I learnt an important lesson playing Watch Dogs: Don't believe everything you read. On this modern day of "everyone-has-an-opinion", it's too easy to fall in clusters of hate (or love) that might throw off one's perception of anything. It's better to base our decisions by weighing pros and cons than by absolutes. That said, I took a chance with Watch Dogs because every time I tried to find out what was actually wrong with the game, all I found was things in the lines of "this isn't what they promised at E3!", when all I wanted to know was if what they actually delivered was any good. I had to take a blind leap and find for myself.
I'm actually glad I did.
If there is any flaw on Watch Dogs as a game is that it starts slow. While I understand the game is the first in franchise, and as such it must establish an entire world of characters and motivations, the opening missions of the campaign could have been more engaging. However, once you get past the drawn-out intro, you'll find a mature plot that touches on interesting subjects like invasion of privacy, human traffic and information vulnerabilities, without becoming a tedious political treatise.
The main character, Aiden Pierce, is a hacker-vigilante with access to ctOS, Chicago's security and infrastructure operative system. This allows him to use a city's systems to his own advantage, as well as using it to avoid crimes and act as an all-around do-gooder. Mechanically, the game offers a big slate of things to do and approaches to objectives, while keeping things interesting with a steady flow of new skills and items to play with, from sticky IEDs to massive city blackouts. Things like the police pursuit mechanics are intense bordering on frustrating, but I think that's mainly because we're all used to GTA's lazy cops. Here, the chases involve helicopters that will keep the spotlight on you, constant patrol backup and street police converging in your point. It becomes more of a battle of wits than a battle of lead, and is the pinnacle of how the game works. Most of the game has you outwitting the enemy, be it through stealth, through silenced combat, ambushing with traps or sniping from a rooftop. Of course, you can solve things with brute force, but Aiden is no superman, and things can go awry real fast facing the game's decent AI.
Graphically, sure, "the game isn't what they promised us at E3!", but it isn't ugly either. Chicago is rendered with incredible detail, down to soda cans rolling in the sidewalk if the wind is too high, and the trees swaying dynamically along with the changing weather. Nighttime is gorgeous, if a bit washed out, with a keen sense of lighting that becomes evident once you trigger a city blackout. Then you realize how genius the lighting is made on Watch Dogs on a technical level.
All in all is a pretty decent game. I would even say it's a good game, with the narrative requirements to keep you interested in the plot, the gameplay mechanics solid enough to make playing it fun and the graphical proficiency to immerse you in its world. If anything, the lack of optimization can make it a real pain to play for some people, and that could be serious if you have a lower-end machine. That said, if you do have a low-end machine, substract 1.5 points from the review, because much is lost lowering detail. Add 0.5 if you install TheWorse mod, which fixes many stutter issues and brings the game to near-E3 quality.