Contrary to popular belief, Watch Dogs is not about canine time-telling devices.
Phooey. However, it is the latest
game from Ubisoft, who you probably don't know as the makers of Assassin's Creed and a particular dopey version of DRM called Uplay that they force down
their PC users’ throats (Dear Ubisoft, I use Steam, which already has DRM. Well
built DRM. Useful DRM, not shoehorned into games DRM. DRM that many, many
people have gotten used to. Please, just let me play your games without this
extra wrench in the gears, mucking things up. Thanks).
I have been told that Watch Dogs is much like Assassins
Creed with hacking, or similar to Grand Theft Auto (the game, not the activity)
with hacking. I wouldn't know, as I haven't tried either (the games, not the
activities. Though come to think of it, I haven't tried those activities
either). But the gameplay does have a lot of hacking. As well as driving, shooting,
and hitting people in the noggin with a collapsible baton.
The story centers around Aiden Pearce (the character
player). 11 months ago, he and his partner, Damien Brenks, were pulling a
hacking job in the Merlaut Hotel. Aiden was in the hotel, hooking up to the
wireless, while Damien was offsite, doing the actual hacking. After they got
about $140,000, another hacker broke in. The police started to converge, and
after Aiden sees a blurry image of ... something, he bails. However, the blurry
image is enough to get a hit put on him that results in the death of his six
year old niece. Now 11 months later, he finds the hitman who cause the car
crash.
The story is kind of weird. You'd think information from the
hitman would lead somewhere, but it doesn't. During the tutorial, you give the
hitman (Maurice) to Jordi, a fixer you're familiar with and have paid a lot of
money to. Jordi's job (besides watching your back occasionally) is to torture
Maurice to give up information, but it doesn't really work. Instead, a second
plot intrudes and takes up most of the game. That eventually branches off to a
third plot (mostly conspiracy) that actually settles the first plot, while
dealing with the last of the second plot ends the game.
Aiden himself is pretty good at hacking, but it turns out
he's also good at driving, good at shooting, good at sneaking, good at
everything needed to accomplish this game. And it's not just because I was in
control of him (in fact, I was pretty bad at driving, until I got the hang of
it. Even then, I wasn't that great). Aiden is recognized in game as good at this stuff. How did he get so good at it? Most
games give an excuse as to why the player character is great at the stuff in
the game. Shepard was part of N7 (Navy SEALS in space). Adam Jensen was
ex-SWAT. Aiden? He's just a guy who's excellent at everything.
Gameplay mostly consists of hacking things, driving things,
shooting people, and hitting people. Hacking is most common, and easy to use.
Simply hold 'Q' for half a second, and you hack whatever your cursor is pointed near. Point it at someone’s phone, and you can hear their conversation, or see
their text messages, or simply just a display of their bank information (which
you can then steal at the nearest ATM). Hacking traffic lights causes green
lights at every intersection, and everyone pulls out, causing pile-ups. Every.
Single. Time. Hacking cameras allows you to look for things you wouldn't be
able to see from your vantage point, even other cameras. A few missions (both
main and side) require you to hack a chain of cameras. Later, you gain the
ability to start and stop the trains, explode transformers or just any boxes
marked 'Explode', street bumpers, road spikes, and even steam pipes under
roads, causing massive explosions. It's one of the better ways of getting
people off your back if their tailing your vehicle, shooting at you. And of
course, one of the very fun things to do is hack the grenades in peoples' pockets. Sometimes they get it out, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they get it
out, just in time to fling it in the general direction of somebody else.
Whoops.
Most of the game is divided up into missions, either main
missions or side missions. The rest of the game is sort extraneous stuff. The
side missions consist of a bit of variety. Sometimes there'll be gang hideouts,
in which I have to sneak in and knock out the head of the gang (not kill him,
for some reason). Some of them consist of Convoys, in which I have to knock out
someone who's travelling with two other cars, and all of them are usually
filled with people who are shooting at me. I didn't do any of those, because I
failed about six times at the one I tried. Four times I died, and twice I
accidentally killed the guy I was only supposed to knock out.
There's also Fixer Contracts, which usually involve stealing
cars. Sometimes it's to provide a distractions, leading to long car chases
along a fixed route. Sometimes it's just to provide a nice car to someone for
free, so it involves driving carefully (i.e. slowly) so the car doesn't get too
dinged.
The other thing that comes up are imminent crimes. While
scanning other people (everyone's profile will pop up with a random fact about
them), I'll get a notice pointing me to a location where a crime is about to
take place. If I go there and look around, I'll eventually spot a potential
victim or perpetrator (their faces will be in a yellow boxes. Most people are
white boxes, hackable phones people will be blue, and enemies are red). If I
wait out of sight, eventually the crime will start to take place. At this
point, I can intervene and clobber the perp on the head, increasing my
reputation. Reputation is nice, because it stops people from calling the cops
when they see me. Reputation can be lowered by injuring or killing civilians,
something that happened with alarming frequency whenever I was involved in a
car chase, so I was always going to the crimes and intervening so I could raise
my rep.
A lot of the extraneous stuff is heading to specific
locations and hacking whatever's there. Mostly it's usually a CTOS box (CTOS is
the system Chicago hooked
everything up to so it runs right) that I hack into, but sometimes it's a door.
Usually doors are locked, and I have a white line I follow around varying
obstacles until I find the switch to hack. Sometimes CTOS boxes are locked like
that too, so I end up wandering into the neighbor's yard to hack a switch on
the back of their house, allowing me to open the garage three doors down. How
does that work? Hacking cameras is very useful here, because sometimes the
switch is somewhere I can't see. I might have to platform a bit to get there,
as well. Once I've hacked in, occasionally I'll have to play a "Connect
the signal" minigame where I rotate pieces of electronics (or code?) until
it connects to where it needs to go. Anyway, if it's a box I've hacked, usually
it just shows something from a camera in someone's apartment. Some of these
scenes are funny. Some are perverted (nothing explicit is ever shown, just
implied). Some are sad. Some are creepy. Mind you, I guess the fact I'm
watching it also creepy.
The main story missions are usually made up of these types
of things too. Go here, hack this. Go here, knock out this person, hack their
phone. Go here, knock out this convoy. If you're good at the side missions,
you'll be good at the main game. Of course, there are also some completely
random extraneous stuff too. You can play poker (and cheat by hacking cameras,
or analyzing biometrics), you can play chess, you can play AR games, or even
drinking games. There was a drinking game as part of the main story missions,
but that was the only one I did.
Most of the game is pretty good, but there are a few bad
things about it. Firstly, the cops. Police are incredibly annoying and
persistent. In most chases, they'll bring in cars and a helicopter. If I outrun
the cars, there's still the helicopter around. If I step out of the car to hack
the helicopter (because the camera won't pan up that far in a vehicle, and
sometimes not on foot), disabling it for a few seconds, then the cars catch up.
By the time I've outrun them, the chopper is back up and running. If I'm not in
the fastest cars, the cops are just fast enough to catch up to me (but not get
in front of me) and run me off the road, usually into a tree (which stops me
dead, unlike lamp posts or streetlights, which simply fall over while denting
my car. Too much denting and my car handles badly. Even more, and it'll give up
the ghost). So escaping from the police is a rather frustrating experience,
usually dependent on luck rather than skill.
Secondly, the knocking people out thing. If the target is
stationary (like gang hideouts), it's possible to sneak up on them, or at least
pick off enough other gang-members elsewhere that the final confrontation isn't
too bad. If they're part of a convoy, though, there's eight people shooting at
me while I try to run up and knock out person out.
Games like Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Dishonored have
ranged non-lethal options. DE:HR even as a tranq Rifle, for extra range. But in
Watch Dogs, you need to be right up next to the person, which often means they
and their cohorts are putting many bullets into you as you try to get that
close (hint: Aiden does not survive many bullets).
Thirdly are the bodies. You can’t really do anything with
them. Either unconscious or as corpses, bodies stay where they drop, which is
annoying, because if anyone comes across them, they get freaked out. Civilians
may call the police (or take pictures with their phones), but gangs will be put
on alert. I hate to keep harping on what other games do better, but DE:HR let
you drag bodies around to hide them in closets, and Dishonored actually had the
body fall into your arms by default if you snuck up behind someone and knocked
them out, letting you easily hide them in … well, more closets. In both games,
guards patrol a lot, but they really should check the closets. I can imagine a
tidal wave of bodies falling out on top of the poor sap who opened the door.
Creating another body, I supposed.
Lastly are the save points. This game goes by checkpoints
with no saving. A lot of other games do that too, but it can get annoying if
I’ve perfectly cleared out a level of a parking garage, alerting no one. It’d
be a great time to save, lest I set of the alarm one floor up and wind up in
another shootout. Unlike Jesus, I can’t save, so if the shootout goes
sideways, I’ll have to restart the whole parking garage again. And yes, this
totally happened, and nearly put me off gang hideouts for the rest of the game.
Other than that, the only other annoyance I found was story
related. Near the end of the game, one of the main characters dies for what the
writers thought was a good reason, and for what I thought was a pretty stupid
one. I guess the writers thought that someone should die for the emotional gutpunch, but I just though “there was figuratively no reason for that to happen.”
I should make specific mention of the soundtrack to the
game. Occasionally, you can hack peoples’ phones and snag a song off of them,
which can then be selected when you’re driving. There’s an achievement for
getting 23, but there are actually a lot more songs than that. Not all of them
were to my taste, but the breadth of selection means there’s something for
everyone. I hadn’t heard “Invisible Man” by anyone but Ghoti Hook, so it was
cool to see the original done by The Vindictives.
So, I was all prepared to give this game an 8 on 10, because
of the annoyances. But then I played the last two missions, which were chock full
of police, and so frustrating I had to knock it down to a 7. There’s a
difference between challenging (like a good math problem) and a just plain difficult
(like a terrible math problem that you don’t understand, because the teacher
didn’t explain the concepts to you, and you’re actually a sociology major, and
are in the wrong class. Whoops). It’s not a bad thing to put frustrating things
in your game (well, okay, it is), provided they are optional. They should not
be jam-packed into the climax of the game.
So, 7 out of 10. Pretty good game, full of things to do, but
be prepared for some frustrating experiences, with excellent music to soothe
you through the hard times.
