An unfortunate example of how the hype machine creates unrealistic expectations
User Rating: 7 | Watch Dogs XONE
At the outset I want to say that I most certainly enjoyed my time with Watch_Dogs. It's a unique game in a lot of ways, and the setting is extremely convincing; however, as a character drama and a functional interactive experience, the Ubisoft hype machine painted a picture of grandiosity that the game was simply unable to fulfill. The result is a mixed bag that I would have been much kinder to if I wasn't bombarded with its impending shakeup of the game industry. The game follows a hacker named Aiden Pierce, a mixed bag of a character that is essentially what all the basement-dwellers on 4chan absolutely hope they could be someday. He's kind of the coalesced power fantasies of a lot of people who claim to be in the hacker collective "Anonymous," but actually aren't. He is on the warpath to avenge the death of his niece by collecting information from the fully-integrated CtOS system- a unified operating system that connects all the city services of Chicago onto a single network. One little-known fact about the game is that Ubisoft consulted heavily with Kaspersky Labs on how the hacking gameplay would work, and while a lot of it is streamlined and simplified for gameplay purposes, most of the language used in the game is quite accurate, if a bit abridged. Aiden uses a customized smartphone to hack traffic lights, raise bridges, burst steam pipes to take out pursuing vehicles, and so on. As the story goes, his sister (who's daughter is the niece for which Aiden seeks revenge) disapproves of Aiden's lifestyle as a vigilante because she believes that it puts her and her mute son in danger. Aiden shrugs off that possibility only to wind up in a situation where his sister is indeed kidnapped by a psychotic former associate of his. Oh joy... What follows is a narrative that can't settle on a tone, and seems to be wildly out of order. About fifteen hours into the story, Aiden kills someone and then acts horrified at what he has become, a murderous vigilante. Unfortunately, he has been carving an unfeeling swathe of death and carnage through the city for days now with not so much as a batted eye. What starts as a journey to uncover the identity of who ordered a hit on him that resulted in the death of his young niece becomes a series of "go here, do that" missions for his ex-partner Damien in order to free his sister. Sure enough, both goals manage to cross at some point and Aiden realizes that there are people close to him that are connected to the conspiracy... as if we didn't already guess that. The reveal is half-baked and uninteresting, and made me feel like the game thought I was kind of an idiot. A bit later on, when Aiden is spiriting his sister from the city in an effort to protect her and her son from the shitstorm descending on them, she acts surprised and absolutely wounded when she infers that Aiden is the infamous vigilante of Chicago. Unfortuantely, that's not exactly the touching moment it could have been, because Aiden's name and photograph had been circulating on the news and huge billboards all over town for days, and I find it ludicrous to assume that she was completely oblivious to that. What starts as a game about a hacker seeking redemption quickly devolves into a gang warfare plot and culminates in a number of Michael Bay-esque action sequences that throw a wrench in the careful pacing that seemed to fall into place in the middle of the game. From a gameplay perspective, I believe that the systems in place are quite good. The gunplay is tight and feels snappy, the driving feels solid while being loose enough for nice drifts around turns, and the hacking adds some nice tactical opportunities to gunfights and car chases. For instance, you can hack security cameras to get a bird's eye view of an area and find the locations of enemies, then use the line of sight from the cameras to cause junction boxes to explode or remotely detonate a grenade in the pocket of an enemy. The game operates on line-of-sight for hacking, so there are some really fun puzzle sections where you have to find out how to "ride the cameras" from one area to another in order to hack a specific item. There are optional side objectives like hacking to CtOS towers to gain full control over an area's hackable assets, and they act as fun climbing and environmental puzzle sections. One thing that was a really nice touch was the addition of the "profiler" system. When your smartphone is out, you can point it at almost any citizen in the city and get a basic rundown on them. Of course, this is meant to be a thinly-veiled social commentary on how the government collects massive amounts of private data, but it also gives a lot of context and soul to the passerby on the streets. It will cough up anything from their secret sexual fetishes to whether or not they are behind on student loan payments, and you can remotely hack many people to steal data from their phone or money from their bank account. It's an interesting mechanic that adds to the world-building. Another thing that's very well-integrated is the online functions. You can be invaded, similar to Dark Souls, where a player will invade you game to collect a bounty placed on your head if you inadvertently hack the wrong passserby on the street. This results in a fun game of cat and mouse where one player attempts to hack another and then stay close enough to finish the hack and then escape while the other player tries to hunt them down. There are also team-based games and other fun online diversions that are incredibly fun. Graphically, I think this game performs quite well, "even" on the Xbox One. While the game does play at a lower resolution, the frame rate stays quite smooth, except when finishing any sort of objective, when the game will stutter while loading new objectives (I also experienced this issue on PC). The game does have incredibly steep recommended specs for PC, but I didn't have too many issues getting the game running on mostly high and staying the high 50's as far as framerate. The city has an incredible amount of personality, and there are unique art assets everywhere. Sculptures at corporate office buildings, event tents on the docks, different assets for different neighborhoods... they all work together to make a very convincing world form a graphical perspective. It's all quite impressive. The audio is another area that deserves special attention. The voice acting is really spot-on for every character except Aiden himself, who delivers his lines with a flat monotone that just screams brooding internet dweller. The other characters are voiced incredibly well and they emote very convincingly. The facial animations sell this emotional content extremely well, and there are a number of standout performances during the main story. The sounds of cars are bit tinny, but they wind up well and sound varied. The weapons are a bit goofy sounding, but they echo well and deliver a satisfying punch. One area that kind of baffles me is the licensed music in the game, which is admittedly incredibly varied. There's jazz, blues, hip hop, electronica, rock, punk, and so on. The selection is oddly lopsided, with Wu-Tang and Kid Kudi juxtaposed with bizarre new-age punk music. It's all quite good, but it lacks the continuity of the excellent musical selection on offer in GTAV. One thing that I absolutely love about the audio in this game is that you can open the media app on your phone and play music any time when not in a mission, which is a nice touch. The original musical score while on missions also contains some excellent dubstep-ish tunes that set the cyberpunk tone really well. As a game, Watch Dogs performs well. As a complete experience, it falls short- and it falls short specifically because of Ubisoft's repeated insistence that the game was going to be better than sex. Their mammoth marketing machine drilled it into our heads for the last fifteen or so months that this was THE game that was going to justify the purchase of a next-gen console. This was THE game that was going to act as benevolent harbinger of the next-gen. It's a great game, but it's a great game in SPITE of Ubisoft's lofty claims, and certainly not because of them. it's a game that uses tired internet memes and pop culture references to sell itself as being hip with a particular crowd, and in doing so, it winds up as downright cringeworthy in some places. There is one moment in particular that made me grimace: your hacker bunker gets invaded and shut down by an elite hacker going by the handle "Defalt." He's a basement dweller in a hoodie and a goofy mouse mask, and after he waves into his webcam, the giant bank of screens on the wall reads "UB3R PWNAGE." That was bad enough. I quipped out loud to myself, "watch, I'll have to take him down later and he'll be a DJ in a dance club while wearing that mask." Yeah... that actually happens in the game. They made a hacker DJ that's supposed to be the in-game proxy of Deadmau5. I'll say this about the game. I haven't laughed that hard in a while.
