I Finally Finished: Watch Dogs (The First One)

And now I’m going to write about it.

I really shouldn’t be writing a review like this right now since I busted the spacebar on my keyboard and writing long form articles would only be slightly less obnoxious if I was doing so with all ten fingers broken. But Amazon takes two days to deliver and I’m impatient. I finally got done playing Watch Dogs because Watch Dogs: Legion is here and what better time to start the series than now? I have owned Watch Dogs for probably four years, I just never got around to playing it.

It’s safe to say that Ubisoft has created a style that by now you either love or you hate, or you got tired of it in the tenth rendition a decade ago. When you play an Ubisoft game you know exactly what you’re getting into; a story surrounded by hours and hours of busywork. For plenty of people that’s fine, for others it is annoying padding. Me I fall somewhere in the middle where I feel obligated to finish the side tasks and more often than not that obligation turns into contempt.

But Watch Dogs follows Aiden Pearce, a man with nothing to lose after a failed assassination attempt leads to the death of his niece. He lives in the sprawling Chicago of the past since the game came out in 2014 and it takes place in 2012 shockingly. Aiden must work with his criminal undergrounds buddies to weave together the web of who ordered the hit and why. He has to hack and utilize the power of ctOS, the city-wide surveillance system, in order to do that.

I really like the attention to detail by having Aiden’s visage blurred out on all ctOS cameras.

Watch Dogs is one of those games where you definitely have to take everything at face value otherwise they just seem like stupid video game gimmicks. You open up more of the map by hacking ctOS access points (Ubisoft towers) which reveal the game’s various mini-games. And there are a lot of side activities including getting drunk at the bar better than someone at the bar who challenges people to get drunk better. You get rewards and skill points for doing these things.

Hacking is a somewhat fluid motion (although I’m told it gets more fluid in later games) of hitting a button and watching something happen. It’s a very cinematic and impressive showing leading to moments where you’ll be in a high speed car chase and hit the button at just the right moment to hack traffic lights and cause an accident disabling the car chasing you. It’s a good show, and one that comes very simply since the game flags just the right time to hit the button.

The RPG system in Watch Dogs is preferable for a game like this since while you gain access to better toys the game never makes you feel underleveled for forging ahead with the main story. It’s not like Assassin’s Creed where stabbing someone in the neck with your dagger suddenly barely harms them because they’re five levels higher than you. It’s a matter of doing more things and faster with less cooldown.

There are online elements to Watch Dogs that you can shut off but I kept them on because the current crop of invaders is inept and a humorous distraction. You get opportunities to invade and be invaded which entails tailing the subject and downloading data or on the other end identifying your tailing party and killing them. It’s an option to test out your stealth skills and in my opinion it’s not hard to look into a crowd and assume the car driving on the sidewalk killing everyone in its path toward you might be the other player. You don’t lose anything of real value by turning this off.

Driving in Watch Dogs is very arcade-like where your cars feel firmly planted to the ground and you really need to beat the crap out of it just to see some visual damage. The driving tricks are fun at first but slowly become more tedious as the chase sequences become longer. Watch Dogs does that thing where it cheats and prolongs chases by just spawning vehicles at intersections in front of you. The handling of cars is fine even though it feels like AI cars are unfairly given more weight so they can nudge you off the road despite obvious size differences.

For the most part you have the option of going in guns blazing or taking the stealthy approach. Alternately you can take the Jigsaw Killer style and observe through security cameras as you blow up and terrify guards at the place you’re supposed to infiltrate. In many instances you can hack in and get the data you need without ever setting foot inside the building. There’s a good amount of variety to how you can play and the game doesn’t feel like it punishes you for choosing any specific path.

Also check out this great Michael Jackson dancer.

While Aiden might not be the best protagonist the cast of Watch Dogs is full of fantastical characters. You’ll meet up with everyone across the board from the punk hacker chick, the tech mogul turned dirty hippy, the soft-speaking mob boss, the corrupt mayor, and more. Everyone feels like they have their own lives and motivations in the massive futuristic city of Detroit’s past.

Playing a game six years after launch and seeing that some of the major momentum breaking glitches were never fixed is disappointing, but it is Ubisoft. I had several moments where the AI glitched out and the game refused to acknowledge that I had escaped, as well as moments where NPCs I’m supposed to walk with would lose their pathfinding. In another strange glitch the character I was supposed to be bugging would just randomly get killed. The fix was to shoot my gun in the surrounding area to scare people off.

Watch Dogs also suffers in my opinion from having too many functions bound to one key. This is especially problematic when you have to take down some guy in an enclosed space (and can’t kill them) and the “take down” key is the same as Aiden’s “do parkour” leading to problems. The cover system also randomly breaks from time to time leading to Aiden going into a dead sprint to make cover ten feet away in the opposite direction from the waist-high wall you were clearly pointed at and intending to take cover behind when you pushed the button.

In some cases the game’s quirks work toward your advantage. For instance in some of the tailing missions you can’t destroy the vehicle you’re downloading data from. You can however nudge that vehicle into a building and then block it from behind.

Watch Dogs falls into the same folder as many other Ubisoft games of late, that being something I’m glad I played but will very likely never play again. Not because the game is bad but because it’s so long and repetitive that I’ve more than had my fill after the first encounter and I’m ready to move on to other things. Thankfully you can get this game for next to nothing during any store sale so you won’t need to put much into it.