Watch Dogs

Hey all, and welcome to my review of Watch Dogs, I just finished it and completed it 100% so I've gotten a taste of everything in the game. The story starts off with the protagonist "Aiden Pearce" interrogating a guy to find out who had ordered a hit on him, the same hit which sent his niece to the grave, and he's looking for vengeance. That's the gist of it I guess. The story in itself is very mediocre, nothing really grabbed my attention, and I found myself rushing through it just to finish it, I did not feel the progression of the story was interesting at all, completing it didn't exactly feel short, but more tedious than long.

First off, lets talk about what you can do in-game, by taking out your phone, you're able to scan the people in the streets to either hack their bank accounts and take their money (money that I really did not find a use for), or you can collect their music (music that I always shut off) or they can lead you to one of many repetitive side quests.

The side quests themselves are very similar to the story missions, they include fixer contracts, which vary between killing someone, racing through the city, or escaping the police. Other side quests include clearing out gang hideouts using the same methods all the time, or getting in the way of a criminal convoy to basically kill or knock down an enemy (as a warning). Overall, what I did for the gang hideouts as well as the story missions is this, scan all enemies using a camera, and then kill them one by one with head shots using a silenced assault rifle, very straight forward and dull but it works.

You have a few tricks up your sleeve, such as jamming the communications of people calling the cops, someone reporting you for hacking, jamming the polices' scanning signals they use to find you with, or slowing down the hacking process people use against you online which we will come to in a bit. You can also cause a blackout in the city, but I did not find a use for it outside from when the game tells me to do so. Also, if you find yourself escaping from mobsters, or from the police, you're able to use some of the city's elements to either slow them down or neutralize them, those options include hacking bridges, steam pipes, traffic lights, and road blockers, but their uses get old really fast. One thing I noticed is that if a car chasing you hits another car going at 100/mph, nothing happens to it, but if the crash is caused by you hacking the traffic light then the car gets obliterated (Watchdogs Logic).

There are also collectibles, such as collecting 100 hotspots in Chicago which is just driving across the map to all the tick signs and pressing up on the D-pad -.-. There are also privacy breaches which gives you a small sort of cut-scene into people's personal lives, and hacking the CtoS towers, which are kind of a puzzle to get to but nothing too difficult. There are other ones but they are so similar that they are not worth mentioning.

Weapons are nothing special, I used the same weapon throughout the entire game because of how effective it was, long range, fast, silenced and deadly. You might find another weapon to your liking, but you'll quickly notice how every un-silenced weapon is disposable due to the trouble it causes you.

The thing I honestly enjoyed a lot, was the online aspect of the game, you have 3 ways to play online, you can search for someone to hack, which puts you in a limited area and notifies a player online that someone is trying to hack him and he must "profile" with his phone and kill you. I found this to be really intense due to how unpredictable it was. You can also tail someone without them knowing, or you can participate in a race. All 3 of those were a lot of fun, and never really got old.

You have a few side games at your disposal, there are the betting games such as chess, poker, slots, shells (3 cups are moved around with a ball under one of them), and the drinking games (For all the achievement hunters out there, this will give you a run for your money), there are a few fun mini-games that each give you a new costume, but I only got one costume and these mini-games don't even count towards the 100% progress bar.

Overall, this game feels like the True Crime game that we never got, and is a very generic sandbox shooter. So lets sum this up :-

I know that the hype for this game was ridiculous, but I've learned not to expect much from sandbox games unless they're from Rock Star. I give this game a 6/10 not for failing my expectations, because that isn't really the games' fault but ours for over-hyping it, but because it had the potential to be something great, but it really was nothing special. I hope you enjoyed my review of Watch Dogs and that it gave you a little insight.