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Multiplayer here, for example, is so much fun it should be illegal. A more coherent sense of freedom from the story component would have been good, but it’s clear how the two just don’t get along.īut is it acceptable? That’s a question for you and your requisites for this type of game. This works heavily against the idea of an open-world, and as I’ve mentioned a few times, its design is at odds with the peripheral activity available to the player. Missions are also a bit linear, and the narrative feels a bit on-rails at times. Unlocking ctOS spots and opening up your peripheral activities, for example, is borrowed a little too heavily from other Ubisoft games, and works against the game being its own beast. There is a sense of familiar design though, and it often doesn’t gel with what the game is working towards. It’s the sort of design sensibility you don’t often see, where less is more, despite ‘more’ being popular and marketable elsewhere. Movement and combat are sublime in Watch Dogs - switching into cover and remaining stealth is handled here with aplomb, while your contextual movement through the game-world while in action mode is slick and stylish - it’s here you can feel the Ubisoft pedigree at work, but rather than copying the AC series, Watch Dogs holds back on the parkour to give you a more believable and grounded set of movement tools.
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It’s important, however, to make note that where the GTA series usually fails, Watch Dogs succeeds and this has nothing to do with your in-game mobile phone and its superpower. Initially you might feel overwhelmed at your options, but once you learn restraint and recourse, it really does become the slogan: “Hacking is your weapon”, and you’ll wonder how games like this ever existed without it. In fact it’s in the hacking side of things that you learn to make the journey your own, and playing with the city in this way is one of the most enjoyable aspects of the whole experience. Early on in your story the game will guide you through most of what you can do outside of revenging and the hacking component is a tether between you and every activity in the game. It’s not an entirely diametric situation though. It’s these parts of the game that keep it all moving, but they’re perhaps too disconnected to the game’s story to be driving components meaning you’ll often find yourself side-tracked with them forgetting your quest or, you’ll get too tied to your quest to worry about sinking yourself into all the city has to offer. You can even dabble in what’s called a Digital Trip to arcade your off-story experience up the wazoo - these are perhaps my favourite breaks from the story in the game, and I sincerely hope we see more and more in post-release content - combine Carmageddon and Mad Max, and you’ll know what I’m talking about with these.Ĭollecting cars, buying clothes, crafting and more are all cogs in your peripheral gameplay machine. You can pick up different music tracks playing around the game-world like you were using Shazam on your phone and add them to your collection, or you can engage in fun augmented reality games riddled throughout the playspace. These also come with historical notations which works to further that sense of this Chicago being alive and functional, but does feel a bit borrowed from Assassin’s Creed. You can check into myriad locations as if you were using Foursquare, and you can also leave goodies for other players in the real-world as rewards. There’s a lot to do in the stunningly recreated city and most activities do lead towards the progression of your character and therefore your game. While I alluded to the game’s misguided sense of player-choice earlier, it’s important to point out that outside of its story, Watch Dogs is a heck of a lot of fun. We’ll get to the wonderful asymmetrical design of multiplayer shortly, but first we need to talk peripheral. I never encountered any slow-down or performance hiccups, except for a few times in multiplayer, and given the deliberate trainwreck that can become (in a good way), I can see why. Its draw-distance is second-to-none and the engine always feels like it’s two steps ahead of what you’re doing. Whether it’s a gusty, sunny Chicago day or a rainy night, the game never ceases to amaze.