Playing watchdogs for the first time on a 360 at a friends, I could tell I got it right when I bought it for the ps4. It's a game that was meant for the next-gen consoles, as the game looks beautiful with the newer hardware, while still retaining a highly playable fps.
The story for watchdogs is decent, albeit a bit cliche, but decent. Your whole motivation as Aiden Pearce is to uncover who ordered the hit on you that got your young niece killed. So you go about the whole city with the aid of your hacker friends hunting down the criminal responsible, all while trying to rescue your sister who's being held hostage. The story is weak in some areas, but makes good at the ending.
Gameplay for watchdogs mirrors that of the open world, GTA type gameplay. You freely roam around the city, choosing to participate in missions and side-missions. The catch is that you have access to your smart-phone, which has backdoor access to the entirety of chicago's mainframe. Called the CToS, it's an experimental hardware wired throughout the city that can do many things from controlling the city's traffic lights, cameras, and trams, to using facial recognition technology to discover the utmost intimate facets of a person's life.
This "catch" in gameplay is what makes and breaks watchdogs. While in one hand you ultimately have much more power than you would in games like GTA and Saints Row, in the other you don't seem to have as much freedom as you do in those games. The developer's basically rode on this high-point of the game, and the gun-play, driving, and free-play fell to the wayside. You'll soon find that driving like a maniac, going on a killing spree, or causing general mayhem just isn't as satisfying as it is in GTA or Saints Row. Let me break down why:
The gun-play: As with many things in this game, decent, but could be a lot better. Basic over-the-shoulder-aiming, gears of war type gun-play. All the guns are virtually the same, and all work the same. There's no mods or camos for any of them, and no real stats either, just a rating system. You'd figure for a game with so many guns, they'd at least add mods and variances to the guns, but they don't. I like that they added a slow-mo gun-mode referred to as "focus", which is always helpful. But that's one of the only positives. There's no blind or hip firing, which really hampers the gun-play.
Driving: Can you say... disappointing? Cause I sure can. I do praise the first-person view while driving. I love games that will show you driving from the driver's seat. But that's the only redeemable quality to the driving in this game. Not to bring that series up again... but after how well done the driving in GTA 5 was, Watchdogs is just an utter dissapointment. It's stiff driving physics mirror that of a midnight club game for PS2. Since driving is actually a pretty big the part of the game, it's ridiculous that they didn't put a whole lot of time into it. It really is just stiff and unrealistic compared to the driving mechanics from other games.
Free-play: Open world games like GTA and Saints Row HAVE to have good free-play. Watchdogs DOES NOT have this. I don't know what it is, the police, the civilians, the environment? But watchdogs just does not have the same feel as GTA and Saints Row. You can have a blast playing those games for hours and not even play a single mission, just messing around. Watchdogs is not like that, it just isn't. And for an open-world game, that's a pretty big let-down. One of the main reasons for this is Aiden's reputation bar. Each time you kill a civilian, or break the law, you lose a bit of reputation. So the player is honestly kind of pressed to stick to the story mode, and not mess around, which is a big part of an open-world game. Especially for a game as massive as watchdogs. Plus.... no cool cheat codes like Saints Row or GTA. Another let-down.
And the part you've all been waiting for....
Multiplayer: TERRIBLE... just bad. It's ALL about hacking, which sounds cool at first, but it really isn't. Why? Because there's no actual game modes like deathmatch, or CTF, or just stuff like that. The only basic multiplayer game is racing.... yeah. All you do in the basic online mode is jump into other people's games and try to hack them. People can even jump into your game(while you're playing the story, not even online) and hack you in the middle of a mission... which is, reaaaally annoying. They couldn't even get free-roam right, which consists of nothing but hacking too. The one-time I played this free-roam I was kicked for killing other players, blowing stuff up, and doing what you're generally supposed to do in a free-roam... you're only supposed to hack them in this game. Gee, that sounds fun. So yeah, online = non-existent.
The Conlusion: By my looking at my review you'd probably think Watchdogs is one the worst games ever, it really isn't. It's just one of the most disappointing games ever, because it was supposed to be so much better than this.
In truth, Watchdogs is still a good game and the campaign is totally playable. That is a high-point of this game for sure, the story mode is still good and will not let you down. I highly recommend at least playing though the games campaign once or twice, it's definitely worth it. But that's the thing with Watchdogs, with totally crap online, you won't play the game past it's story mode. I already went and sold the game for something else. Worth a pre-owned buy or rent, but not worth the 60 dollar price.