Dubai: Take two parts Grand Theft Auto and one part Assassin’s Creed. Blend well. Season with plenty of cybercrime spice. Bake onto a DVD and serve.
That’s pretty much the recipe for the long-awaited Watch Dogs, and while it’s easy to dismiss that as imitative, the result is a fascinating open-world mix of driving, shooting and puzzle-solving.
And while I don’t think Watch Dogs is greater than the sum of its parts, I do think it can hold its head up in the same company. Ubisoft Montreal have created a tasty dish.
Expectations for Watch Dogs have been running very high, and by and large the game delivers on its promises — though it did crash twice on my first evening’s play. Fortunately save points are fairly regular, and the PS4 rebooted it quickly.
Astute readers will notice the qualification: it delivers, but it doesn’t exceed. There’s been a lot of hype about the game — that it will change the face of open-world games, that it’s a new way to play. It doesn’t, and if you expect that, you will be disappointed.
What it does deliver is a rich, open-world action driver/shooter with great variety of side missions, side games and collectibles.
There is, of course, a central storyline — we play hacker Aiden Pearce, whose niece has been killed in revenge for a crime he committed some years ago. Pearce wants revenge, and has turned to the life of a vigilante to get it.
Much to explore
How gripping the storyline is, I cannot say, partly because Ubisoft has asked reviewers to avoid spoilers, and partly because I’ve spent far more time exploring the open world than I have following the story path, as is my wont with such games.
There is much to explore. Pearce can hack into game-Chicago’s databases and CCTV networks using his smartphone. Each region has a base station that must be unlocked to reveal the area’s secrets, much like Assassin’s Creed’s eagle towers.
Once Pearce is hacked in, he can track crimes in progress — his reputation as a vigilante increases if he can stop them without fatalities — locate gang hideouts, and other side missions.
He also gains information on any person he tracks with face recognition through CCTV. This usually reveals their name, job, salary and a bit of gossip about them. Some people have hackable phones, which enables you to listen into their calls or texts, siphon money from their bank accounts, or get bits of code needed to build lures and other devices.
This does reveal Pearce’s puzzling moral outlook — he objects to criminals blackmailing civilians, and metes out his vigilante justice upon them, but has no qualms about draining the bank account of someone suffering from leukaemia.
Pearce can also control many of the city’s functions, such as traffic lights, retractable bollards and swing bridges, which allow you some control over the environment when driving, and give the ability to overload transformers or steam pipes, which can aid in combat.
Avoiding combat
Combat itself usually offers you the choice of sneaking in, taking down your target, and sneaking out again, or going for the shoot-out. Cover’s important in either case — you can’t take too many hits before dying.
In some cases, you may be able to avoid combat altogether by hacking your way to the target.
Driving is a big part of the game, and driving missions are quite varied — at various times you’ll be racing from checkpoint to checkpoint, trying to ram a target off the road, hiding from cops (I must develop the helicopter-hacking ability), or taking down a target defended by blocker cars.
I’m a notoriously bad video game driver, Mario Kart being about my level, and I find the driving challenging but achievable.
Watch Dogs is a fun, varied game with plenty of options. What it lacks is the little touch of magic, the immersion that lifts a game from being really good to being great. It isn’t quite the kind of game we’ll be speaking of in awed terms, as we do Assassin’s Creed II, GTA Vice City and Red Dead Redemption.
But it’s close.
