Watch Dogs Review

"Windy City of Mass Connection"

Campaign

Watch Dogs is a game of many forms; providing you with an open world city of Chicago and basically a wide spread connection to everything. As your skills develop the ability for you to manipulate the world increases. CtOS has become a widespread system that watches everything and everyone.

From there our main character Aiden Pearce takes control of this with his handy smartphone from which you can almost do anything. It really does glorify hacking to some extent and Watch Dogs is quite edgy in terms of style. The entirety of my playtime was actually really decent packing over twenty hours just for the story itself without much divulging to various other tasks that are present in the game.

Now these stretch from finding crimes happening around the city to small mini game tasks that have you hunting people down. I'm really just diving into these sections of the game, but my primary focus is always at the main story. There is one really annoying fact for these side things and that's the damn online tracking that happens where someone jumps into your game to hack you, which is really awful.

Now back onto the main story which in presentation I loved, the dynamics and how every act was setup I really did enjoy it. I wasn't too happy with some of ending points for various plotlines, but that doesn't take away for how great of a story it was. For the actual missions that the campaign was comprised of there was some great and unique points, yet these were at times dragged down by the very repetitive use of car chases which were alright at the start.

Though they really started to drag on me as they went on and on with the same sort of styled chase. Now a stick out moment for me in terms of the brighter levels were the ones where there was a restricted area from which I was able to choose how I was to go about hacking into the terminal objective.

There's basically the choice of perhaps running and gunning or manipulating the cameras, along with the many side effects you can create. It's small choices like this that created some wild and creative moments during the campaign. With as many great moments there was also some really awful issues with glitches, things not showing up and generally annoying repetition in driving escape missions. I also didn't like the auto fail design that was present in some missions though it really is a back and forth relation with Watch Dogs.

Gameplay

The city of Chicago is a beautiful world that is bright and filled with things to do. There are mini games to play and a wide variety of side missions for you to accomplish in while doing the main story of after. It looks great and has minor issues for the amount of gameplay present. I did have a crash though, but auto save really made me care little for it at all.

Other than that I really felt everything went very smooth in terms of gameplay and fluid movement throughout the massive world. The actual play feels like a mix of the Assassins Creed character and the open world of Grand Theft Auto.

Combat worked pretty efficiently as sometimes I just wanted to shoot some places out, but the hacking system should always be the main focus as it's the most satisfying when done correctly. It will definitely become a series from what I have seen and I'd love to see the tech tree provided in this one to be more in depth along with a lot more fleshed.

The Conclusion

Watch Dogs was enjoyable, it was packed with a great length of straight up story time with tons to do on the side. The online components could use a ton of work as you can do multiplayer with others, yet there really isn't anything to do in it. The city of Chicago was brought alive beautifully and the scenery is amazing.

From art structures to landmarks and filled with fascinating live dynamic people. Missions do have some great variety though way too many chase or driving levels. The combat and gameplay works fluidly without issues though there was a fair bit of minor bugs present. I really did enjoy the overall story and how the acts were set up.

Though the thing I absolutely loved most about everything is Watch Dogs was the hacking system that allowed me to control everything that was happening in the environment. The whole structered city of monitoring is really interesting and quite tied into the current situation in these ages. It's really an interesting title that was grand in scale and I look forward to seeing where this series will be taken.

Watch Dogs Review on Xbox One

Rating Overall: 7.5