It has been a few weeks since I beat the game Watchdogs on the PC. I’ve had some time to let it stew in my head, and these are my thoughts. (Spoilers ahead).
I got the game free with the purchase of a new video card. I had recently upgraded my entire system and this was as good a game as any to test my new system with. On my own I probably wouldn’t have bought the game when it was released, the reviews came back mostly positive but I knew a few people who had lots of trouble running it on their PCs. It booted up and ran fine on mine though and it was a reasonably fun game, you know, when you weren’t really paying attention.
The main character, as many others have noted much better than I, is boring. Most of the plot is stupid and the computer stuff generally doesn’t make sense but fine, I’ll roll with it. I hooked a 360 controller to my PC and found the driving and shooting were good. Using the keyboard and mouse was not as fun. But being able to order any car you had unlocked, and then just go driving around was enjoyable.
Side missions were generally well done. In the vein of run around to find the thing to hack, or run around to find the guy to punch out, or drive around through shortcuts and whatnot. Its fun trying to sneak past the entire staff of guards using only the video cameras to hack your objectives. It generally looks like the programmers put time and effort into making these particular missions work either by run and gun, or by sneak and peak. I only wish they had done more of that every where else.
The games and side missions are a hodge-podge of random things thrown together that end up being less than whole. Each is fun enough in its own way but they don’t connect. And for a game where the whole philosophy is connectivity this feels like blasphemy. Case-in-point, the human trafficking side mission ends with you killing the man responsible. But then at the end credits the TV anchor notes that this man was just arrested. Its just sloppy to have that kind of incongruity.
That example just leads into a point about being given no real choices. Many others have already talked about the beginning of the game having to shoot Maurice. This is only one of the many times that the possibility of a choice is displayed, only to have the gamer figure out that there is no choice. Is this some sort of meta commentary about the nature of man? That we can hack into other people’s lives, see them at their most vulnerable and steal from them, but we can never give back? It feels like they were missing deadlines and started tearing parts out.
My final grief with the game is just everyone else in it. I liked that it wasn’t the cliche wife and son of the main character, but the sister and nephew didn’t end up feeling that different. I guess they did this so he could have his family to protect and still have a “blossoming romance” happen. When he forces his sister out of the only place she has even known to be home, she just accepts it and tries to make Aiden not feel so bad about doing it? Terrible. The mobster isn’t really given any motivation other than a lust for power I guess. The ex-CTOS programmer becomes some crazy junkyard artist which I accepted at first as a clever break from his previous lifestyle, but the fact that he doesn’t change when coming back into fold means either he was always like this, couldn’t adjust quickly, or the writers were too enthralled with a “unique” character to bother making him believable (its never made clear, but I’m pretty sure its the third option). Iraq is the only really interesting NPC in the game and he defaults to the bad guy. I wonder how he learned his epic hacking skills. I invented a whole backstory for him because I was honestly interested but the fact that I had to do that rather than have it revealed to me in the course of the game is another mark against it.
Final word is that its a cool concept and has some cool parts, but in the end it doesn’t live up to the hype. I did like the multiplayer stuff, and I might mess around with that some more, but I won’t be playing through the game a second time. Score – 5 out of 10.
Laughlin's Line 