Watch Dogs: A mixed bag

I just finished playing Watch Dogs, and .. damn. I have conflicting feelings.

It's not a bad game, by any means. It's also not a OMG AMAZING game, either.

I enjoyed the combat, the stealth gameplay (TO AN EXTENT!) and the hacking. The shooting was decent enough for a 3rd person shooter. The guns had actual range and spread to them, making them feel different enough to use multiple.

You don't really need to use many guns, though, dissapointingly. There's no real reason to upgrade your weapons, you just need a silenced weapon for stealth missions, and then a weapon with decent range to kill dudes who are far away. Sniper rifles are for the most part unnecessary, and a lack of silenced sniper rifles means you won't use them at range much, either.

Hacking and Stealth gameplay are incredibly fun together, when you're hacking cameras and then overloading electronics, or hacking grenades to kill your enemies while you're 1000 miles away, sitting in cover, safe and sound. I actively sought out bases and played through story missions so I'd have more enemy encounters I could go through, killing as many guys as I could before I'd have to take out my silenced goblin and finish them off personally.

Now, I said I enjoyed the stealth to an EXTENT. That's because this game has fail states, which is fucking TERRIBLE to include in modern games. If I get detected by the enemies? So fucking what, let me deal with the problem myself. If they saw me and I fucked up, make me fight the angry horde of enemies who discovered me. Don't say "MISSION FAILED RESTART AND RE-WATCH THIS UNSKIPPABLE CUTSCENE"! It's infuriating.

It's not such an issue in the missions where you're sneaking through an enemy base and have to be undetected -- so long as you use a silenced weapon, you can actually kill most of the guys and get through fine, although for some reason takedowns alert them, so you're forced to sneak or kill them.

THE DRIVING STEALTH THOUGH? HOLY BALLS THAT IS THE WORST THING I'VE EVER PLAYED IN A VIDEOGAME, It is the most RAGE inducing bullshit you will ever come across. You're forced to stay in a vehicle to escort someone, and you can't be detected on the road, or MISSION FAILED. There are two of them in the story missions, and lordy did I ever come close to snapping my controller in half. You're supposed to drive "sneakily" with driving mechanics that are "alright" but not perfect (more on that later) and it's just ridiculous. You have a helicopter stalking you, so you have to keep moving, but you have to drive down alleys and follow specific paths, or else you'll fail. It is one of the worst mechanics from the past, and I hate it so fucking much that I almost didn't finish the game because of it. Total bullshit.

Driving in the game is serviceable, but ANY missions that require driving are going to be tedious, boring, and very likely frustrating. Which is hilarious, because one of the best "digital trips" (VR drugs) is Madness, which is based SOLELY around driving. It highlights one of the things that makes driving through the game totally suck balls though, and that's the other drivers. When there's no cars on the road and your goal is to mow down dudes to collect their souls? INCREDIBLE. You have a fast car and no obstacles, it's just super fun. Having a super fast car and 1000 cars on the road, with some on narrow ass bridges to guarantee at some point you're going to slam into their ass a 200mph? Annoying as hell. The driving just doesn't feel "tight", it gets you from A to B, but it's just not all the way there yet. I can't put my finger on it, but it doesn't feel as good as driving does in other sandbox games.

Also, the radio in the game is so terrible. There's about 30 songs total, and about 3 or 4 from random genres. I had to keep skipping through rap, punk rock, and classic rock (all of which were the worst representations of their genre) just to find a smashing pumpkins song, which even then wasn't one of their best. The best thing on the radio is the handful of techno songs, and even those aren't that great. It's to the point where you'll end up playing with the radio turned off for the most part, because the song selection is TERRIBLE. I'm assuming this is because it's a new IP and Ubi didn't want to throw a ton of money at licensing (which would eat up their budget very fast) but damn, atleast pick something good from public domain, or indie music, eesh.

Story in the game is pretty good, a bit cliche, but overall enjoyable. I liked Aidan, he seemed kind of like a hacker-batman. The story gets a bit convoluted towards the halfway point, and your goals seems washed out, but it plays like a action movie, and I love them, so it was pretty good.

Overall, if you're looking for something to play? I'd say the game is worth the $60 I threw down on it. If you have a backlog and are looking for the "next big thing" -- work on your backlog, this game will not "wow" you. I haven't played any of the assassins creeds games, but I hear that this game is very similar to "assassins creed 1", in that it had big goals and ambitions, just needed a lot of work.

That's definitely what I'd say about this game, it's a damn good game, and you can see what they wanted to do with it, it just needs a lot of work. Overall, glad I bought it, definitely worth it, good, not great.

Look forward to seeing what Ubi does with this IP in the future.