firing a gun at his moving car" job) on Pearce, that ends up with his niece dying in a car accident. I don't really know who this girl was, since she only gets brief mentions through lousy dialogue and flashbacks, so the game failed to grab me in its opening sequence. This girl, who I don't know or care about, and isn't even directly related to the protagonist, acts as the driving mechanism to the story. I don't even remember her name.
Aiden himself is a dry, boring man with fewer character traits than nieces. I was astounded that a game that at one point appeared so ambitious and intelligent could serve me up a mannequin with a gun as a protagonist, in an era of games that feels so beyond the cliches of family death, revenge, and betrayal. At the end of the game, one character describes Pearce as a man who does a good job at hiding his personality from everyone. I was inclined to agree. During the campaign, Aiden ruins the lives of his remaining family, kills countless men for revenge I don't want him to have, and gets people he cares about killed. The worst part is that in the end, he's pleased with himself. Aiden is a character who has no place in the new progressive generation of gaming.
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| Mods make the game look great, especially at night. |
The mechanics of Watch Dogs at least feel decent on most fronts. Shooting is fun, and large-scale firefights can get pretty exciting. The mission structure leaves weapon shops pointless, since you are given a new, more powerful weapon in almost every campaign mission. Driving feels solid and balanced, but I can't say the same for the collisions or vehicle selection. Some side missions and mini games are pretty fun, including the exceptionally unique Digital Trips, easily my favorite part of the game. However, something can be taken from the fact that the game needs giant robot spiders and zombie car massacres to be at least entertaining. The game may play well, but it doesn't do anything better than similar action games have done for years.
That leaves us with Watch Dogs' last trick up its sleeve. The one edge it could possibly have over the competition: hacking. The Chicago in this game is completely under the control of a city-wide operating system, and Aiden Pearce has access to all of it. Street lights, steam pipes, bridges, cameras, cell phones, ATM machines, and so on. This can be used to your advantage in a number of ways both in missions and when roaming the city. Use cameras to survey a heavily guarded area and mark enemies you need to sneak past. Jam their radios or cause a massive blackout to slip by under the cover of darkness. When the action picks up, you can cause an electrical box to explode, hitting an enemy behind cover with shrapnel. During car chases with enemies or police, you can change stoplights to cause a massive crash and stop your pursuers, or blow a manhole cover off the street and disable their ride.
The hacking in Watch Dogs is a neat addition, but I can't help but feel like it wasn't capitalized on by the developers. This central feature, when used alongside all of the other familiar gameplay options, make it feel like a gimmick that was tacked on, and used to a lesser effect. A lot of the opportunities I had to hack something to my advantage felt like something that doesn't dramatically change the way I play the game. Why do I have to use my cell phone to blow a steam pipe an enemy is next to when I could just shoot it? All of this is what lead me to realize that an open-world action game was not the best path this game, or the developers, could have taken.
Ubisoft is no stranger to stealth. They defined modern 3D stealth games with the Splinter Cell franchise over a decade ago, and then made Assassin's Creed, easily one of the most successful franchises of the last gaming generation. I can understand that they needed more diversity in their catalog, and didn't have a game of this variety, but I couldn't help but feel like Watch_Dogs could have been much better a more linear, story-driven stealth game. Take away all of the heavy firepower, make smarter enemies, put them in closed-off, diverse locations, and encourage stealth and you could have a really unique game.
Almost every new game has an open world, dynamic gameplay, and lots of player freedom, but that doesn't mean anything if there nothing fun to do with all that freedom. The hacking mechanic could easily have been expanded upon, and better integrated into the gameplay. Making smaller, more diverse environments could encourage players to think smarter with how to use technology to their advantage. The Orwellian government spying story could have been a great and unique angle, but was brushed aside in favor of the cheesy revenge quest.
Instead, Watch Dogs is just another mediocre action game. There were many like it before, and there are countless more to come. It does some things well, and some things poorly. Nothing about it is remarkable in any way. It will probably win a couple Game of the Year awards, but most will have forgotten about it by then. It upsets me, getting excited for a game like I did, and being so let down. I don't feel burned by anyone, and I only have myself to blame for that. The greatest lesson I learned from all this is to be smarter and realistic with whenever I want to get on the hype train again.
I guess I need to give it a score now. I haven't done a legit review on this blog yet, so I should explain myself. I'm going to score games on 20-point scale. Games can score up to a 10/10, in increments of half a point.
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