Reviews// Watch_Dogs

A white male in his late 30s with a gruff voice and about as much emotional response as my Hoover. It’s the characters around him that make the plot itself worth sticking with, which is a shame because all Aiden represents to me is a missed opportunity.

It’s a great shame as the writing is actually pretty good, as is most of the voice acting. Some performances are better than others, but it never gets embarrassing and characters' dialogue is believable and it’ll hold your interest.

The Windy City
We’ve been treated to some amazing open worlds in the past generation of games, with the cherry on top being GTA V. That game still amazes me. The sense of place the game has to offer is matched by nothing we’ve seen before or since and it’s set the bar on how an active world should be done.

Sadly Watch_Dogs fails to clear that bar. In fact it runs directly under it without even knowing it’s there. Chicago feels like a cold lifeless place at times. Although some of the animations of the civilians are really good, and the fact that you can hack people and find out more about them adds to the environment, it doesn’t make it.

Motorways don’t feel like motorways, they feel like wider roads, you can’t get a sense of districts or buzz of popular areas. Everything feels all over the place. Get in a car and instead of an active radio network you have songs played cold with the odd radio news report dropped in.

It reminds me slightly of The Truman Show, with every shop seemingly built around Aiden. CCTV Cameras in handy places;, cars left in the middle of nowhere to save walking back to a road and clothes shops that only sell the same clothes that Aiden is wearing but in different colours.

None of it feels real
And of course the elephant in the room shows its ugly face once and a while. The game looks nowhere near as good as we’d hoped or even as good as GTA V did on the Xbox 360. Dynamic lighting is non-existent from car headlights, traffic pops up out of nowhere when driving around at high speeds.

As for the sound, that’s even more below par. Vehicles sound laughably bad, and try to honk your horn without instantly thinking of circus clowns in tiny cars.

It all adds together to make what could have been something special seem far from that mark. It’s an average world with a lack of detail and I’ve always believed that in an open world game, the environment you’re in needs to be treated as a character. It needs depth, detail and it needs to feel real. Watch_Dogs fails to achieve this fully.

As an overall gaming experience, Watch_Dogs is a mixed bag. Its gun play is fantastic, but its driving terrible. Hacking can be fun but also tedious, but I’d be lying if I said I had a bad experience with it.

When it’s good, it’s good and although it feels as though it never really gets out of second gear, it does enough to keep you coming back for more.

Now that Ubisoft has said that we’ll see more of Watch_Dogs, I really hope they have found this project to be a learning experience because deep within it is a fun game waiting to be truly unleashed onto the public.

If Ubisoft pushes to expand on what it has achieved with Watch_Dogs then I think the next in the series will be something special. It’s just a shame that this one falls short.

Pros
+ Fun Gunplay
+ Decent Plot
+ Invading others' games is fun

Cons
- Aiden isn’t a very good character
- Chicago feels lifeless

SPOnG Score: 3/5