Watch Dogs

[IamLEAM1983]

My car sidles along the road. I conservatively stop at the light and pull ever so slightly onto the kerb, to abandon it. The surrounding traffic honks and protests because I'm blocking half a lane, but I don't care, honestly. This isn't my car.

I walk for a few blocks, hands in the pockets of my trenchcoat. Chicago's wearing its best fall colors, which makes the Gold Coast feel roughly worthy of its name. The waters of Lake Michigan shimmer off in the distance and to my left, but I'm not really here to take in the view. I need money, and public spaces like the shoreline's oft-travelled sidewalks are perfect for a few rounds of postmodern pickpocketing.

I pull out my Profiler as I keep walking. To the uninitiated, this gizmo's just another smartphone. To me, it's a skeleton key to all of the city's computer-enabled infrastructure. These days, everyone's a walking 4G or LTE blip on the city-wide radar, and my Profiler can use their network-assigned address to pull out a three-line summary of whoever it is I focus on. Here's a young professional physical therapist who's into BDSM. There's a fortysomething executive with a weight problem and three wives, none of whom are aware of one another. Oh, and the guy over there? He writes MLP fanfiction, whenever he's not being a respected post-graduate professor.

The Profiler lets me know that he has a little Savings account – probably alongside a fat credit margin and a few Visa and MasterCard stubs – and lets me swipe four hundred and fifty dollars from his virtual pockets. All I need to do in order to collect that cash is withdraw it from any ATM I could run into.

A few blocks later, my phone chimes again and has me focus on a middle-aged man in business wear. He's carrying a briefcase and looks pretty hurried... I check my own screen, and realize that I can intercept his current text messages.

Ooooh, now this is interesting... Mister Briefcase is hard at work, hm? Sorry, Wifey, but I can see your husband right now, and he's taking a pretty brisk walk well far and away from the residential areas. Where's he off to, I wonder? Does he have an affair, or does he happen to dip into something that's more unsavory? I elect to keep an eye on him and wait for a bike to park nearby. I jump on while the owner's unaware and roll out, keeping a careful block's worth of cars between us. He finds his own car and heads well away from Bucktown, into the industrial district. He's driving like he knows where he's going.

We stop at an old meat-packing plant, and I realize the place is more than properly guarded. Russian accents are everywhere and the weapons look intimidating. I could pull out my own assault rifle and shotgun, but I'd much rather infiltrate this place discreetly. A few thrown electronic lures later, I'm inside the plant. The next two guards aren't too much of a challenge, as I elect to hack one guy's cell phone so it suddenly rings – after having changed his ringtone to an angry dog's barks. His partner was apparently diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and I'd figured I'd try and see how he would react to sudden and dangerous sounds...

As expected, Guard 2 freaks out and blows Guard 1 to kingdom come, immediately bemoaning his fate in anguished Russian. This allows me to sneak up behind him – but I don't want to let him alert his comrades, however. One quick pull on my collapsible nightstick and one solid bop later, he's out cold. I slink in.

Past the rows of meat hanging on hooks, things take a turn for the sophisticated. A red carpet appears and the plant's industrial surroundings suddenly start to look like elements out of a Grimy Chic decoration manual. I peek around one last corner and find a small room, about the size of a peep show theater. The difference is that there's no porn being broadcasted; I'm seeing full-length pictures of girls, with their vital statistics printed underneath, like they're slabs of meat about to be purchased.

Mister Briefcase is in the sex trade, then, and sex trade of the worst possible kind. I'm no angel myself, but I'd never stoop so low. I'd never agree to something as degrading as this. I can see bruises on the face of several of the girls, and very few managed to look fetching or glamorous for their full-body shot. Most look terrified, with arms hugging their waist or eyes staring straight ahead, like frightened deer in the headlights.

I need to ruin this operation, and ruin it now. Luckily, I've recently acquired the ability to blanket an entire city block in a forced blackout, thanks to my remote box's ability to momentarily isolate and turn off pockets of the ctOS network. The hard drives are running, so I know that while a blackout won't destroy all their data, it'll at least prevent them from saving their proofs of purchase. It'll put a severe monkey wrench in their plans, and what my Blackout virus can't finish, my bullets can.

One touchpad press later, the private room erupts into screams as the entire place goes dark. The remaining guards immediately focus on trying to find the source of the disturbance, and I hide behind the rear-most seats in the theater. I'm forced to gun down the last guard with my silenced pistol, but am otherwise able to let them run off towards the front of the plant. This gives me a little window to try and access their server room physically. Prior to the blackout, I could've tried to hack my way in remotely, but I couldn't reach the back of the plant on foot without alerting more guards. This time, I had no choice.

That done, I pull out a small machine gun and unload into their screens and rigs. Good luck trying to complete purchases now, you monsters!

This, for all intents and purposes, is Watch Dogs.

Developed by Ubisoft Montreal alongside Ubi Reflections and Ubi Shanghai, this is most assuredly one of the studio's most ambitious projects in the last five years. It's not a sequel, it's not a reboot or an offshoot, and despite some narrative tie-ins to the Assassin's Creed universe and lore, it still is very much its own beast. Depending on the version you'll pick, it has the potential to be a very pretty, if somewhat bog-standard open-world game in appearance. Mechanically speaking, it also is actually fairly rote, while the central concept of your main character being a hacker opens up gameplay options that feel rather novel. It might echo the very nineties-worthy notion that the Web is somehow able to interface with everything, but it does so in a way that packs a lot of near-future versimilitude and that speaks rather plainly to our fears regarding privacy invasion and the abuses that corporate heads and government officials could perpetrate with this increased control.

In the game's universe, the 2006 New York blackout wasn't caused by autonomous computer failure, but rather by a hacker who'd managed to paralyze the heart of the Big Apple for several agonizing hours. This, apparently, has led some groups to call for tighter forms of online security and for smarter city infrastructures. As the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, predictive analytics and digitized criminal records meshed with data mining from ISPs and cell phone providers, along with CCTV camera networks, in order to create ctOS – the computerized heart and brain of many a north-american city by 2016, if you go by the game's lore. Chicago is apparently one such smart city, a gilded cage where privacy can be invaded by just about anyone and your darkest of secrets can be revealed by just a few keystrokes. The city itself knows about you, and if it does know about you, then you can assume the authorities do too. You understand that ctOS offers a lot of conveniences for your average law-abiding citizen, but innocence and privacy become extremely mutable concepts. Chicago is now a nice and sunny Orwellian microcosm, in a sense – and nobody's complaining.

You are Aiden Pearce, a former thug and fairly gifted hacker whose last high-profile job cost him a loved one. Nine months later, you're back in the Windy City with a vengeance, ready to combine your data-mining prowess with your ability at busting heads in single combat. You've seen the heart of ctOS, and it is unabashedly corrupt. Safety isn't its priority so much as profit, and extending its reach across all of North America, until all of the world's metropolises will be blanketed by a system of which a few privileged murderers and thieves have all the keys. Honor seemingly demands that you beat them at their own game.

On the surface, you'd be forgiven for thinking Watch Dogs is in the same ballpark as Grand Theft Auto V or Sleeping Dogs. You drive cars, exit them in a hurry, whip out your guns, shoot armed mooks, dive back into your mode of transportation and exit the scene. Bam, you're done.

Except – that's not how you'll be best served by the game. As Watch Dogs is a Frankenstein's Monster of all previous Ubisoft franchises, your return to Chi-town means you've lost access to the different boroughs' ctOS hubs over the past nine months. Regaining control is much like attaining control of the Rook Islands in FarCry 3, or synchronizing Viewpoints in Assassin's Creed titles. Each hub you seize reveals ten to fifteen different activities, ranging from races to assassination contracts, car thefts or online missions. Reaching the server hub can be done guns blazing, of course, but you'll gain far more experience points by sneaking your way through security measures undetected. As could be expected of a Ubisoft title that has Blacklist's flexible cover system, stealth is considered crucial. To make it sink in, the game isn't afraid to hammer you in ways that aren't quite brutal, but that certainly offer a challenge.

Of particular note is the game's array of Fixer contracts. Going by the game's fiction, a Fixer is someone who's hired to go after any member of Pearce's sham Anonymous collective, here called DedSec. You're free to queue up for a contract at any time, which will place you in the position of the hunter. Where you'll keep seeing Aidan Pearce, others will see a random Chicagoan. It's your job to blend in and hack your victim's phone remotely, while avoiding death and general defeat by any means possible. If you're the one who's being invaded, however, you'll have to track and kill the Fixer who's trying to elope with your data. It's basically Dark Souls: Modern Days Edition, or a weapons-enabled game of tag. These missions never entirely break the flow of the game, and they quickly became my favorite segment.

Taking a page from Black Flag, the game also offers a ton of less active diversions. Would you rather solve chess puzzles with an old gangster who looks like a doddering old grandpa but who could kill you at the drop of a hat, or maybe use your phone to enter a few Augmented Reality games that see you shooting down pretend aliens with pretend laser guns? You can also enter a Super Mario-esque mode that has you running along a coin-filled path as fast as you can, or momentarily turn Chicago into its Zombie Apocalypse counterpart.

And then, if none of that felt crazy enough for you, you can turn into an eight-legged tank and rampage across town for fun, profit, and high scores. In these last few cases, you're actually playing what the game refers to as a Digital Trip – essentially an Augmented Reality mind-bender that turns your phone into a psychotrope. Or something.

So there's tons of content – about enough for sixty hours of play time – but how are the visuals?

On the PC and on Ultra settings, the game reveals its rather poorly optimized nature. Even users sporting newest-of-the-new specs are having a hard time staying at a consistent 30 FPS, while PS4 users are reporting texture streaming issues and bad cases of car and pedestrian pop-in that more or less made them spawn inside other cars and citizens. The PS3 and 360 versions are the worse for wear, obviously enough, with their eight year-old hardware being pushed to its absolute limits. Things have been tweaked here and there and watercraft are conspicuously absent from the last-gen versions, but all versions essentially offer the same experience with varying levels of visual fidelity. If you're a gamer who considers that his computer specs define who he is as a person, you're very likely to find Watch Dogs to be a harsh mistress. If you're in for the gameplay elements and don't mind a bit of reduced car and pedestrian traffic, the last-gen versions are perfectly serviceable. If anything, I'd say the art direction doesn't flatter any specific generation or platform, as Watch Dogs is largely presented to you in urban-jungle tones of brown and grey. The autumnal trees are a nice touch, but they're a bit on the wispy side on all platforms.

If anything, the rural area presented by Pawnee takes a huge hit in terms of visual fidelity. What at least looks like a forest on current-gen systems and feels like a forest on decent PCs looks like a barren tundra with a few gold and rust-colored leaves poking out here and there, on the PS3. If anything, I'm a bit reminded of the way Dead Rising looked, once it was ported on the Wii.

Yes, you heard that right – Dead Rising was ported on the Wii, back in the day. Instead of whole crowds of Romero Zombies, you now had small... throngs of Romero Zombies. The game worked and it worked fairly well, but the atmosphere was gutted. Things aren't so dire for Watch Dogs as you can plainly see that the last three years didn't allow for much more than 2009-worthy specs and builds being progressively inflated. It feels like a game that could run on my PC, but its bleeding-edge lighting engine and shaders confine it to the more recent platforms, at least in its prettiest incarnations. Considering, I'm not all that disappointed. The version I'm playing is almost on par with Grand Theft Auto V, visually speaking. I wouldn't exactly call that ugly.

Narratively, however, all game versions get the same preachy and slightly confused slog. Aidan Pearce has no defining characteristics or particularly redeemable points. He starts out as a criminal and consistently remains a criminal in your hands, even if your reputation level increases and the locals start recognizing you as quote-unquote the Vigilante. His motivating factors are presented to us in a single cutscene, and nothing in what it shown warrants the kind of single-minded focus he displays. What unfolds as a Neo Noir yarn about technology running rampant eventually becomes a confused run-and-gun slog that exposes the Big Bad's motives as being disappointingly pedestrian, in relation to the far-reaching goals ctOS enables in all those corrupt enough to use it in order to bend the city's social tissue to suit their needs. The game spends so much of its time trying to impress you with the hacking scene's crafty, secretive and nervous nature that its sudden endgame shift into intense protracted gunfights came across as a shock, to me. I'd expected to be able to slink and hack my way through everything with enough patience, not just hit a point where the game more or less goes “Welp, you're gonna want to use that assault rifle, now. No, seriously – use that assault rifle.”

Not that this knocks pegs off of the gunplay itself, far from it. It's tight, and possibly the most responsive combat system I've seen since Red Dead Redemption, which makes it outclass even GTA V. There's just enough Auto-aim at play in order to be actually able to snap onto targets with your right thumbstick, and still enough autonomous control to line up headshots easily. There's not a ton of what I like to call thumbstick acceleration, which means you aren't going to be stuck with crosshairs that veer far off to the sides of what you actually want to shoot.

Other than that, and as said above, you've got your boilerplate selection of charismatic disreputable gits you'll be forced to work with. Clara Lille is your requisite Wannabe Lisbeth Salander, Jordi Chin feels like a Sleeping Dogs extra that wasn't picked up and handles the Cars on Demand app on your phone, T-Bone Kenney is a good ol' boy and a Phreak Box enthusiast who acts as Aidan's hardware nerd, and Dermot Quinn essentially acts as a Y2K-compatible Al Capone, having financed the development of ctOS in tandem with the Blume Corporation. You'll play tense chess games with him and eventually murder him in a fairly creative way. Then there's Damian Banks, whose very name screams I will betray you. They're all fun and intelligently written, even if they're not exactly original.

So, should you try out this mixture of Script Kiddie hackery and gunplay? Yes, because it's one of the few open-world and city-based games with a strong focus on traditional stealth, and especially because said stealth becomes intriguing when you can piece a route together using observation, hacked cameras and your surroundings' networked objects. You should play it if you appreciated Ubi Reflections' work on Driver: San Francisco, and especially if a somewhat lessened reliance on gunplay interests you. It's not entirely what I'd call a thinking man's Crime Drama sandbox, but it comes extremely close. You should also try it if you're interested in the prospect of having to play cat-and-mouse with distant players.

Don't play it, however, for the story. It starts strong and peters out into a fairly desperate and typical end-of-milestone shooting gallery. Pearce isn't a compelling character and I'd honestly say he needs a do-over on the whiteboard, because we've seen enough Badass Self-Made Thugs with a Heart of Gold in games. Also, don't play it if you're expecting a more invested take on hacking, such as what Uplink offers. Everything is based on a single button press, and you're essentially the Windy City's strongest Script Kiddie. That's not exactly praise leveled at your hypothetical hacking chops. Rather than your typical Social Engineering-based approach, you feel like Harry Dresden swapped his fedora for a baseball cap and his staff for an iPhone. It's fun, but it certainly doesn't alleviate hacking's televised reputation as being something that takes a lot of dramatic keystrokes – or no keystrokes at all and a snazzy omnipotent iOS app.

Remember Sherlock's The Reichenbach Fall? Jim Moriarty breaks into the Tower of London with what looks like a uber-hacking tool enabling him to paralyze London in its entirety and to steal the Crown Jewels in a few thumb swipes – but what his phone actually does is generate ready-made texts that are sent to accomplices in each targeted institution's security detail. Watch Dogs essentially scraps the middle man and does indeed present you with the ultimate Hollywood Hacking tool, which can be both freeing, fairly amusing, and slightly disconcerting.

When the game buckles down and tackles its own strengths, it's great. When it tries its luck at being a gritty pseudo-Rockstar techno-thriller, however, it falters. If anything, the second opus needs to focus on the narrative more intently, and absolutely has to give Pearce more tangible hooks. Being a gravelly-voiced Caucasian male with a supposedly “iconic” cap and designer trenchcoat clearly isn't enough.