Watch Dogs (2014) by Ubisoft

Lots of Watch Dogs feels like the most phony-corporate depiction of techno-punk you can possibly imagine

If I could describe Watch Dogs as one thing, it would be the combination of Grand Theft Auto and Assassin's Creed.

That sounds awesome, right? So why isn't the game?

I typically enjoy open world games, but I'm a ridiculously huge Assassin's Creed fan. That being said, Watch Dogs bored me to tears. I've put hundreds of hours into 100%ing the Assassin's Creed games, but I just didn't feel the same drive to do so with Watch Dogs. The main issue I have with the game is that nothing feels interesting enough to spend time doing. I mean absolutely nothing. I didn't give a damn about the storyline, and none of the minigames or subquests ever rewarded me with anything that I felt like had any value. I was excited for a leveling system because I always felt like the AC series should have one, but even that doesn't give you anything of real substance to change up gameplay.

With the Assassin's Creed games I constantly felt like I was affecting the world around me. In ACII, for example, I felt a huge change in the cities as I progressed by clearing towers, making money and investing it, and gaining new equipment and wardrobes. Things like the constant rebuilding and enriching of my family villa, unlocking new costumes for Ezio, new character upgrades, and new items to use was what created the uncontrollable desire to keep playing. It was a Civilization-like addiction of "it's 12AM and I have work tomorrow? Damn... Well, I can do just one more bank deposit".

The main problem with Watch Dogs is just that none of that stuff exists. Everything feels completely arbitrary, like there was a producer hovering around the designers' desks repeatedly telling them to make sure that they had vigilante missions like Grand Theft Auto, or to make sure they had vantage points like Assassin's Creed. There's just no point to any of it. None of it affects the world or your character in any way that feels meaningful. And none of it felt cohesive at all. As a result the entire game feels like something patched together by a team of people that know nothing about game design. Like they put a bunch of popular titles on a wall and cherry picked certain features from them to throw into Watch Dogs.

It wouldn't be an Ubisoft game without some classic open world bugs

It's not a bad game, it's just a bland one. It's something that could have been saved and pulled along by a strong story with good characters, which is how I feel about BioShock Infinite (a game that, in my opinion, has poor gameplay design but becomes greater than the sum of its parts due to a great story, excellent characters, and amazing voice acting). Watch Dogs even has a great, pulled-from-the-newspapers theme regarding technological surveillance and privacy. But it completely fails to capitalize on any of it, making zero meaningful points about it. The characters are paper flat, boring, and in the case of Aiden Pearce, flat-out unlikeable to the point that they're actually dislikeable. How you fail that miserably in writing a protagonist is mystifying to me.

Add in the fact that it runs poorly on PC and you've really not got any reason to consider this. I will say that the game looks absolutely beautiful with the E3 2012 mod, but that's about all it's got going for it. The rest just feels like busywork.

Right now, basically all it is is a game that has the potential to turn out a great sequel. Aside from that, I'd steer clear of it.

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