Ubisoft’s brand new open world game, and I use the words “brand new” loosely, launched a few weeks back introducing us to the adventures of super hacker Aiden Pearce as he trudges around Ubi’s recreation of Chicago with a zesty twist: A Big Brother type operating system named the ctOS meant to keep the public trust “safe.” It’s a tale of murder, espionage and mayhem all done from the comfort of Aiden’s smartphone and ultimately, unfortunately, an overwhelmingly bland experience.
By now we’re all used to yearly renditions of Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series in which you take on the role of the titular assassin, and work to disassemble complicated Orwellian plots set in motion by an evil group called the Templar. Meanwhile the Far Cry franchise, also surprising everyone with a new title that should hit us very soon, often sees you as a scrappy young upstart against several impossible overwhelming enemy forces. These two games share a lot of the same traits, you employ very optional stealth, you kill enemies for experience points and skill upgrades, you craft items and you climb shit in order to take away vasts swaths of territory from the big bads. Now you may wonder why I spend so much time talking about Ubisoft’s two other open world franchises in a review about their new one, the answer is quite simply: Old habits die hard.
Watch Dogs was a very real chance to explore something new. To not only step into the ring of other, more familiar open worlds popularized by the format presented to us in Grand Theft Auto, but also to allow you to play the role of a hacker who has the city at his finger tips. Instead the game echoes of the same old same old. Now there’s nothing inherently wrong with the Ubisoft formula but it does start to get old, especially when they insist on pushing out a game each year that incorporates the same mechanics as the last one. Yes, Aiden feels a bit different from the free running assassins or the gun toting mercenaries, but aside from a new graphical sheen I feel very much like I’m trapped in a loop of been there, done that.
So let’s talk about some of Watch Dogs merits. At this point, it doesn’t have very many. It’s coming off the heels of the technically awesome Grand Theft Auto V and the very creative Saints Row 4, both of which opened up brand new avenues as to how open world can be played. Since Watch Dogs was in development around the same time as these other two titles it’s difficult to say “Well, Ubisoft could have taken a page or two from Rockstar or Volition’s notebooks” but the fact of the matter is the open world market was already an overcrowded one and so, finding your niche, finding what makes your particular game more fun than the rest is always key. Again Watch Dogs has a sound premise that it fails to deliver on. Yes, you can steal cars in this game, you can buy outfits, stop into a bar for the occasional beer and tour a take on Chicago recreated in digital form, but this is honestly nothing we haven’t seen in the likes of any other open world game.
So does Watch Dogs, with its elevator pitch of you being a hacker with the world at your fingertips, deliver at all? The answer is kinda sorta, but not by a lot. The ctOS is the name of the terribad computer system that controls all of Chicago’s infrastructure, and spies on people Dark Knight style in their homes and on their cellphones. This great, vast security system is also the city’s big weakness. Aiden can break into it (often by… sigh… climbing a tower) and get small advantages from the backdoor components. The main advantage, and perhaps the only one you’ll ever abuse, is the ability to yoink funds out of bank accounts and pad your pockets. You get others, such as the ability to detect crimes or special fixer contracts, but the game kind of alerts you those are going on anyway. Every once in awhile you’ll hack into a cute little phone conversation about Chicago’s plumbing system being plugged up with spunk (I loathe to meet that penis) or a guy threatening his buddy for buying jelly filled instead of boston creme, but you quickly begin to realize every phone and text conversation is more or less on repeat.
ctOS. Good for fast cash, quick getaways, and figuring out everyone in Watch Dogs’ Chicago is a pretty lousy person.
The other real ctOS advantage is enemy evasion. Your starting ability to muck up traffic lights isn’t worth much more than a simple amusement in making two cars collide at a former red light, but as you level up your skill tree you get better abilities for escaping fixers and cops. Opening garage doors and jumping bridges are great for quick getaways, and add a teensie bit of flavor to the normal wanted level evasion tactics you’re used to in these kinds of games. You also get the ability to “neutralize”, using any of your previous hacks to cause a chasing car to get into a hilarious accident. That said fairly early on you get the ability to render wanted levels near-moot entirely via the use of craftable items such as blackouts and jamming systems. The most use you’ll get out of ctOS is during infiltration missions, where you’ll be jumping from security camera to camera looking for distractions or, better yet, death traps to lure enemies into before making your way deeper inside. It’s a somewhat fun way to deal with enemies, but sadly these missions are usually capped by some annoying puzzle that breaks the flow of the previous stealth/action section.
Weapons are fairly standard, and it’s easy to load yourself up quickly into a one man army. Clothing options leave much to be desired, we’ll just say Aiden kind of feels like a nerd with a cellphone and no matter how hardcore the game tries to make him out to be, his outfits will keep him a nerd with a cellphone. Crafting reagents and ammo remained in pretty steady supply during my run through, so I had limited reasons for wanting to walk into a store to buy more. Driving in this game feels a bit “heavy”, and there isn’t a whole lot of joy in collecting cars. Vehicle acquisition runs on a system similar to Saints Row, where you can call up your car and have it delivered at any time as long as you’ve unlocked it, but there’s no customization and little incentive to special order them when you could just safely steal any car parked on the street and get yourself from point A to point B. Online inter-connectivity really is take it or leave it. You don’t have to bother with going up against other players, and in all likelihood they won’t bother to go up against you. In the case you do encounter a rival player it ends up being a lot less a game of cat and mouse and more ‘just run around until you find the guy then chase him, or don’t.”
The story is of no consequence, it uses REVENGE as a simple motivator and does nothing to change that. Everything is vengeance. That guy prank called my family; vengeance. That dude hacked my phone; vengeance. He made me drop my hot dog, time for some vengeance. The characters in Watch Dogs could have used a lot more time percolating. Aiden himself is all over the map. Starting the game I wasn’t sure how to read him, if he was just a guy in over his head, a vigilante of justice, or a cold blooded murderer. The problem here is Ubisoft apparently doesn’t know how you’re supposed to take Aiden either. There’s a heavy slant on the “vigilante” angle, but for each moral code Aiden has he then turns and does something equally contradictory. Mild spoilers ahead here. One such moment would be an early mission when Aiden drove a thief to a crime boss. Aiden willingly drops the man off at his execution, complete with Aiden’s speech hinting he knows damn well what will happen to this man. Once he’s dead and the mission is over, Aiden laments on how horrible it was and how he’ll never let it happen again. I reiterate, Aiden could have saved this man at any time, opted not to, then in the aftermath declared himself lawful good and decided no one would die on his watch again.
Aiden continues through much of the game with these very confused, near hypocritical morals. The gameplay mechanics don’t help either. There’s something of a karma meter monitoring Aiden’s actions, between how just and how evil he is, but story events such as the one above make it entirely moot. I’ve seen grey area characters work in open world before, we all know psychopaths work well for the genre, and I’ve even seen morality systems at least be somewhat effective because the choice of the player no matter how binary impacts the outcome of the story. Not in Watch Dogs. Morality just kind of means nothing, and Aiden seems to do a stream of confusing actions the developers simply thought were cool and edgy.
The Girl Who Cleared Fair Use Copyright
His supporting cast isn’t much better. Clara, our low budget Bond Girl and arguably less broken, direct rip off of Lisbeth Salander, develops an incredibly awkward and confusing relationship with Aiden. She hangs out with him and helps him because plot needs to happen. But was already his enemy and goes on to think he’s a despicable dude also because. Then decides to keep helping him because who the hell knows. Any hint of a romance between the two feels forced and bizarre, with their dynamic playing out like a D list high school comedy rather than the sexy romanticized Hollywood hackers they’re meant to be. Aiden’s old partner, Damien, wants his old friend and companion back, but then does the worst thing possible to try and coerce Aiden to his side with very little motivation to do so. Perhaps the best written relationship is with Aiden’s nephew, Jacks. A father/son dynamic that Ubisoft couldn’t write well so they decided not to give Jacks any lines of dialogue at all, a tactic I much prefer to the tragedy that’s the rest of the script. Simply put it’s a parade of vastly inconsistent characters with often forced dialogue. Sometimes I’m in a pulp comic about a guy who wants vengeance for his family, other times I’m in an espionage thriller about the gruff “sexy” spy who wears a yellow banana trenchcoat. There needed to be some serious character decisions here that Ubisoft just didn’t pull off in the writing.
Marketing calls Aiden’s look “iconic.” I call it “robbed a thrift shop”, but some of the other characters are done well.
The game is very aesthetically pleasing. It is nice to sometimes just walk around and see Chicago. Aiden’s fashion faux-paux aside some of the central characters are pretty fun. Clara, even though she’s just admittedly “French take on Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” has a fun design. I also thought Lucky Quinn, a major antagonist in the story, was done well artistically in terms of bringing to life a very old yet still very terrifying crime boss. Tobias was another character who struck me aesthetically as the paranoid yuppie with expressly drug ladled features. I played this on a PS3 as well, and I’d say it lands somewhere between Grand Theft Auto 4 and 5 in terms of look which is at least respectable. I did encounter some draw distance issues, with pedestrians and traffic sometimes popping up out of nowhere. Shadows and textures aren’t stellar, but overall the graphics are functional and you likely won’t notice the cracks unless you really seek them out.
The minigames are where Watch Dogs tends to get most creative. Which is a shame because I like some of them more than the ho-hum gameplay of the main game. This is very similar to the problem I had with Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag. You can go on ‘digital trips”, psychedelic like experiences that change the way you engage with the game. From stomping around Chicago in an awesome wall climbing spider tank, to clandestine missions where you must remain in stealth to hide yourself from evil robots. There’s also a series of fetch quests, known as investigations, that shed some light on the rest of the world and open additional perks and missions. My personal favorite was finding bodies left around by a serial murderer, and though it didn’t do much to break the gameplay formula of “Walk around, scan things” the writing and creativity was much more stimulating than the core game. One wonders why such fun and creative options weren’t applied more to Watch Dogs as a whole, which is basically a series of climbing things, scanning things, and far too many uninteresting car chases.
Digital trips are among one of the greater, more fun pulls from the main game.
At the end of the day Watch Dogs is a competent open world game, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a good open world game. If you’re going through some hardcore GTAV withdrawal, especially as you wait for heists, and need something to do Watch Dogs is certainly there. There’s nothing must see in this game, and in a very populated genre where even at least mediocre games present some kind of new, fun angle Watch Dogs could have afforded to try much, much harder. Hopefully in the next iteration of this game Ubisoft will give us something a bit fresher and break this rut of repeating the same note they’ve been playing to the tune to for awhile now.
