WATCH DOGS 1 CAMPAIGN REVIEW.

Watch Dogs is a game developed and published by Ubisoft for action adventures. This is the first installment in the series Watch Dogs. The game is played from a third person's point of view, and its world is moved by car or foot. The plot of a singer-player follows a grey hat hacker and vigilante Aiden Pearce who seeks revenge after the killing of his niece, which are part of a fictionalised version of the Chicagoland area of 2013.  It was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, and Wii U in 2014.

GAMEPLAY

Hacker Vibe.

The player controls hacker Aiden Pearce, who uses his smartphone for train control, lighting and security systems infiltration, jam cell phones, accessing personal information and emptying his bank accounts.  The hacking of systems requires puzzles to be solved. The game has an Open World environment that allows free-roaming in a fictional version of Chicago. It has a day-to-day cycle and a dynamic weather system that modifies the conduct of non-player features. The player can use proximity IEDs, grenades, and electronic lures. There is slow-motion gunplay too. Mission approaches can be implemented both lethal and non-lethal.

Aiden can scale up vertical surfaces, forklifts, and aerial work platforms to otherwise inaccessible locations and hide from enemies behind walls. Players have a variety of motorcycles, muscle cars, off-road vehicles, SUVs, luxury vehicles, sports cars and speedboats

Hacking traffic lights to waste people's time.

. It has about 50 songs and can be customised for the car radio. If the player steals a car, its driver can summon the police; if the player has a good reputation, the driver may acquiesce. Detecting (and stopping) crimes can gain a good reputation and a bad reputation is caused by crime.

The skills tree is upgraded by hacking, combat, driving and manufacturing points. Money can be used for buying firearms, equipment and cars. There are many minigames, including killing aliens and controlling a large, robotic spider. Collectibles are QR codes and audio logs; ctOS towers open map icons and side missions.

PLOT

Aiden hacking ATM.

In 2012, Chicago became the world's first city to implement ctOS, a computer system that connects all devices to a single system developed by the Blume technology company.  Hacker Aiden Pearce and his mentor and partner, Damien Brenks, triggered a mute alarm from another hacker while conducting an electronic heist at Merlau's high-end hotel. Damien attempts to find the hacker giving Aiden and himself away. Aiden's fear for his family leads them to safety as a surprise trip to the country. Hitman Maurice Vega attacked them along the way, which led to a car crash that killed his six-year-old niece Lena.

In a baseball stadium a year later, Aiden follows Vega but fails to learn about his contractor's identity. Leaving Vega in the hands of his partner, hired fixer Jordi Chin, Aiden visits Nicole and Jackson, his sister, but learns that someone is harassing them. It was the birthday of Jackson. Aiden tracks the harasser with Clara Lille, a member of the DedSec hacking union, who disclosed to be Damien, who wants to get Aiden to help him find another hacker from the work of the Merlaut. Aiden refuses but, while dealing in dealing with a stadium witness, he learns that Damien kidnapped Nicole,  to force him to do so.  : gang leader and army veteran Delford 'Iraq' Wade. Aiden follows the hacker with Clara's help: gang leader and army veteran Delford 'Iraq' Wade, after establishing the hideout – an unnoticeable former Blume Base with ctOS access.  Aiden infiltrates a human auction to Iraq's server and blackmails Delford's cousin Tyrone "Bedbug" Hayes into being his inside man. Bedbug only gets a sample of data revealing that Iraq has information about nearly every Chicago citizen and uses it to blackmail government officials to protect his gang.

It's not a world map actually.

When Aiden and Clara come across encrypted data beyond their capabilities, they track down legendary hacker and former Blume whistleblower Raymond 'T-Bone' Kenney, who caused the 2003 Northeast blackout while trying to expose the dangers of CtOS that he helped create. While Aiden infiltrates Blume's headquarters to erase Kenney's identity from CtOS, allowing him to return to Chicago, Damien abandons Kenney's location in exchange for full access to CtOS, forcing Aiden to rescue him before Blume's private security forces kill him. Afterwards, he attacks the Iraqi compound to finish downloading his server data, killing Iraq when he confronts him. Aiden, Kenney, and Clara were unable to decrypt the data because another hacker, JB "Defalt" Markowicz, is infiltrating their system, stealing it, and removing it from their servers. Defalt also reveals that Clara was hired to track down Aiden after Merlaut's work, and is therefore indirectly responsible for Lena's death, which causes Aiden to angrily dismiss her. Meanwhile, annoyed by Aiden's lack of progress, Damien reveals his identity to the authorities. After collecting data from Defalt, Kenney helps Aiden track down Nicole, allowing him to rescue her and take her and Jackson out of Chicago for their safety.

As Kenney finishes decrypting the data, he informs Aiden about who ordered the hit: Irish Mob boss and Merlaut owner Dermot "Lucky" Quinn. Aiden confronts Quinn, who reveals that he ordered the hit because he believed that Aiden was searching for secret video footage of Mayor Donovan Rushmore, who killed his secretary after learning of his dealings with Quinn, which the latter had used to extort Rushmore. After killing Quinn by hacking his pacemaker, Aiden is informed by Damien that Quinn has sent hitmen to Clara for his responsibility. Unable to save her, Aiden makes all the chanting material public, enraging Damien, who is starting to wreak havoc in Chicago using ctOS. Aiden shuts down the system using a virus created by Kenney and tracks Damien down to a lighthouse. Jordi arrives, having been hired to kill both men, but Aiden hurts him and kills Damien. Later, one last time, Jordi calls Aiden to tell him where Vega is kept; Aiden heads there and decides his fate.

REVIEW

Ahm Ahm...

Watch Dogs has an impressively detailed map of Chicago. By pressing a button, you can trigger environmental traps that break down chasing cars, empty a citizen's bank account, or even remotely activate a grenade in the enemy's pocket.

Our hero, Aiden Pearce, is an empty trenchcoat as far as personality is concerned. It's remarked at one point that he is suppressing his personality, so it must be intentional, but it doesn't make him a strong character. Luckily, the supporting casting is much more interesting. An enthusiast and cavalier fixator, a gang leader: a super-hacker, and a soft-spoken mob boss, who steals the show and makes it a kind and well-acted group.

Aiden Pierce hacking a camera without even looking at it.

Watch Dogs' completely open map is another great strength: it's vast, diverse, and intricately detailed. The rural area of Pawnee is balancing out Chicago's urban sprawl, and everything looks great, especially at sunset or during a rainstorm. Everything runs smoothly for 30 frames per second, but after playing for a few hours, I started to experience frequent slowdowns when new mission targets were being loaded. Fortunately, they never happened when there was anything interesting going on, but they're definitely noticeable, and they're getting worse as the story goes on.

This techno-thriller fiction is all about the power of information in a super-connected town. Scanning a pedestrian or a brute pops up a brief, randomly generated personal history – some facts about their hobbies or lifestyle, plus their age, occupation, and income. It's a small thing, but it's surprisingly effective in humanising them. I actually felt a pinch of guilt when I accidentally ran someone down and then saw that they were on the waiting list for a liver transplant, and as a result, this is one of the few open-world action games where I rarely went on a violent rampage. And that had very little to do with the meaningless reputation meter, which seems to have no effect whatsoever.

Nice Cars BTW.

Over more than 20 hours, the story of pure vengeance becomes more and more complex until it bursts with intrigue... only to take a strange turn for the mundane when the motivations behind it are revealed. Watch Dogs' villains just don't think very big about a game that deals with issues like surveillance society and media manipulation.

It can take a lot longer than 20 hours, though, because Watch Dogs is extremely good at distracting attention away from the main story with a steady stream of side quests and minigames. I'm a big fan of gang hiding missions that really let you test your stealth skills as you take down well-guarded targets (though it's kind of odd that they're asking you to keep the gang leader alive, but they're cool about killing everyone else). Most of the other activities can be repetitive, such as pre-crime interventions that always result in the same foot chase, but there are so many types, from criminal convoy ambushes to chess and poker to drinking, that they don't get old quickly if you mix up what you're playing.

I admire Ubisoft's restraint in including only one hacking puzzle minigame in an uber hacker hero game, and it's both clever and used infrequently enough that it doesn't get annoying. There's also the ability to take over any surveillance camera you can see, even some worn by guards, and it's put to good use in puzzles where you jump from camera to camera as you try to get a line of sight on a terminal you want to hack.

Watch Dogs' missions are much more stealth-focused than most open-world action games, which give them a great deal of variety. The smooth cover system and the mandatory time-slowing power make the silenced headshots easy to score, and the wet splattering sound it produces is a great, gross reward. I do wish there were fewer missions that would auto-fail you if you were discovered, and that there would be better rewards for using gadgets like a powerful blackout tool to ghost through the area without being spotted or knocking anyone out. The best missions give you the chance to steal or fight, and that makes Aiden feel smarter than a typical gun-blazing maniac.

75 Bullets are more than enough.

After the bullets begin to fly, the cover-based gunplay feels good, even if the arsenal is pretty conventional. The highlight is the pump-action grenade launcher, which makes both the gun and the vehicles short-lived. What often makes the firefights in Watch Dogs memorable is how you can fool enemies by moving behind the cover, causing them to fire in your last known position instead of where you are now. This allows you to make some good flanking moves and makes enemies feel more like foolish humans than all-seeing robots.

Watch Dogs is a good arcadey fun when you get in a car and drive. Cartoonish crash physics and roads littered with tonnes of breakable objects make it spectacular and funny to break through shortcuts. However, because of their lack of combat options, car chases are gradually becoming more and more disappointing and tiresome. You can't fire the window as you drive, so all you can do is drive around hacking to trigger hazards. Half the time you don't even see a car or a trap in the wreckage. And enemy cars are so rubbery that it's impossible to simply outrun them even in the fastest of cars-you've got to hack things to put an end to the chase.

GOODGAMER7 RATING => 10/10

GOODGAMER7 => HIGHLY RECOMMENDED