Watch Dogs (PS4)

January 23, 2017

Watch Dogs (PS4)

I remember that when Watch Dogs was released back in 2014 it received a lot of negativity and because of that I didn't even consider playing it back then. When Watch Dogs 2 came out last year I thought that if they made a sequel, the first game can't be that bad can it?

It turns out I was right and the negative reviews were mostly unfounded and Watch Dogs was just a game that happened to be too overhyped and not everyones high expectations were met. I guess the same thing happened to Assassin's Creed: Unity which actually was a pretty good, if not great game but people still liked bashing the crap out of it.

What have I learned from this? Well firstly, to keep expectations low or at least not too high but more importantly, ignore other people's opinions and form your own.

I mentioned Assassin's Creed already and Watch Dogs is very similar in many aspects. It's an open world game where the city of Chicago is your playground and electronic devices of all kind are your weapons. You play as Aiden Pierce, a lone hacker seeking revenge for the death of his niece. With the help of his phone and the skills of a hacker he's ready to expose the corruption in the city and take down the people who threaten his family.

If you've played Far Cry or Assassin's Creed you'll see the similarities quite quickly. In Watch Dogs as in those games, missions mainly consists of you sneaking into enemy territory taking out enemies one by one to reach your goal. What's cool about Watch Dogs is that you can hack security cameras and from a distance use the environment to take out enemies instead of getting your hands dirty. You can of course use guns and explosives as well. The others similarity are the towers scattered around the city, that you can climb to open up new parts of the city and the new activities within them.

There's a lot of driving in the game as well and like GTA you can steal vehicles but this time by hacking their locks or order cars on demand once you've unlocked them. You can't shoot your gun while driving but that is not actually a huge problem since being chased by cops or other bad guys is actually quite fun once you've gained the ability to hack traffic lights, blockers, steam pipes and bridges.

The biggest problem with Watch Dogs is the many uninspiring and repetitive side missions that luckily can be skipped. The main missions are varied enough to keep you interested until the very end and I aside from Aiden I thought the supporting characters were pretty cool too. I think I'm now ready for Watch Dogs 2.