Technology sure has made life easier. We all rely on it in some form. Hell, you’re reading this on technology… I’m even typing it on some. Hello! As a species, we’ve gone from wood carvings, to paperwork, to putting all our data in the cloud, or stashed on a server somewhere.
Although fancy tech is convenient, it’s not without its disadvantages. I’m not talking about ‘iconic’ cap-wearing bros like Aiden Pearce, the protagonist of Watch Dogs, hacking into your personal information, either. As you’ll know if you’ve ever had a gaming PC, the more advanced the tech, the more inconsistent it can be. You can sum up Watch Dogs with that word: inconsistency.
For starters, the game doesn’t look anywhere near as nice as its initial reveal. During the day, the streets of Chicago look drab and grey, with road textures looking flat and lifeless. It’s a nocturnal city, coming alive much more on a rainy night – the rain pools together, creating the illusion of depth and shape on the ground.
The problem is, the things in Watch Dogs that are visually impressive are just down to the power of the consoles, with particle effects and dynamic lighting playing a major role in the eye candy – all things that are going to be standard for current-gen games going forward, I imagine.
It’s nothing to do with the art style, with its over-designed protagonist, who can only buy variations of the same coat from every shop in Chicago. And it’s not down to the streets, which are washed-out doppelgangers, every corner looking the same – this Chicago has no sense of place.
After finishing the game, I never passed a single location and recognised it – yet I feel like I could whizz around Los Santos without a map and still know my way. On top of this, there’s even technical issues: I’ve seen vehicles spawning, textures not loading, indoor rain, stock reflections, and plenty more.
These inconsistencies extend to the story, too. At times, the story’s engaging, but you’re soon pulled out of it by Aiden Pearce – an unlikeable vigilante who kills more people than he helps, grabs women by the throat as soon as he meets them, and talks in a Batman voice just because.
The driving is passable, with the handling model mostly satisfying, especially on the motorbikes. The vehicles all act like tanks, though, ploughing through every car you hit and hardly taking any damage in the process – this takes the thrill out of a high speed pursuit, somewhat. Not as much as the fact that you can hop on a train to escape police, or jump into water, or drive a boat… every single time – police can’t follow railway tracks, swim or drive boats, apparently.
Only the helicopter will pursue you if you choose any of these three tactics, and you can disable that with your phone, which acts more like a rechargeable special ability than a hacking tool: tap button to disable helicopter; tap button to raise bollards; tap button to lift bit of cover; tap button to make road sign display ridiculous meme; tap button to spy on people having sex.
It works the same during firefights, too. You can whizz around the battlefield from CCTV camera to CCTV camera, triggering environmental hazards to take out the majority of enemies, but it’s often more convenient to just ghost around the flaky AI and bash them all with your baton.
Or you can use a silenced weapon, which pretty much breaks the game. When enemies see you, you have a few seconds to break line of sight and it doesn’t trigger their alert status. If you’re a quick enough shot, you can just sit behind cover headshotting everyone with a silenced pistol, popping up and down like a deranged meerkat. Pop up from cover. Headshot. Hide a second. Repeat. “He’s got a sniper rifle,” the enemies scream. No, I haven’t.
There’s a glimmer or two of good mission design, but for every great mission there’s a terrible one – insta-fail car stealth sound good?
Watch Dogs, like Assassin’s Creed before it, feels like the template for better games to come – a prototype, its true potential to be revealed once it loses the shackles of cross-gen development and terrible design decisions. For Aiden Pearce, Watch Dogs is an origin story for his vigilante persona – he should have saved his Batman voice for the sequel – the whole story setting up the next game. I’d suggest you wait until then. You won’t miss much.
