Everything you’ve heard about Watch Dogs is true, TRUE I tell you! It’s a little bit Grand Theft Auto IV, a little bit Far Cry 3, a little bit Ryse: Son of Rome (pre-update) and a little bit Pipe Dream all rolled into one. If that concoction of a drink sounds like something you want to get wasted on, Watch Dogs is for you! If you hate all those things, well Watch Dogs isn’t really going to do much to impress you. Also underscores suck so I’m not typing Watch_Dogs I’m typing Watch Dogs, so there!
First the GTAIV-ness of the game is readily apparent, all cars drive like a 1989 Monte Carlo, some just happen to have better acceleration and turning radius, walking and running still feels like I should be a bit snappier and I can’t for the life of my climb down a ladder except the Mick Foley way of just jumping off roofs and praying I don’t die. Is the billion dollar franchise that is Grand Theft Auto a bad thing to emulate, no, but I would have thought we could at least have got the driving to be better by now.
The Far Cry 3 nature of the game is actually the best parts and it should be, Far Cry 3 was awesome until you went to island number 2 or island of the suck as I like to call it. In Watch Dogs Chicago is full of shit to do, of course there’s the main quest but there’s also chess, gambling, AR games (hey looks like they aped some from Saints Row The Third too), lite puzzle solving, extra side missions and of course general mayhem to cause just because. All the distractions are fun in their own way, even the climb hack radio towers to open sections of the world parts. I felt Far Cry 3 did this better by making me drive around to look for the big radio tower in the sky instead of just giving me a way point there but then again I am a super hacker in Watch Dogs so I guess it makes sense.
Finally the Pipe Dream nature of hacking mini-games will not please some people, in-fact it has the honor of being the one to offend the most people. I’m not sure if people actually watched the trailers for Watch Dogs but the main character, Aiden Pearce, uses a damn iPhone app to cause destruction and mayhem. If you were super hacker A Number 1 and you had an iPhone that you just clicked the Street Light App or the Explode Gas Line App and shit happened how hard should hacking be to you? If you were expecting some grand hacking simulator unfortunately Watch Dogs isn’t it but if some simple puzzles and more quicktime events than Ryse: The Son of Rome sound good to you, welcome aboard, you’ll be causing citywide chaos in no time.
The sum of all it’s parts is what makes Watch Dogs interesting and fun but they also make it frustrating. What I wouldn’t give to have cars that drive like the cars from Split Second in Watch Dogs, they even have fun quicktime events too! At some point I expect someone to get the feeling of running around a city with freeroam and parkour and all those fun things right but Watch Dogs did not. It’s not bad but there’s still surfaces you can’t climb on or over and every so often I feel like I’m turning a human 18 wheeler instead of rounding a corner. I can’t really say much about online except it’s broken, either there’s thousands of gamers DDoSing the system or hackers are really having fun hacking Watch Dogs for real. The one online game I did get to play does make me want to play more of it and I was laughing like a school girl while hiding in plain sight from my victim while hacking them. On the flip side when I was invaded once it was like Al Pacino from Taxi Driver level psychosis. I was focused like a laser to hunt down the wannabe hacker and the gears immediately went off in my head forming a foolproof plan as I raced to the scene of the crime to deal with the little nuisance that had showed up in my world.
Lastly since I’m playing on PC I have to point out a few specifics that only PC gamers will likely face, first and foremost the damn menus! Before everyone asks, don’t you have a controller? I do, thanks, but you should also ask, do the play testers have a keyboard and a mouse? Because navigation is just atrocious, who navigates a menu with mouse like it was a d-pad, Watch Dogs, that’s who! It really throws you off when you’re used to either using WSAD for directions or I don’t know just having the mouse cursor on screen! Even then the menus you can use with a mouse feel sluggish, like my mouse pad was switched out with a short stack from IHOP covered in delicious maple syrup, to be clear, as awesome as that sounds I would rather eat pancakes than use them as a mouse pad.
Now onto the driving, I know it sounds like I’m harping on this one but it’s 2014 here, if you’re going to allowing driving in an open world do it right. Also don’t cheap out and only make driving with a controller fun you know people will use a keyboard and mouse. Here’s my best opinion to fix keyboard and mouse driving, developers everywhere feel free to use this. When using something with no pressure sensitivity can we have an option with 2 graphs, think the Photoshop Curves dialog box, where we can dial in over time how fast an accelerator is pushed or a car wheel is turned. Then make the second graph for if we double tap the key/button, boom, done, million dollar idea there.
Watch Dogs has a lot of fun in it, getting that perfectly timed hack to foil your police pursuit is an awesome feeling. Stealthy using cameras to your advantage to take out most of the enemies in a building before waltzing in and eliminating the few enemies remaining is sublime. Hell, you can spend hours just messing with the general population of digital Chicago to see how they react and reading their little text descriptions. I didn’t have any graphics issues during my playtime and they seem fine for 2014 but UBISoft should have just made it rain all the time Blade Runner style and then the monocle wearing graphic perfectionists wouldn’t be complaining as much.
Source Link: http://www.watchdogs.ubi.com
