Watch Dogs is a game set in the piss filled streets of Chicago, where you play as edgy permanently fourteen year old hackerman Aiden Pearce and do lots of hackerman stuff. The mainframe's are the cattle and you are the executive of Big Meat
First and foremost, this is the third time I've played this game. Why, you may ask? I have no fucking clue. The reception to this game wasnt super positive as you may know, and its yet another open world ubisoft game with a huge amount of side "content". The combat is nothing special but its serviceable, the driving is fine for the most part. The little puzzles you do sometimes to hack things are pretty fun actually. Really on a basic gameplay level its perfectly decent, nothing that is that special but nothing is terrible either. The story is surprisingly good, it has a lot of cool ideas that I felt were for the most part executed well. Aiden is such an edgelord that I find it pretty endearing. T-bone is a bro, Jordi is funny and Clara is a hot punk emo girl so yeah. The villains are pretty so-so but as long as you go in knowing you're playing Watch Dogs you may find liking the story more than anticipated.
Buttttt it does have its fair share of problems. They aren't really big issues necessarily but they are worth mentioning, and since I did every bit of content there was in this third playthrough It's actually what dropped the game to a 3.5 for me. First theres the terrible thing lots of open world games seem to do, and thats where the open world is usually big enough to do as you please but when you actually get down to it the missions are very, very restrictive. Go a little outside of an area because you wanna be creative? You're leaving the mission zone fuckass, get back in and play the game precisely how we dictate it. You can argue the story should be like that because they have a specific vision which is fine I suppose but the real problem of this is with the side missions. Often in them, you're tasked with knocking down enemies instead of killing them, and if you do so you auto fail the mission. But.. why?
This leads into another flaw with this game. The morality system. It "works" like most games. Kill people bad, save people good. In this game its completely fucking useless. You get discounts for high morality (more on this in a sec) and then with low morality civilians are more likely to call the po-po on you. So basically useless. Especially because the best (and practically only) way to make money in this game is by hacking into people's bank account as they walk by. This is cool in concept but outside of outright gunning down everyone you see its perhaps one of the most messed up things you can do, but of course it doesnt effect your morality for whatever reason. A further proof of its inconsistency is what I was talking about earlier with the forced take downs. You absolutely have to keep these randomly generated side characters alive or you fail. Then what is the fucking point of having a morality system? Its not a big deal in the end I suppose but its just so fucking stupid you have to restart these missions for this especially if you're playing Aiden with low morality. It makes no sense. Of course on top of this his morality is mentioned vaguely in the story but its always kept perfectly in the middle ground so it doesnt ever effect the ending or anything of the such, which Is ultimately a good thing because its implemented so terribly but in the end it just feels like Ubisoft chasing a trend instead of actually implementing a useful or engaging mechanic. Okay that rant is over I usually dont care about gameplay much but i just spent 40 hours in this game in like 3-4 days you don't understand what my brain is going through rn.
The game also deals with some pretty heavy subject matter. There are collectible strands about a serial killer and even human trafficking which is something the story gets into as well. I think these are pretty interesting and didnt really have a problem with the game showcasing these topics, but there are some parts where the game just goes too far. These moments are mostly in another collectible strand called privacy invasion, which i never bothered with and also am not like 13 years old anymore so playing them now just made me feel weird. Basically for these collectibles you hack into servers and spy on people for a minute. A few of these, especially ones you get access to in the story or the ctos towers are really funny, but when you get into the actual side mission a lot of them just felt gross and left me sitting there thinking "Um okay ubisoft thanks for sharing" I wont get into them but they just felt really needlessly edgy and maybe you could say thats commentary on spying on people or some bullshit but I just think they let a sociopath into the writing room.
What really hit me though was a moment while playing through the main story. Theres this thing in the game called profiling, and it shows you little details about the random people in the world. Sometimes it says wacky stuff like killed a dolphin, dating twins, is a member of isis or other silly things (side note: sometimes it'll say something like transgender or asexual which while isnt really much, the inclusion is welcome). It may also say something like "father of two" to people you just killed so it's just like The Last of Us 2 but better. Im going off rails a bit but just stay with me here. The profiler also often tells you their age, but its randomly generated of course. And so in the main story at one point you basically raid a drug compound, and I happened to profile an armed soldier whos brains I just blew the fuck out with a shotgun only to find that it said..
Age = 15
And this was a really uh, conflicting moment for me. Now im not saying all this to complain about dark subject matter, truthfully I often enjoy dark shit in fiction but this just felt a bit too far. It made me sick. Now sure it's just randomly generated so Aiden didnt react to this in any way or anything like that, but I feel like the fact that It could happen at all says a lot about this game as a whole. Its not that it handles its dark subject matter poorly, its just that it doesnt handle it all. It doesnt tackle any dark topics, it just chases them and waves them in your face saying "look, look at this. fucked up init?"
Okay. So. All that being said. This game was still really damn fun. I know i just spent 90% of this review ragging on this game and yeah does it ethically deserve like a 3/5 at best? yeah. probably. But I am not exagerating when I say this game consumed me for days and I literally had no motivation or desire to play anything else. And this was on my THIRD playthrough. I have no idea what made me play this so much but I did and damn I probably will again five years from now too. For now though, I got all the collectibles. Got everything I wanted out of this game. And thats good enough for me. Time to move on. Watch Dogs 2 will get its chance to improve when I get to it this summer.
Trophy Completion - 79% (30/40)
Time Played - 39 hours 22 minutes
Nancymeter - 75/100
Game Completion #65 of 2022
May Completion #15
First and foremost, this is the third time I've played this game. Why, you may ask? I have no fucking clue. The reception to this game wasnt super positive as you may know, and its yet another open world ubisoft game with a huge amount of side "content". The combat is nothing special but its serviceable, the driving is fine for the most part. The little puzzles you do sometimes to hack things are pretty fun actually. Really on a basic gameplay level its perfectly decent, nothing that is that special but nothing is terrible either. The story is surprisingly good, it has a lot of cool ideas that I felt were for the most part executed well. Aiden is such an edgelord that I find it pretty endearing. T-bone is a bro, Jordi is funny and Clara is a hot punk emo girl so yeah. The villains are pretty so-so but as long as you go in knowing you're playing Watch Dogs you may find liking the story more than anticipated.
Buttttt it does have its fair share of problems. They aren't really big issues necessarily but they are worth mentioning, and since I did every bit of content there was in this third playthrough It's actually what dropped the game to a 3.5 for me. First theres the terrible thing lots of open world games seem to do, and thats where the open world is usually big enough to do as you please but when you actually get down to it the missions are very, very restrictive. Go a little outside of an area because you wanna be creative? You're leaving the mission zone fuckass, get back in and play the game precisely how we dictate it. You can argue the story should be like that because they have a specific vision which is fine I suppose but the real problem of this is with the side missions. Often in them, you're tasked with knocking down enemies instead of killing them, and if you do so you auto fail the mission. But.. why?
This leads into another flaw with this game. The morality system. It "works" like most games. Kill people bad, save people good. In this game its completely fucking useless. You get discounts for high morality (more on this in a sec) and then with low morality civilians are more likely to call the po-po on you. So basically useless. Especially because the best (and practically only) way to make money in this game is by hacking into people's bank account as they walk by. This is cool in concept but outside of outright gunning down everyone you see its perhaps one of the most messed up things you can do, but of course it doesnt effect your morality for whatever reason. A further proof of its inconsistency is what I was talking about earlier with the forced take downs. You absolutely have to keep these randomly generated side characters alive or you fail. Then what is the fucking point of having a morality system? Its not a big deal in the end I suppose but its just so fucking stupid you have to restart these missions for this especially if you're playing Aiden with low morality. It makes no sense. Of course on top of this his morality is mentioned vaguely in the story but its always kept perfectly in the middle ground so it doesnt ever effect the ending or anything of the such, which Is ultimately a good thing because its implemented so terribly but in the end it just feels like Ubisoft chasing a trend instead of actually implementing a useful or engaging mechanic. Okay that rant is over I usually dont care about gameplay much but i just spent 40 hours in this game in like 3-4 days you don't understand what my brain is going through rn.
The game also deals with some pretty heavy subject matter. There are collectible strands about a serial killer and even human trafficking which is something the story gets into as well. I think these are pretty interesting and didnt really have a problem with the game showcasing these topics, but there are some parts where the game just goes too far. These moments are mostly in another collectible strand called privacy invasion, which i never bothered with and also am not like 13 years old anymore so playing them now just made me feel weird. Basically for these collectibles you hack into servers and spy on people for a minute. A few of these, especially ones you get access to in the story or the ctos towers are really funny, but when you get into the actual side mission a lot of them just felt gross and left me sitting there thinking "Um okay ubisoft thanks for sharing" I wont get into them but they just felt really needlessly edgy and maybe you could say thats commentary on spying on people or some bullshit but I just think they let a sociopath into the writing room.
What really hit me though was a moment while playing through the main story. Theres this thing in the game called profiling, and it shows you little details about the random people in the world. Sometimes it says wacky stuff like killed a dolphin, dating twins, is a member of isis or other silly things (side note: sometimes it'll say something like transgender or asexual which while isnt really much, the inclusion is welcome). It may also say something like "father of two" to people you just killed so it's just like The Last of Us 2 but better. Im going off rails a bit but just stay with me here. The profiler also often tells you their age, but its randomly generated of course. And so in the main story at one point you basically raid a drug compound, and I happened to profile an armed soldier whos brains I just blew the fuck out with a shotgun only to find that it said..
Age = 15
And this was a really uh, conflicting moment for me. Now im not saying all this to complain about dark subject matter, truthfully I often enjoy dark shit in fiction but this just felt a bit too far. It made me sick. Now sure it's just randomly generated so Aiden didnt react to this in any way or anything like that, but I feel like the fact that It could happen at all says a lot about this game as a whole. Its not that it handles its dark subject matter poorly, its just that it doesnt handle it all. It doesnt tackle any dark topics, it just chases them and waves them in your face saying "look, look at this. fucked up init?"
Okay. So. All that being said. This game was still really damn fun. I know i just spent 90% of this review ragging on this game and yeah does it ethically deserve like a 3/5 at best? yeah. probably. But I am not exagerating when I say this game consumed me for days and I literally had no motivation or desire to play anything else. And this was on my THIRD playthrough. I have no idea what made me play this so much but I did and damn I probably will again five years from now too. For now though, I got all the collectibles. Got everything I wanted out of this game. And thats good enough for me. Time to move on. Watch Dogs 2 will get its chance to improve when I get to it this summer.
Trophy Completion - 79% (30/40)
Time Played - 39 hours 22 minutes
Nancymeter - 75/100
Game Completion #65 of 2022
May Completion #15
2 Comments
That was my biggest issue with the game as well, it feels like its going for shock value rather than actually saying anything
Assenemy
1 year ago
That said, hot damn this review!! You ghost writing for Jacob Geller or just trying to catch his eye? What a babe