Watch Dogs review: Who watches the watchmen?

Watch Dogs's fame was propelled into the stratosphere overnight by the hype generated with it's first showing at E3 2012 that blew people's minds. With it's compelling world, mind-blowing visuals and a unique premise, giving the world its first glimpse of what the next generation of gaming would be like. Years later, Watch Dogs is finally released and we finally get to find out whether it the messiah heralding the next generation or will it fall flat on its face, tripping on its own long trail of hype.

Surveillance state

Welcome to Chicago, a city controlled by one big operating system, ctOS, with a billion eyes, watching your every move, every mistake, every bite or every life you take. It's like a god in the city and a ghost in your home, one that's connected to your power, gas, traffic lights, cars and every other essential facet of your life.

So who watches the watch OS
Meet Aiden Pierce, a hacker turned vigilante after his niece becomes collateral damage when a shadowy figure orders a hit on him. Now Aiden is out to get revenge, armed with a tactical baton, lots of guns and a smartphone, that channels the entire might of ctOS through it. Though, he is not alone, there are other hackers out there, and not all of them are good guys.

The game starts of very slowly, and requires slugging it out the first few missions, before things start getting interesting, before stretching out in rolling ups and downs as you fall deeper down the rabbit hole. With the game sometimes trying to be clever and sophisticated like a Michael Mann movie with a bit of Michael Bay injected into it with mixed results.

It's not tight as a plot, but it is fun at it's upswings. Saved most part by it's eccentric and eclectic cast, that exist beyond black or white, with dark motives wrapped in the funny or dangerous. These elements make Aiden seem like a walking plot device, only existing in the world to be controlled by the player and to trigger fantastic, suave conversations with them.

Grand Theft Auto: Assassins Creed

With your Profiler on, just walking around Chicago is like invading privacy, one person at a time. You can see people's deepest secrets, their police records, what they do. You can listen in into their private conversations, hack their accounts to relieve them off some money, at least those who have too much of it. You can also see when crimes are about to happen and act fast to prevent it.

Watch Dogs is an open-world action adventure game. Meaning that you can go anywhere, do anything in the sandbox of Chicago and the surrounding countryside of Pawnee. You can traverse the map end to end in a jacked vehicle of choice or you can traverse on foot. Think of Watch Dogs as a very refined blend of Grand Theft Auto and Assassins Creed, polished to a mirror clean sheen. With an element of hacking thrown into the alloy.

There's a plethora of cars available for your driving pleasure, just command ctOS to unlock one for you and you can drive it into the sea if you wish. When on foot, Aiden can free-run across the city, jumping over cars, vaulting across gaps in a very "lite" version of Assassins Creed's trademark parkour.

The hacking is the icing on the cake and appears all over in the form of contextual button presses. If you're being chased by cops or mobsters, you can trigger exploding steam pipes under unsuspecting pursuers or turn a traffic signal green, causing a pileup and even raising barriers and bridges to cause mayhem. This makes the car chases a frantic barrel of fun, as you set up your traps with precise timing at high speeds.

What is annoying is the penalties of being a vigilante,which have to be there from a morality standpoint, but collateral damage is unavoidable sometimes. In the heat of a car chase, you cannot help suddenly drifting around a corner and mowing down a few passersby, which quickly erodes away your morality meter.

In a way, yes, the game cannot let you get away with killing the same people you swore to protect. On the other hand, maybe during car chases, the game could have thinned down the populace or something real-time.

On foot, encounters go beyond just shooting guns, which is good because handling guns is quite spotty in Watch Dogs. By creatively harnessing the power of hacking, you can actually go through each fight without firing a shot. In fact, there are some levels where you can stealthily gain your objective without killing at all. Just jumping from camera to camera.

However, the fun begins as you trigger various traps like overloading junction boxes, exploding steam grates to even remotely triggering explosives that the bad guys are carrying. The result is exhilarating, as you employ all your wits to take down your enemy who is spooked and confused, ready to run into your next carefully laid trap.

Combat in Watch Dogs is a bit weird. For an open world game, it limits your combat to one single contextual button, which you have to press when you're close to an opponent to perform one scripted take down. Likewise with the gunplay, where every gun except for the silenced pistol, tends to violently recoil. Thankfully, the stealth mechanics are a lot of fun.

In addition to the hacking and sneaking around, the game introduces a new game mode called car stealth. An interesting addition, as you have to moved through certain locked down sections in a car, avoiding heavy patrols, hiding in your car, lights and engine off, just like you see in the movies.

You're not the only with access to ctOS. There are other hackers either assisting you or out to get you. You also have the powers behind the operating system to worry about. For example, it's not as simple as escaping from the coppers by losing their trail. The police department initiates a ctOS scan which you have to actively dodge, lest the coppers pick up your trail again.

There's a lot to do in Chicago
Open world games are packed with stuff to do, and Watch Dogs has tonnes for you to do if you're not going about doing the missions. You can just go about hacking ctOS stations to increase your range. There are also gang hideouts you can infiltrate, as well as convoys of bad guys you can take down. Those are just few of the things you can do in Chicago.

Digital trips add a fun and mad element without ruining the experience. These alternate realities in a pill lets you go carmageddon in a demonized version of Chicago; stop cyborgs from taking over the city; save the city from a Terminator-like future where ctOS has taken over; jump on psychedelic flowers and commandeer a spider tank and wreak havoc and destruction. All of these immense fun.

In addition, there's the multiplayer aspects of the game, where at any point a player can invade your world and try to hack into your defences. You have to find him/her in a crowd and shut the hack down and eliminate him/her before he/she eliminates you. Likewise you can invade other's games. There are a few other multiplayer modes like racing, where every racer is a hacker. However, there have been a few problems in connecting to Ubisoft servers here, so it will be a small miracle if you actually connect.

If nothing else, you can just walk around the city and let the profiler let you know of any crimes.

Graphics

In the graphics department, Watch Dogs pulls out all the stops with drop-dead visuals. The game is best played on PS4 or a beefy PC with an Nvidia card; you can also enjoy it if you happen to be one of the few with an Xbox One.
In the game, the Windy City comes alive with sights, sounds and people, each character imbued with their own lives. The day-night cycle brings with it its own routines. People in parks doing their yoga in the mornings and joggers are present in the evening, but it's the night when the city is at it's most magnificent, bathed in neon and streetlamps, especially beautiful in the rains. It's when wind whips at Aiden Pierce's coat, as the raindrops pitter patter around, lengthening the reflections of the neon.

Watch Dogs wins big in the graphics and sound department, and will be one of the most beautiful open world games you have played, right up until Grand Theft Auto V for next gen comes out in a few months.

On that note: The PC version of the game has a few problems, especially in terms of frame-rate issues that Nvidia and Ubisoft should correct with a few updates. The current generation version on the PS3 is not recommended to get the best visuals; all the gameplay is intact, but the graphics are very toned down.

Should you buy it?
Watch Dogs is a really good game, but falls short of its hype, much like the first Assassins Creed. However, if you are not yet tainted by the hype machine or are willing to play Watch Dogs with an open mind, you will really have some fun. Over-engineered story aside, this is a fantastic looking game with excellent hack'n'drive mechanics that never seem to get old, and some great puzzle-like approaches to stealth-through-hacking make this game a fun play.