Watch Dogs Reviews
I have very little doubt that there's a bright future ahead for Watch Dogs, at least at the cash register, and I'm sure I'll be fairly hyped for whatever comes next in the series. But, it's hard to recommend Watch Dogs to anyone that isn't absolutely ravenous for a new PS4 or Xbox One game to play.
It's obvious a sequel will be coming, but Ubisoft really needs to take a good hard look at this title and address the glaring issues and stereotypical plot if it wants the future of Watch Dogs to be a successful one based on quality, and not the result of a huge marketing push that hides the fact this isn't the next level in the genre it was touted as being.
On the whole Watch Dogs is undoubtedly worth a play. It may have its faults but Ubisoft have kicked off a new series that not only delivers promise but a tremendousamount of choice as to how you want to approach your game.
Unfortunately, the extra time it took to get on the Wii U did not lead to improvements over the other versions and some technical issues remain unaddressed.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
Watch Dogs is a bold, ambitious game that delivers well in some areas, though nevertheless feels like an iteration away from reaching its potential; the inevitable Watch Dogs 2 could be one to keep an eye on. It's a sizeable, enjoyable game, but one that is let down on the Wii U by poor optimisation and disappointing performance; the frame-rate is inconsistent but tolerable while on foot, but often struggles badly when driving. It's possible to play Watch Dogs and work through these bottlenecks, but that shouldn't be expected of the gamer in a big-budget, pricey retail experience.
Watch_Dogs was supposed to be the chosen one, but it's neither the coming of the new generation nor a particularly good game.
Decent, but not great. Watch Dogs is certainly worth playing, but it's not even close to living up to what's been shown off since it was announced.
Ubisoft's hotly anticipated open-world action game provides decent entertainment but is let down by over-familiarity and a dreadful protagonist.
Watch Dogs is a solid open-world game that doesn't do enough to set itself apart from the pack.
Ultimately, there are a number of things Watch_Dogs does right. It's a solid enough feeling open world to warrant checking out. The hacking mechanic, whilst at times negated by an easy shootout, does open up a huge number of possibilities within gameplay. A solid base for Ubisoft to build upon, Watch_Dogs does more wrong than it does right, and ultimately results in a frustrating example of a game designed by committee and with very little that is "next gen" provided. Oh, and Ubisoft? Please get rid of that silly underscore for the sequel.
These missteps get corrected through truly next-gen multiplayer that'll pervade the experience if you let it, along with gobs of side-objectives, collectables, augmented reality games like NVZN (third-person alien blasting around the city), and digital trips that allow Ubisoft to add fantastic elements like the Spider tank. The focus on setting up Watch Dogs as a new franchise will pay off in the years to come, but it does come at the main game's expense.
For all Watch Dogs' wonderful forward-thinking largesse—its very serious aesthetic concern with memory and surveillance and violence—it still thinks small. The plot confuses memes with jokes, confuses hoops with plot points, confuses Deadmau5 with cool. We move from person of interest to person of interest, as in a Raymond Chandler story, but unlike in a Chandler story no larger structure takes shape. We uncover only more hacking, more people of interest; jabs are taken at corruption but the corruption is only a type of information, a thing to hack. We hop up and down the ladder, from club to ghetto to skyscraper, but each setting is just a new set of boxes and cameras and targets. It is assumed that the setting will tell the story, but the city will not speak.
Watch_Dogs on Wii U is a tricky one. The game isn't bad, far from it even, but the six month wait is a bitter pill to shallow. Not much has been added to make it truly different from other systems and the overall presentation could have been slightly better. The large amount of missions, the huge world to traverse and additional functions give this game a solid running time of 20 hours. There are problems here and there, but if you decide to pick it up, you can have potentially fun with it.
Not a grand slam or even a homerun, 'Watch Dogs' is very much akin to Ubisoft's other flagship series, 'Assassin's Creed,' in this respect, the initial entry is engaging (and frankly, 'Watch Dogs' is far more gripping than the original 'Assassin's Creed' could ever hope to be), but at times feels like a really high-quality tech demo. There's a load of promise from the Disrupt engine and the game license itself. The story of Aiden Pearce is money well spent, even if the buildup doesn't get nearly the payoff one would expect. The little added bonuses feel tad bit gimmicky, but up until recently, Ubisoft never tried to heavily promote them as selling points. What a future 'Watch Dogs' game needs to work on are its driving physics and its graphics; there isn't a reason why the next game should begin to match expectations of the E3 demo; what gamers have been offered here maybe lacking in sheer 'wow' factor, but had that demo never been as stunning as it was, I'd argue the end product might have been received more favorably.
Fundamentally that's the overriding feeling of Watch Dogs. It's a game that has so much to offer and so many things to do that it can't fail to engage you as a player. But eventually you'll realise it's not all good and what you find interesting is done. There's little to compel the player to finish in terms of the way it does things, aside from that square button which allows magical occurrences to happen. With this introduction to the world of hacking Ubisoft have created a behemoth of an IP, one that promises much. Like its predecessor though, we'll have to wait for the tighter and more focussed second iteration, removing what didn't work and improving that which did, to realise that full potential.
Ubisoft Montreal should certainly be applauded for trying something new within the bounds of the genre - hacking in Watch Dogs is genuinely innovative, despite the threat of gimmickry - however, Watch Dogs has ultimately failed to live up to its hype. It's good, but it could, and probably should, have been great. The underlying irony of Watch Dogs is the fact that the game itself suffers a bit too much from an identity crisis.
The profiling system isn't as deep as expected, but still offers remarkably strong and subtly creepy world-building away from the main plot.
It is Open World: The Game, and as such, struggles to find an identity of its own beyond its entertaining hacking hook and the inspired multiplayer. But those two elements make up a sizeable portion of the game. There are moments of genuine brilliance buried in the game that elevates it above mediocrity, but its reliance on increasingly tired design does it a disservice.
Imaginative, cleverly integrated online play helps to bolster Watch Dogs' less exciting single-player offering, which fails to capitalize on its ambitious hacking concept in any truly memorable way.
Watch Dogs makes up for a snooze-worthy story with heaping amounts of smartly designed diversions scattered around its gorgeous open world.