50 Years of Video Games: Watch_Dogs (PC)
Despite being set around the same time the game was released, the 2014 game Watch_Dogs depicts a world of interconnected technology where the same conveniences afforded by the intersection of the internet and smartphones with daily lives also allows for criminals to operate with a greater degree of control and power than ever before. Meant to still be a somewhat grounded look at a potential path for cyber crime while also relying on the city of Chicago to have connected almost all of its technology to a digital system called ctOS, this game that points a spotlight at the dangers of the growing movement for smart tech was in some ways instead an eye opener on the state of the game industry. Its reveal trailer misrepresented the final product’s look, the special edition releases of the game all had mutually exclusive content so there was no one perfect version to get without buying redundant products, and the open world design approach to creating a game world was becoming so common in major releases many players were reporting open world fatigue. Even now to play Watch_Dogs you need to download the Ubisoft Connect launcher even if you get the game through a digital store like Epic that already had its own launcher, but a fair few of these issues were problems of their time, and things like open world fatigue are mostly a problem of player habits. With any hype for the product long since fizzled out, its much easier to talk about the actual substance of the game rather than its release curiosities.
Aiden Pearce is a hacker with a heavy burden on his conscience. While trying to wire cash out of the Merlaut Hotel things go south and soon a hit is placed on him, but when the assassin Maurice Vega makes his move, he fires upon Aiden while he’s driving his sister and her children out of town. The resulting car crash only leads to the death of Aiden’s six year old niece Lena, and while his sister and nephew are shaken by this experience, Aiden dedicates himself to trying to find out who placed the hit so he can avenge his pointlessly killed niece. Such a fiery tale of revenge certainly seems like it would fit the behavior of an emotional character, but Aiden Pearce is a barely expressive protagonist who seems almost detached from even the most heartbreaking of plot developments. While he will mutter to himself to try and make it sound like he’s conflicted about the people he hurts on his path to revenge or say something that could have sounded like the mournful regrets of a conflicted soul, his vocal delivery and lack of expression makes it all feel like he’s paying lip service to the ideas without really feeling them. It is noted that Aiden tries to keep a mask up to separate himself from things, but even during moments which should seem more personal it never cracks, making him seem distant from the events he is a major player in. He didn’t need to be bawling or raging at every moment as the other members of the cast can handle being more emotionally open without being melodramatic. Fellow hackers Clara and T-Bone that Aiden comes to work with are more expressive and reactive and hearing their moments of excitement injects some needed energy into the narrative.
Unfortunately, Watch_Dogs’s plot is a bit of a muddled affair. While it can provide special locations and situations for the mix of hacking, driving, and gunplay that this game uses, the course of events is a bit jumbled together. Aiden confronts Maurice Vega at the start of the game and the assassin is kept on the backburner for ages. At some point Aiden’s sister gets kidnapped and held ransom to force Aiden to hack other criminal groups in the city but when you get chances to talk with her along the way she can go from terrified to oddly flippant to despising Aiden to being unable to live without him without the kind of progression to make such mood changes feel appropriate. Rather than bundling together associated missions the game sometimes has you bounce too quickly from one target to another, although after the busy second act it does at least start grouping related tasks better so you can see more clear progress rather than scattershot addressing of the many things Aiden has up in the air. However, while these missions can have some good uses of the game’s mechanics, they also feature the game at its worst, “Not a Job for Tyrone” being a standout moment of poor design. The mission starts potentially with a glitch where the moment you hack a security system to spy on Tyrone he can fall through the world and die inexplicably, and to prevent this you need to shoot the exterior of his house even though that logically should alert him to your presence. After you finish the hacking minigame and he leaves home you need to tail him, and while the car segment is fine if unexciting, when he’s on foot and walking among guards who will cause you instantly to lose if you spot them, you need to stay close to hear him converse with others. If you get spotted you will need to slowly sneak behind him again and listen to these conversations all over again, and while there are other tailing missions they usually allow you more freedom or the option to use your hacking skills like following pirmarily by camera or not needing to repeat something so slow.
Watch_Dogs’s rough story moments and uncharismatic lead are not a death knell for the experience though. During the better missions and the plentiful amount of optional content found throughout this technologically connected version of Chicago the player will find moments where a mix of stealth, technical tricks, and weapons use can provide some interesting play. Perhaps at its best when you’re meant to be infiltrating specific areas like a gang hideout or an area important to the story, you’ll be able to use Aiden’s cell phone to connect to various systems to clear the way ahead or even perform your goal without getting your hands dirty. Security cameras are plentiful and give you an eye on areas that might be dangerous to rush into, and as your capabilities expand over the course of the game you’ll get more tricks to use while spying on people. You can activate distractions if you want to slip by or even lure them over to things like transformers that you then detonate to take a guard down in a way that other guards will blame on faulty tech instead of a hacker’s intrusion. There are limited amounts of interactive objects in an area though so you sometimes need to be smart about how you utilize each option, but Aiden can take down people silently if he gets in close and he can craft special items to help him if he does need to be physically present in the area he’s trying to infiltrate. Activating a communications jammer can help him lose suspicious law enforcement, enabling a blackout will limit your hacker abilities but also make it easier to slip through in the dark, and while the electronic lures didn’t really seem as good for drawing guard attention when they were your handcrafted versions instead of environmental distractions, you can even get more heavy duty options like remotely detonated bombs if you’re ready to be more direct in your approach.
Hacking systems to gradually pick off the opposition is certainly a satisfying way of clearing an area when the game is providing the right tools and some areas like T-Bone’s junkyard even get very creative with the options as his metal sculptures can be used for attacks. Even when you’re out driving you can utilize the city’s interconnected infrastructure to your advantage, turning off traffic lights to make dangerous intersections for your pursuers, bursting steam pipes beneath the road to wreck peoples’ rides, or opening and closing doors or gates to drive through shortcuts or lock people out behind you. Even when walking about the city you’ll find plenty of use for your little smart device. Aiden has a hacked database in his phone that lets him profile people on the street passively, and while having your phone active and ready to hack can be a little finicky as certain actions disable it and the main indicator you get for if its active is Aiden holding it in a hand that often is obscured by his trenchcoat’s sleeve, there are a lot of fun things to see around town with it. Every citizen has at least one small descriptive trait, usually randomly assigned to them but from a wide range and many are meant to be humorous. You can listen in to phone conversations or intercept texts for silly exchanges as well and at some moments you can hack into places to view video feeds that mostly exist for the sake of small jokes, many of them leaning towards raunchy situations that are also supposed to imply how easily the ctOS is able to view these private moments of people’s lives. Passersby might also have bank accounts you can quickly drain a little bit out of even though they’re so common you might have more money than you know what to do with, but these can also alert you to nearby crimes you can help to prevent as Aiden is encouraged to be a vigilante rather than a remorseless cybercriminal as you can earn positive reputation and rewards for doing the right thing.
A lot of the hacking is as simple as holding down a button to enter a system while some require a wire spinning minigame to connect circuits to undo locks in a less technically complex representation of cracking through firewalls, and at other times needing to find the right relays through camera systems to reach systems can provide a nifty little search-and-find challenge. As you get deeper into the game though the exciting potential of the hacking systems will begin to decline as it doesn’t seem quite as powerful as it started and the tricks you have become more commonplace parts of your approach. When every place seems to have a forklift you can fiddle with or a pipe your can burst the options become less thrilling to engage with, especially as the moments that force you into using your weapons reveal that you don’t often need to fear the guards that can take quite a while to disable with technical tricks. Most guards rely on typical assault rifles and cover to fight you and a few bullets from most any of your guns will quickly put them down, a headshot an instant kill and not too hard to line up either. Some heavily armored gunmen urge you to use explosives to take them down, but a good grenade launcher can handle them rather than needing to bait them to an exploding floor panel. You are able to carry your entire arsenal with you which includes a wide range of guns from pistols, semiautomatics, shotguns, fast-firing snipers, and the earlier mentioned grenade launcher, and the ease of switching means you’re rarely outgunned even when someone like an enemy sniper shows up. Ammunition is similarly easy to come by and save for missions where stealth is required, it becomes clear that your weapons often are a better choice than slowly hoping that guard will be positioned right for a hacking trick to take him out. The game does at least let you use those powers in the middle of a fight and usually it’s still a good way to get an early start in a skirmish before you go in guns blazing, but the surprising strength of the weapons coupled with regenerating health for Aiden seems to encourage brazen risk-taking that reveals how little danger you’re truly in rather than rewarding more crafty approaches.
Chicago does have plenty of optional activities that can require different skills than good aim at least, and the game does reward you for engaging with them by having specific unlocks like more cars you can call to your location with your phone or free weapons once you’ve completed enough side content. Some are very simple like poker games or drinking contests, but while the drinking contest minigame will evolve over time with its focus on pressing buttons as your cursor resists you, the amount you need to do to get the rewards can be tedious since they are still fairly straightforward. A few more puzzle oriented moments make tracing the wires that connect ctOS part of the challenge like when you activate the radio towers that increase your connectivity or spy on people through their security systems. Having to explore a little area to find what needs hacking to open up the vulnerabilities needed for your rewards is a different kind of challenge than heading out to stop criminal convoys from making deliveries or foiling crimes, and while those violence oriented ones can become repetitive since they barely change in format, the puzzle ones rely on different structures in Chicago to spice them up. Criminal chases can be rather bland because of their empty framing though, running after people always feeling longer than it needs to be and with little to speed up the process if they’re not running towards the city tech that could be traps. Exploring Chicago had the potential to be interesting too as there are hotspots to connect to with history to share, but it’s a mix of real locations, phony history meant to be funny, and fictional additions that make it hard to sort out what should be believed. Mostly repetition and simplicity will wear down the appeal of engaging with these even though some of their rewards are hard to resist, but gang hideouts at least make a challenge out of infiltration and the contracts where you race around town can test your driving skills some amidst the unpredictable traffic, reactive police, and varying control sensitivity of your rides.
Aiden is encouraged not to harass passersby or kill them pointlessly by the reputation system and the potential to trigger police chases that are hard to lose and can ruin your reputation more if you violently resist, so while there is a big city to drive through with different locations like the skyscraper filled downtown, a run down slum, and the more humble small town of Pawnee, you’re not encouraged to make your own fun and instead are meant to head to icons on your minimap to find the structured but often rehashed content concepts. One area with a bit more freedom though is the game’s multiplayer component, in that players actually infiltrate the world of others and try to sneakily hack or tail them. While multiplayer does have more direct competition like races, the hacking and tailing missions can trigger suddenly and the target can be caught unaware while exploring the city by them. There did seem to be an unusually high amount of this happening right before I finished a side objective like activating a ctOS tower that prevented me from doing so, but this might have been bad luck and the option can be disabled. Leaving it open or invading other people’s games though can provide an exciting bit of cat and mouse play where one side is hiding while forced to stay close enough to do their work while the other is trying to turn the tables. Being able to trigger all throughout the city and being dependent on the skillful play of the participants does mean this can stave off some staleness that comes from the reliable behavior of AI and less area-specific designs of something like the convoys, but it’s not quite the captivating multiplayer component the game could have rested on to make up for some deficiencies in its design elsewhere.
THE VERDICT: While Aiden Pearce’s stoic facade and a cluttered story make Watch_Dogs’s core content a bit harder to get invested in despite some decent mission ideas and some solid supporting cast members, the game is mostly a case of starting high before grinding it down little by little with repetition without innovation. Besides missions like “Not a Job for Tyrone” though its more a matter of fading fascination as the limits of your nifty hacking skills are slowly established and the game dials back on creative uses for your tech options, everything becoming familiar as the same tactical options are provided despite guns often being a simple enough solution. Side content formulae stagnates despite the rewards for indulging in it making you want to check it out, but the multiplayer concepts and better conceived diversions like ctOS tower puzzles means there are still moments of intriguing freshness to offset the decline.
And so, I give Watch_Dogs for PC…
An OKAY rating. While Aiden’s woodenness is a bit of an issue from the start and the plot tries to cram too many threads into one space for a while, the opening of the game still gives you some moments that make the cyber crime elements exciting to engage with. Infiltrating a building without even setting foot in it, eliminating guards and pursuers with well timed activations of nearby technology, and only getting your hands dirty when things demand it gives the early game a sense of opportunity and potential that starts to dry up gradually, but by having functional gunplay you can at least find some entertainment even after the hacking starts to become rote thanks to its gradually more evident limitations. There is a level up system that starts to grant you additional hacking skills and tools that unfortunately spread out the availability of nifty tricks, and while some are fairly strong, by the time you can briefly disable a helicopter from tracking you the hacking has lost a good bit of its luster because it has restricted your tools so heavily. A battery system does prevent you from being absurdly capable with your best tricks already so perhaps smarter use of resources rather than having the resources eventually introduced at too slow a rate would keep the game’s core appeal from the wane in interest, but besides some low effort extra content like the street crimes and convoys that might as well be the same mission repeated, there is still enough to the moments of action that you’re rarely required to do something that is frustrating or boring. Watch_Dogs was actually delayed as the developers tried to ease up the repetitive design but it wasn’t quite enough, but still the hacker angle breathes a good bit of life into things as seeing if every citizen is an opportunity or hacking into a security system to see something silly keeps you rooted in what makes this game more than just an open world exploration of Chicago.
Watch_Dogs is probably the kind of game that lead to the open world fatigue problem many players who only play major releases experience, the open world here not quite filled with the degree of content that would make exploring it worthwhile. The plot can feel overly serious when so much of the hacking content can lead to quirky moments, Aiden even hacking street signs to display memes when he’s stoic elsewhere, but cohesion isn’t as big of a problem as needing to ensure activities are worth doing intrinsically rather than because you want a new weapon. The excitement of your many tools and the many marks on the map that promise content fades as you start to see it won’t be evolving too much and when it does it’s a level up that only added one new trick to your arsenal, but unless you overindulge yourself in specific types of play, Watch_Dogs still has decent mix of tech-focused action to keep you onboard if not always excited to see its newest shape.