Watch Dogs Reviews
Ubisoft has certainly upped its game in the past several years, with Watch Dogs being yet another display of both the publisher's ingenuity and willingness to take risks, all for the benefit of players.
Like Grand Theft Auto V before it, sometimes it's not enough to simply be big and well-made. Watch Dogs feels like a collection of promising concepts with nothing solid holding them together. Aiden Pearce should have been that something, but instead, he's just a character meant to sell cool looking hats in collector's editions. Perhaps that can be rectified in a sequel, but for now, Pearce is pretty big issue, and so is his propensity to kill people in boring, cover-based shooter-y ways.
Watch Dogs is an origin story of sorts for a vigilante killer. Aiden Pearce is to Chicago what Batman is to Gotham, or more a more apt comparison would be to describe Pearce as more of a high-tech Punisher. The story is adequate to pull players through to the end and you can play much of the game approaching situations in your own, non-violent way, but the campaign forces extreme gunplay more than we wanted.
Watch Dogs is solidly entertaining and a lot of fun to play. And while it could've achieved true greatness if it had followed through on its most ambitious promises, it is still better than a lot of what's been released this year. The hype seems already to be benefiting the sales figures. Everything about Watch Dogs tells us that we are all susceptible in the digital age.
Watch Dogs isn't a hack job, but it isn't the next-gen revolution that many were expecting either. It's a game largely made up of mediocre bits and pieces, but is elevated far beyond the sum of its parts by its brilliantly dynamic sandbox and often gripping mission design. You'll want to see Aiden Pearce's tale through to its conclusion despite its flaws, but it's those unpredictable and sometimes spectacular moments of vigilante justice that will keep you connected to Ubisoft's latest open world.
Watch Dogs on PS4 executes fresh gameplay ideas with aplomb, marking one of the first games of this new generation of consoles to innovate within its genre. It's a slower, smarter sandbox shooter with an astounding degree of content, but despite resonant themes of technological overbearance, its poorly handled story likely won't grip you.
Although we would have liked greater rewards and penalties, the technology powering multiplayer is impressive, and there's lots to do, from hacking rivals and hunting fixers, to searching for files and escaping a tablet-controlled police force. After an opening act bogged down by tutorials and dodgily scripted story sequences, Watch Dogs removes the shackles, takes some chances and begins to live up to its own hype. Despite its pacing issues, Watch Dogs manages to tell a worthwhile story that's backed up by some novel new ideas in both single and multiplayer.
[I]t will fray your nerves and test your mind. But won't hack its way into your heart.
Watch Dogs won't please everyone. Its shallow narrative and bland protagonist detract, but those looking for a finely-crafted open world game that eschews parody and satire for an overall darker tone will have a great time in Watch Dogs' digital Chicago.
With Watch Dogs, Ubisoft Montreal has created an interesting, immersive and innovative new IP, which will hopefully end up marking the beginning of a great series.
Watch Dogs may not be the "next-gen" game that many had the expectations for, but it is a fantastic game that is worth experiencing. Hacking is both your weapon and your toy. Enemies will cower at your feet and the city will bend to your will as you walk amongst the low-tech plebs. Unique gameplay and a beautiful living world sets Watch Dogs apart, establishing itself as a great outing and the strong foundation of a new franchise.
Ultimately, the vast amount of content that you get for Watch Dogs help inspire us to overlook its graphical shortcomings. It may simply be yet another GTA clone that didn't meet our expectations, but it still plays efficiently and offers a staggering amount of fun for players to explore every pocket of this tech-noir version of Chicago.
The game won't be for folks who prefer a more straightforward action game or shooter. But if you're a fan of open world games and would like to try one with a more cerebral approach, then you'll want to hack into Watch Dogs and give the title a spin.
Watch Dogs is a very good game - and occasionally a great one - but not a landmark game or any sort of classic. It's a fine open-world game with a fantastically detailed setting, and one you'll happily play for weeks. In fact, with a good thirty to forty hours of content, that's probably what it's going to take.
Watch Dog's gritty story and dystopian near-future are paper-thin, but the amount of stupid fun you can have running around Chicago and "hacking" things more than makes up for it.
Watch Dogs is a solid game, but I feel it falls short of the mark Ubisoft set for it. The single-player experience is a decent length and there's plenty to do around town, it's just too bad I never know what the game wants me to focus on. Aside from that, the game's world is rich in fascinating points of interest for you to explore. Throw in some decent multiplayer that works somewhat seamlessly with the single-player and it's an overall solid game. Too bad Aiden is just such a cardboard prop.
The fact that Watch Dogs has come out as second-best against the juggernaut that is the Grand Theft Auto franchise doesn’t mean it’s a bad game; it’s quite the opposite. It’s quite a great achievement for a brand new IP to come out and be as good as it is and to also try to do some new things on such a large scale. Its multiplayer is by far one of Watch Dogs‘ stand out components and this is where you’ll start to see some great videos floating around online from the community as they invade your game. Watch Dogs has dozens of hours of content and will certainly keep you entertained its world and what’s on offer.
Treated like the Second Coming, Watch Dogs has arrived riding a tidal wave of hype and has turned out not to be a momentous event in gaming, but instead just a great game. In some ways, Ubisoft has done it a disservice by creating expectations it could never live up to, as this is a wholly entertaining experience on its own terms. The campaign is massive and full of enthralling missions, the voice acting and characterization (outside of Aiden) is impeccable and it's jam packed with enough content to keep gamers satisfied until Grand Theft Auto VI.
Watch Dogs might not be the defining next-gen experience that Ubisoft has claimed it would be, however, being able to hack your way through Chicago might be one of the must fun open-world experience I've had to date, save for Saints Row 4 of course.
Watch Dogs is here and it's good but not great.