Watch Dogs disappointed me. It is not a bad game by any measure, but I allowed myself to get swept up with all of the hype and ended up getting a pretty good game that I was expecting to be legendarily perfect. I've been watching Watch Dogs gameplay videos for months before it's release, and I was certain that it would be a GTA caliber city sandbox, maybe its open world fatigue or the fact that bandanas make my eyes roll, but Watch Dogs feels like another Sleeping Dogs or Saint's Row with a different gimmick.
Watch Dogs does get lots of things right, and unique things at that. The profiling of random people walking down the street is amazing, I'm having a shootout with a security guard who my phone is telling me is HIV positive, or the chick I just got in a fender bender with is a member of a doomsday message board. I steal from citizens' bank accounts, and sometimes use the info I get from the profiler to distract them. I had to sneak past a guarded gate, and my profiler informs me that the gunman's wife just left him. I can then fake a text message to the asshole pretending to be his wife returning, and as he looks down to text her back, I pipe him in the back of the head. The hacking system in Watch Dogs is what the game is built upon, and it works very well.
The serial killer side missions are also super interesting. Each hidden location contains a gruesome corpse and a disturbing audio recording from the killer. Clearing out gang hideouts and finding weapon crates hidden in garages are fun little distractions, you can also hack into apartment buildings, watching unsuspecting residents through their laptop cameras or television screens. I watching a divorced single dad jerking off until his daughter crying from the other room interrupts him, and I watched in complete anonymity while a business man made an asian hooker play Russian roulette with him.
The best part of Watch Dogs is inarguably Jordi Chin. Voiced by the super talented Aaron Douglas (Chief from Battlestar Gallactica), Jordi is funny, well-acted and shockingly brutal. He is the best character in the game, and I wish he was the star.
Which brings me to Aiden, Watch Dogs's protagonist. What I liked initially about Aiden is that the game doesn't expect you to develop his powers. Aiden begins his story in Watch Dogs having already mastered hacking, and has long since established his reputation. It is more believable this way, Aiden has been hacking his way around law enforcement for years, so it's no surprise when he has surprising contacts deep within organizations, or when Aiden uses his cellphone to collapse a bridge. The biggest problem is when Clara and Aiden occupy the same screen, which quickly disintegrates into a pile of angsty romantic cliches, topped off with that stupid fucking face bandana.
Watch Dogs does so many unique things correctly that the shortcomings are infuriating. Why can't I move bodies in a stealth mission? The bodies attract attention, so am I not supposed to knock anyone out? If so, why do I have a silencer? Why do I have a stealth takedown? How come Chicago doesn't look like Chicago at all? The Magnificent Mile has been inexplicably renamed The Mad Mile, there's an island in the middle of the city where a secret base is, but the lake is to the east of Chicago, there is no large body of water in the center. The Willis Tower is there, sure, but Wrigley isn't. The Hancock building isn't. The bull statues? The Picassos that line the streets of downtown? The streets aren't actual Chicago street names, and the L trains don't have the names of the real stations. To someone from another place I guess those aren't legitimate complaints, but I'm from Chicago, it is my home and I was super excited to finally play a GTA style game in my city.
The biggest difference between great sandboxes and others are that great open world games make you want to do everything. Recently in GTA5, I did every side quest, every challenge, picked up every collectible. GTAs are almost always a masterpiece, with content so smartly included you can't help but desire to complete it. In Watch Dogs, I do not do the random crime missions, or the convoy missions, or the "tail the target" stealth missions, or the "collect x amount of y" distractions. I don't feel any real incentive to do so, because plainly, Watch Dogs is not as good as some other games of it's genre. Worth playing, not worth 60$
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