Review
Played on: Xbox Series XReleased: 2014 (PC/X360/PS3/XB1/PS4/Wii U)
Watch Dogs has been around for years, spawning two sequels. In a similar fashion to Ubisoft's The Division, review here, it was one of their games that sparked a lot of discussion due to an excellent trailer, shown at E3 in 2012. Two years later when it released across multiple platforms, new and old generation as well as the Wii U, many people noted that it had been downgraded and felt it didn't live up to what Ubisoft had promised.
Often disguised as ingame gameplay, a trend back then were many trailers boasting more than the final product could deliver. Watch Dogs was was one of the titles which began the debate if it was right of publishers to do so, it changed people's perception of the truthfulness of gameplay in trailers. Forcing publishers to tone down early promises prior to the finished product.
Nevertheless, this is history passed long by and what was promised and not, doesn't matter. I was in the mood to dig out some older releases in my digital backlog and spotted Watch Dogs. I received it years ago on my Xbox Gold subscription; back when they simply gave away digital versions each month.
Feeling in the mood for something in the vein of a city and darker dystopian setting setting, I decided that this would scratch that itch and play a rather large release of its day I missed out on.
Let's hack into the closest camera and take a closer look!
The story is seemingly a classic cliché; the main protagonist Aiden Pearce, who's an excellent hacker, is double crossed in an attempt at a heist on the fictional ctOS, a central operating system located in Chicago. In an ordered hit, aimed at Aiden backing out of the heist, his niece is killed and so begins a revenge story a year after her death.
At first, it seems like the classic tale of criminal gone good with his morale and begins his journey of stopping crime in the city by going undercover with the main goal being to hunt down his niece's killer. However, plot twists happen and Aiden becomes increasingly tangled into an underground world of crime and hacking. Surprisingly, the story is quite dark; relentlessly people die and Aiden is thrown into harsh decisions. It might be linear with its main story arc, but it's quite exciting to follow as the intensity builds up though the chapters.
I'm a bit mixed in my opinion of Aiden himself though. He's the kind of personality that's a bit dull and unlikeable. Although he has a lot of opinions and lots of speech, and I get that he is a sort on anonymous hacker, he ends up being forgettable and shows little emotion regardless of the situations he's in. Worse yet, during the story he gets close to a hacker woman called Clara, yet the game fails to build this relationship in any meaningful way before the whole thing is over.
Later in the story, Aiden meets "T-bone", an eccentric hacker living in the rural parts of town, which i s perhaps the most memorable and unique character of them all. His missions near a lakeside village are fun and a breath of fresh air from the rest, a welcome break before returning to downtown Chicago again.
The hacking is key to what makes Watch Dogs stand out as simply not another action revenge game with GTA styled map and traversal. While Ubisoft probably made it look all that more advanced in their infamous 2012 trailer, it's basically the same as what we see in the excellent Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Mankind Divided.
A lot of the hacking is a one button prompt once you've earned skills points and upgrades to Aiden's mobile. To gain access into mainframes or doors you must do a hacking mini game; which involves guiding electricity through wires, avoiding triggering alarms and unlocking a final node. It reminds me of Deus Ex for sure, albeit slightly simpler.
To infiltrate buildings, you often need to "ride the cameras", as Aiden puts it; you hack a camera, be it a surveillance one, a laptop camera or a bodycam on a guard, then moving it to spot another camera and jumping to that one. As such, you can move around from room to room through cameras until you find a server to hack, an audio file to download, or a door unlock. It's a simple, but cool way of surveying your surrounds and getting access to places before sneaking about with Aiden.
Car chases also play a prominent role, and the hacking is key here too. When being chased or pursuing somebody you can trigger events to stop other cars. Be it setting all traffic lights to green making a pile up, bursting a steam pipe to blow a car sky high, raising Chicago's famous river bridges or activating roadblocks. It's quite satisfying to see cars crashing or thrown about! That said, the driving is a bit nervous as cars feels to light, it's works fine but it could've done with more realism.
Visually it's it does its job without much flair but it’s looking a little dated on console. Although many titles from this era began showing their teeth with impressive graphics, which stand tall even to date, I'm running it as a pure Xbox One game backwards compatible on my Xbox Series X. Which, sadly, doesn't enhance the resolution and so we're at a low, 720p, and quite blurry looking setting.
Luckily, it's a framerate boosted game and as such we get it upgraded to a rock solid 60fps up from its original 30 fps state. The increased frame rate really helps make controls more responsive and the picture sharper than it should be at this resolution.
Edges are jaggy with a fair bit of rough looking shadows on characters and the ground, but the overall amount of people and cars in the streets is well done witha lot of visual variation within the Chicago map. Daytime cycle allows for variation in form of sunsets, rain showers and neat looking night scenes crowded with light sources.
When it comes to a living and breathing depiction of a city, I feel the nighttime really brings out the best of Watch Dogs. It has a ton of light sources, and the city feels alive when wandering about between its massive skyscrapers and fairly busy streets. Textures and overall geometry levels still look very good and as you play you forget that it's already a 12 year old title.
For a big upgrade visually from console, the PC version is readily available and very reasonable on Steam. Allowing you to increase resolution much higher and reach 120fps quite easily these days.
There probably isn't much incentive to go back to this release now; it's a somewhat dated urban open-world approach, with visuals that are fine but dated by today's standard.
That said, it at least offers a different approach to a typical GTA, or similar, as the hacking allows you, albeit limited, to perform a handful of tricks to gain access to buildings, hack computers or change traffic to get an upper hand in the numerous car chases. Hacking things like pipes blowing up in front of cars making them overturn or exploding a transformer box next to some heavily armed guards is always satisfying.
The slightly futuristic setting highlights some of the scary scenarios that have since come to surface in our real world as more systems are automated in cities by computers. Plus, the social media and personal information shared and downloaded throughout the game is an alarming mirror of what happens daily these days.
In a way, it's a forward-looking scenario, feeling like a mix of Deus Ex hacking, The Division presentaion and GTA car chases, but it never excels at any. Landing in a safe zone of a perfectly fine experience to play but not standing out as anything memorable in hindsight. It’s a dark plot with a straight to the point linear design of the main missions, I had fun cloking up just under the 20 hours it lasted.
