Watch Dogs Review

WATCH_DOGS REVIEW

Watch dogs (often stylised as Watch_Dogs) is a PEGI 18 rated game published by Ubisoft. It is a game set in modern day times in the outskirts of Chicago;  it is about hacking- in the opening scene it refers to hackers as modern day magicians. The hero, Aiden Pearce, is an empty trenchcoat as far as personality goes. It’s remarked at one point that he’s suppressing his personality, so it must be intentional, but it doesn’t make him a strong character. Fortunately the supporting cast is much more interesting. An enthusiastic and cavalier fixer, a gang leader who I affectionately refer to as Avon Barksdale: Superhacker, and a soft-spoken mob boss steal the show and make it a likeable and well-acted group. Character animations are elegantly done, too.

Watch Dogs blends cutting-edge technologies and sophisticated game design into a realistic and living open world where players must use any means at their disposal to take down a corrupt system.

Watch Dogs’ completely open map is another big strength: it’s huge, diverse, and intricately detailed. The rural area of Pawnee balances out Chicago’s urban sprawl, and it all looks great, especially at sunset or during a rainstorm. Everything runs at a smooth 30 frames per second, however, after playing for a few hours I did start to experience frequent slowdowns when new mission objectives were loading up. Fortunately they never happened when anything interesting was going on, but they’re definitely noticeable and get progressively worse as the story goes on.

Watch dogs has an immense diversity of vehicles that you can easily drive; there are also many missions to play. The main story line (no spoilers are coming) is that Aiden Pierce's niece was murdered by someone and he wants to get back at that person. However, it is not as simple as it sounds, there are many other twists and turns during the game with many other side missions as well.

Watch dogs also provides a great chance of playing online (unfortunately it can't do offline multiplayer) multiplayer against your friends and other players. You can race, hack and loads more. It is a great game!