Watch Dogs (2014)

Platform: PS4

Playthrough: Replay

Language: French

Finish Status: Completed

Playtime: 25h

Difficulty: Easy

Ho boy, started replaying this to practice my French, it was a pretty good level for me. I was actually not expecting to have THIS much fun with it. There's a lot of fun, extra content to do, sure, mindless, and useless. But damn it's fun to just tour around Chicago with ur favorite car, then take a detour to watch hack the home of some stranger dying of a heart attack while on the phone with his niece, then do a quick detour to bust up some human trafficking scum.

Eventually, I got to the main story too, which is, well, too incredibly nuanced and at this point very dated and done, but it's still kinda interesting. It does feel a little bit different from the other open-world games from that time. The story missions, at least when they are not escort or get detected, are pretty fun.

But I gotta tell you, the biggest takeaway from this game is the weather system. I love how it turns from day to night to rain and storm. It's such an incredible vibe, and just cruising through the city, I such a gem of an experience, and to be honest, it was a very very long time since I had such a genuinely purely fun just for the sake of it time, just hanging out. One of my most memorable experiences was when it started raining and I hopped on the tramway to just cruise around the city and look out the window with the rain and storm going on in the city. To me, it's experiences like this that are absolutely priceless.

Ubisoft has great franchises with huge potential, but every time they manage to ruin everything in the most unimaginable way. Watch Dogs is not a bad game; it didn't deserve to receive all that hate at launch, but unfortunately, it's not the game it wants to be either.

Ubisoft have one of the most skilled 3D artist's in the whole industry, the environmental storytelling in their games is always superb, at least for my test. But every time they manage to ruin great worldbuilding and visuals with a boring gameplay loop and a mediocre story at best. The gameplay in Chapter 2 missions starts to resemble Assassin's Creed gameplay; at this point, I realized that I have zero interest in "follow the character" missions straight from 2010 to complete the game. I have enough of it..

I guess I will never come back to this game ever again, unfortunately.

• Pros: Great concept with enormous potential.

• Cons: Poor execution.

Finally got around to completing this game after having it sitting in my backlog for years, here's a brief summary of my thoughts on the game.

Positives:

• Atmosphere and world building. The game does a decent job of depicting a technological Chicago where you constantly interact with ctOS, the system making the city "smart and connected". The oppressive feeling of having cameras everywhere and being constantly watched is totally there.
• NPCs. At least modded, the city really feels alive since there's a ton of traffic and a ton of NPCs going about their lives. Because of your magic hacking app, the profiler, you can see a short randomly generated background for every single character and it totally works at making the world more believable.
• Blackouts.

Meh:

• Graphics. Specially unmodded, the graphic department isn't anything special. Also some glitchy animations here and there. Passable, with the occasional beautiful shot at some locations.
• Gameplay. The hacking skills are cool but they end feeling repetitive since you're basically using the same environmental tricks from beginning to end, specially if you focus on this skill tree early (as you probably should). The gunplay is ok, but there's little incentive to use anything but the strongest weapons all the time (I think the only time I've ran out of ammo was for the grenade launcher which is a very OP weapon, specially for vehicle takedowns). The cover system is pretty smooth and I liked it. The stealth system is barebones and yet I found myself consistently utilizing it as much as possible, kinda playing like hitman with the silenced pistol and the melee takedowns. It combines well with the hacking mechanics and some gadgets.

Negatives:

• Driving. Really annoying driving mechanics for some reason, it just doesn't feel right. It took me a while to even be able to drive anything more or less effectively. Bikes are the best option most of the time.
• Story. Your basic vengeance rampage narrative. Pretty bland in general, although it has a couple of interesting characters that help flesh it out some more.
• Police chases. Really obnoxious, specially early game since you lack the skills necessary to deal with them more or less effectively and they're relentless. Way too long and tedious.
• Ending. The ending felt pretty underwhelming for me, I guess the build-up of the story probably seemed like going for something more spectacular than what we got.
• Side content. I basically ignored all of it after doing 1 or 2 of each except for the gang hideouts (the typical "enemy base" ubisoft stuff) which were a bit more fun and varied. I guess I see where they wanted to go with it but it just seemed boring and repetitive to me, more so than in any other Ubi game I've played.

Conclusion: Watch Dogs is a pretty average game, just a meh game. Mediocre at best in many departments and not innovative enough with its specific features like hacking, but it isn't absolutely horrendous either. I'd recommend you play it if you generally enjoy open world games (specially Ubisoft games) and also like the main topics of the game: technology intertwined with social control, revenge with some mystery and hacker stuff. I think you just have to go in knowing what to expect to have a decent time with it.

Disclaimer: I've played the game modded using some "all in one" mod called Refresh. I strongly suggest you also play it modded since the graphical downgrade for this game was so humongous and these mods restore a lot of the E3 demo features and just add a ton of stuff that should've been there in the first place.

As I play through Watch Dogs 2, I take a moment to record my thoughts on the original.
Watch Dogs was a game I was excited to play when it was announced, & I wasn't too upset that they had a "graphical downgrade" it still looked pretty enough for me.

I am a big fan of the TV show "Person of Interest" and I saw this as the closest we'll get to a game of it. And while Aiden was dull as dishwater as characters go, he did remind me of Mr. Reese from the show. My favorite activity in game was stopping crimes, like the show , even if the game handled it poorly.

The game's selling point was it's hacking, and I'd say it did that well. Being able to spy on people through computer cameras was another fun activity, even if they were sometimes immature. And using cameras and technology during combat\stealth sections was polishes feeling. Even the driving felt solid. The mechanics in this game were good, the story...

Aiden is bland brooding hero cliche #26 & the story is a stock standard revenge plot with a piss poor mystery [of course the mobster's the big bad] The ending where we learn Lucky thought Aiden wanted the blackmail footage, not the money, from the Merlaut & had his niece killed for it felt like a dick ending.

The other characters are "meh" at most with T-Bone & Jordie sticking out to me. Guys like "Iraq" looked too goofy for a game that tries to play it straight.

I liked they picked Chicago for the setting. I'm all for games in cities that aren't New York, LA, or a stand-in for them. It was also cool they created the song list on mostly native Chicago artists or songs about Chicago. Unfortunately most those songs weren't to my taste, but I liked the Blues station, good ol' Chicago blues.

Este juego es una porquería.

El personaje principal, Aiden, es el típico personaje de viveojuego: 40 años, morocho, no habla mucho, apariencia misteriosa, un intento de bad-ass mal logrado... en fin, nada destacable. Su trasfondo psicológico está completamente centrado en su sobrina y en la muerte de ésta, se puede entender que ese hecho lo haya marcado y que por eso su futuro es como es (vacío), pero es que su vida no tiene NINGÚN otro tipo de profundidad, como si antes del atentado Aiden Pearce no existiera como individuo con sueños, metas, aspiraciones, triunfos, fracasos. Aparte de ser hacker, qué tiene? Al no tener este trasfondo el personaje no interesa mucho y lo que le pasa tampoco. Se puede empatizar más con su familia e, incluso, agarrar bronca con Aiden por las cagadas que se manda UNA TRAS OTRA mientras su hermana se lo recrimina. Es que el chabon es insoportable, es un sufrimiento jugar con él durante 15hs.

Los personajes secundarios son alto remarcables, los dos hackers que lo acompañan en partes de la historia (T-Bone y Clara) sí tienen una personalidad, y por más que la de Clara sea algo básica podemos congeniar con el personaje y su muerte nos toca un poco.

En cuanto a los villanos, no hay ningún tipo de misterio... desde su primer aparición sabemos quién será el "jefe corrupto" de la ciudad, y todo el lío que nos hacen hacer en la ciudad con los criminales de poca monta parece al pedo. El final es un poco meh... no hay ninguna parte en todo el juego que sea más que disparar y cubrirse, disparar y cubrirse, disparar y cubrirse. Los hackeos aburren después de la primer tanda de cámaras, el sistema se vuelve un trámite engorroso.

El sistema de conducción es UNA CAGADA, me recuerda al GTA 3 (al que se le perdona este aspecto por ser un juego VIEJÍSIMO). Apagar semáforos no es cool, lo único divertido es entrar a garages o túneles, las persecuciones de la policía son una estupidez, la IA de los enemigos también... en fin, la jugabilidad en sí es pésima. Los gráficos me parecen buenos dentro de todo, pero la historia no acompaña porque es muy aburrida, terminarse el juego es un parto. Uno de los peores que jugué en mi vida.