When the first Saints Row was released for the Xbox 360, it filled a void. There was no Grand Theft Auto for the new systems and wouldn’t for quite some time, and while Saints Row was clearly influenced by Rockstar’s creations, it did well just because it offered people all of the stealing cars and shooting people that they wanted and couldn’t yet get.
It was a perfectly serviceable enough clone, but it didn’t offer a personality of its own and when Grand Theft Auto IV finally returned, it didn’t even see Saints Row as it stepped on its climb back to the top. It wasn’t until the next few Saints Row installments that Volition lost (or found) its mind and decided to forgo the usual “man building a criminal empire piece by piece” style and just go nuts. They put the focus on ridiculous fun and eventually turned you into a straight-up superhero. They found their own niche and hit it hard, finally creating a unique, entertaining game that didn’t feel like the titles that had spawned it.
Turns Out That Neither PS4 Or Xbox One Watch Dogs Versions Are 1080p
Why bring this up now? Watch Dogs feels like it's in the same situation. Its next-gen installments fill a market that GTA has yet to satisfy and does it well—but does it do it differently enough? The answer—somewhat.
The hacking stuff that’s so predominantly featured in the marketing (which allows you to use your cell phone to hack into any of inhabitants of Chicago or the city’s infrastructure with a push of a button) sadly takes a backseat to the usual GTA tropes. There is plenty of hacking but that isn’t the focus here—it's about shooting people and stealing cars.
Watch Dogs falls victim to the same things a lot of GTA clones do, too. Why are we collecting all this money, hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of dollars, when there’s nothing to purchase except clothes and guns? What rationale does your character have for becoming a mass murdering sociopath who runs over people and kills cops without a second thought?
Real-life Parkour, Hacking, Pranks- Ubisoft's Brilliant Watch Dogs Marketing [VIDEOS]
That last issue is the most egregious, actually. The story makes a half-assed attempt to humanize protagonist Aiden Pearce and give him a reason to become the man known by the unimaginative in-game media as “The Vigilante,” which is that his niece was killed during an attempted assassination. Aiden blames himself for her death and sets out to find the people responsible.
It’s not like he was leading a clean life. He’s a hacker that steals people’s money using his cell phone—going from a thief on a vendetta to a vigilante—who doesn’t hesitate to kill anyone with any sort of criminal past is even sillier. You can easily become a menace to the city through your actions too if you run over pedestrians the citizenry will really get mad at you, although if you walk by them they’ll never recognize you unless a tv is broadcasting your image that very second (You also always wear the same clothes, even to sleep, so Aiden’s on some Clark Kent-level deception). Funnier still are missions that make you teach some crime lord a lesson by knocking him out. Sure, kill all his men and destroy his property, but make sure not to kill him too! That would be awful.
Of course, Watch Dogs does the GTA thing really damn well. The cars control wonderfully and running from cops is even more fun once you start unlocking hacks to the city infrastructure, allowing you to control things like drawbridges, underground steam pipes and traffic lights, all the better to stop pursuing enemies. Hacking also lets you tag enemies and see them through walls, and there are many sections where you have to hack your way along through multiple cameras, hacking camera by camera to enter otherwise inaccessible places and open unlocked doors and get information. These parts are fun but again, they aren’t the focus on the game- that’s the gunplay, driving, the usual. Fortunately there's a progression to things, as the farther you get into the game the more skills you’ll earn, since every action earns you xp that lets you level up and put points into hacking, driving, guns, and more.
But the game isn't just cribbing from GTA, it's also has learned from Saints Row’s journey to not take itself so seriously. The game’s got a lot of GTA-style sexual innuendo and absurdity, mostly revealed by hacking into people’s houses (the things people get up to in the privacy of their own homes…), but the game also lets you take a full-on journey into the bizarre. You can find some drug dealers that offer you “Digital Trips”, which are incredibly fun, almost little games in themselves. In one you find yourself driving a monster muscle car along a fiery landscape straight out of hell, running over flame-headed demons; in another, you pilot a gigantic spider mech and terrorize the city, jumping up skyscrapers and smashing every vehicle you can find.
Each trip allows its own skill levels and experience system and gives you a range of missions to perform, allowing you to easily lose hours into each one- they’re insane and fun and you’ll be completely absorbed before you realize that you should probably get back to the main story.
There are a ton of things to do besides that, though. You can stop crimes that are happening, you can take down criminal convoys, you can play AR (augmented reality) games that let you shoot virtual aliens or collect virtual coins along a path. You can check into local attractions in the game’s version of Foursquare and read up about the sordid history of Chicago. You can steal and sell cars, you can run races, and to find all of this stuff you can climb buildings to hack into towers and identify all of the local events, a la Assassin's Creed’s synchronization.
At one point you can come across the scene of a grisly murder and open a new “Investigation” series of events that lets you track down a serial killer, which is exciting until you realize that it involves you going around to look at checkpoints on a map and not, y’know, investigating.
But regardless, you will absolutely never run out of things to do. There’s really no way that will ever happen when combined with the game’s online modes. The game is always connected and will regularly give you opportunities for multiplayer matches as you play the single-player campaign. There are races and matches that see people competing to steal a critical file, and a full-featured freeroaming mode that lets you hunt down enemy fixers with friends.
Another great mode utilizes the companion app for iOS, Android and Kindle. In that someone who’s download the Watch Dogs CTOS app can use the city against you, laying down traps and sending police after you as you try to hit a certain number of checkpoints. It’s a pretty thrilling mode but still the best are the hacking and tailing modes, in which you invade someone’s game. It’s something ripped straight out of Dark Souls but with hacker flair—at certain points in your game someone will enter and start stealing your information. You have to run around trying to identify the hacker before he or she absconds with your info, and if you do, take them down. On either end it's exhilarating, perhaps more so when you’re trying to blend into a crowd or duck down in a car so your victim doesn’t see you. You can turn this option off in the menu but I really recommend you ever do.
Then there’s the story, which takes a few dark turns as Aiden continues to get his family and friends sucked deeper into his dark life and then tries to get them all out. It even offers the usual surprise backstabbing that you'd never, ever see coming—unless you've played a game in the last decade. As with most games of this type the otherwise boring campaign takes a backseat to the sheer madness you cause. Why would you care about taking care of your sister when you can explode a city with a giant spider mech, after all?
As fun and amazing as it is (and as great as it looks on next-gen, even if it’s infuriating that a game on these systems still has some pop-up issues) you still can’t help but feel like it’s not different enough to make it stand out. That if a new GTA came swooping down to show people how things are done you’d forget this game even existed.
Maybe in the next iteration or two Watch Dogs will find its own personality and become its own unstoppable beast. There’s certainly a ton to like here, and you’ll spend hours upon hours sucked into it, exploring, collecting, and having fun with the multiplayer. It’s an immensely polished experience, it just didn’t have enough guts to try its own thing.
---
Watch Dogs was reviewed from a PS4 retail copy provided by Ubisoft. The game is also available on Xbox One, Xbox 360, PS3 and PC, with a Wii U version hitting later this year.
