WARNING: The following article may contain mentions of difficult topics. Reader’s discretion is advised.

Twelve frames of animation, that’s all it takes. Twelve frames of animation and you’re supposed to be invested in a character’s motivations because a kid was killed. Not the kid of our grumpy-misery guts lead character, Aiden Pearce, just his niece. I am speaking as an uncle: I wouldn’t blow up half of Chicago for any kids. Definitely not for a kid I’ve only seen for twelve bloody frames of in animation.

Watch_Dogs is the progenitor for a lot of things, including the Watch_Dogs series, the bullshot, and my hatred of a man that I am supposed to root on in his adventure for mindless violence. On the surface, the game is actually not that bad, if not for beginning the homogenization of “the Ubisoft game” that is. It is a bit Grand Theft Auto-y and has a substantial bit of Assassin’s Creed, but you aren’t going to encounter groundbreaking 2014 gameplay. It has just one interesting idea and a mechanic that was expanded upon later.

The premise (which I’ve covered twice before in reviews) is that a hacker, by the name of Aiden Pearce, is on a revenge mission. That right there is about as groundbreaking as you’ll get, a boring White guy with enough gravel in his whisper to put David Hayter on his toes while seeking revenge for a family member’s death. Revenge that comes via acts of violence only acceptable in video games or 80s action films. Speaking of which, the plot of Short Circuit (1 & 2) is more believable than some dimwit with an iPhone, a VPN a YouTuber lied about selling to him, and a cell plan with the best coverage in history.

Our Aiden is a magic space wizard, and his iPhone is his closed-system wand. Running all over the very monotonous landscape that is Chicago’s Downtown Loop, South Side, and surrounding areas of the city, isn’t the most inspiring map in a game. With muted colors and drab backdrops, Watch_Dogs does a disservice to the attractiveness of Chicago’s more enticing and vibrant sides. Even with your android from Mars waving his wand about in public, changing traffic lights, raising bridges, and all sorts of havoc, nothing brings back any excitement for the location.

However, there is that mechanic I was on about a second ago, the profiler. It will provide a small selection of details about random people you’ll find within the world. Things will pop up such as their yearly earnings, their job, their age, and other demographic info that may make them unsavory. Sometimes you’ll find good people too, ones that shouldn’t be murdered on the spot with a high gauge shotgun to the back of the neck. Examples like people who give to charity, someone who works at a homeless shelter, or someone bringing about the next revolution by setting fire to people who mention NFTs six times in a conversation.

With the moniker of “The Vigilante,” it seems apt that you go about with high-powered weaponry in a major US city with a bit of dystopian tech. It also seems appropriate to dish out your own moral values upon the poor people of Chicago. Why else would I have this piece of tech if not to do that? Somehow, I am supposed to be cheering on Aiden in his pursuit of carefree violence against people as moralistic as he is. It was Far Cry 2 and Watch Dogs: Legion‘s creative director, Clint Hocking, that coined the phrase “ludonarrative dissonance,” and that’s exactly what is wrong with Aiden as a character. He is a raging psychopath in both examples, but for different reasons altogether.

Narratively he believes his own brand of justice is reason enough to exonerate him of his crimes. In gameplay, he’s controlled by a different type of psycho that’s committing crimes far outside of the narrative scope. Of course, the game tries to “punish” you for it with a little bit of UI displaying that morale has gone down, but I don’t care because it doesn’t affect me as I play. People are supposed to call the fuzz quicker or all but ignore my crimes, with the in-game news touting either my every villainous act or heroism, but that changes nothing overall to gameplay. Evading cops in a chase is quite easy when bricks have more intelligence.

I have more tools at my disposal than a rogue agent in a spy thriller. I can pull out my magic space wand, and without the exposition of films, books, or TV, I can shut down all surveillance of myself without much more power than playing Candy Crush. At the press of a simple button, I’ve halted traffic for three miles, dropped a helicopter out of the sky, and caused a state-wide blackout only comparable to Texas in February-March. My point is that a video game is often a power fantasy for people who couldn’t fly a dragon into battle and have sex with orcs, but equally, the fantasy can’t be too powerful, or it becomes boring.

Aiden isn’t much more than some tool to be used to get us about the world, but his story isn’t important. He doesn’t change or grow from point A to point B. He starts as an unlikeable psychopath and ends with the same antipathy for his fellow man (or woman), but with a slightly different profile in news stories. The whole moral choice thing gets on my nerves because while almost every game uses it, very few are making it little more than picking the flavor of ice cream, á la Mass Effect 3. Having the public notice Aiden shouldn’t matter narratively. He doesn’t care and is blinded by his need for his irrational revenge.

As a concept, I enjoyed Watch_Dogs for what it was offering. I am one of those weirdos who would walk about San Andreas or roleplay being a trucker, going from venue to venue in East Los Santos, Battery Point, and either Greenglass college, the stadium in Redsands West, or the Caligula’s Palace. Yes, even I recognize this as some kind of illness. We didn’t have as many games back in the mid-00s. My point is that the roleplay of being able to interact with characters beyond the superficial means of their outfits makes a world feel more alive.

This is where Watch_Dogs worked best, beyond Aiden and his plight as the mentally ill uncle hung up on something his sister (the kid’s mother) is coping with at a far better rate. Though, she ignores his face appearing on the news with the same amount of apathy as someone heavily medicated on something stronger than what a psychologist would prescribe. Being able to go about and see that the nice old woman with her shopping bag is into BDSM, or the person outside the coffee shop is doing the cardinal sin of writing their screenplay in public all constructs the idea that the world is far more vivid than it actually is.

That’s not to say there aren’t hitches in the system at this early stage, this is what procedural generation does to games. Instead of stories being constructed with complete narrative dimensions, we’re still at the point in time where the purple-shirted woman is holding hands with different orange-shirted men around the San Andreas area. You’ll see things like anniversaries and divorces next to each other. Though they are not necessarily meant to be connected, we as humans join the dots where we can. In the first experiment into the waters of Watch_Dogs, the idea is little more than a proving ground to be built upon, which it was.

To return to the story for a moment, it was clear someone listened to the feedback for the second Watch_Dogs game, as stupidity followed by narrow-mindedness was de rigueur throughout Aiden’s adventure. There is one section about a bridge that needs to spin on a pivot. By the point you are here, you’re launching yourself off bascule bridges in attempts to Die Hard 4 a helicopter in the middle of a chase. Chances are your magic space wand has an app for that bridge, or maybe being an expert hacker (apparently) Aiden could create one? No, we have to track down someone to help our stone-faced lead.

The city is full of boats, and this bridge takes us to an island where the first ctOS command was housed for a bit. For all that is holy, could someone use some common sense with this? I’ve blown up several hundred fences, driven boats up the beach, and catapulted my body across the city with the help of bridges, this shouldn’t have been so much of an issue at the mid-point of the story. However, it was proven that for all the interesting ideas of the profiler and using CCTV for observation, no one cared about the story as much as the tools in-game.

There is one set of implements that just don’t work, however, and I’m talking about any vehicle. I think it is unmistakable from my many reviews of driving and other open-world games, I enjoy cars, and I like to believe I know what makes something feel acceptable for driving in a game. The weight and lack of maneuverability for most cars is the biggest issue. They feel like Hot Wheels cars with bowling balls for tires. You will have a hard time flipping them, and (for the most part) you’ll have a difficult time getting them off the ground for little more than a nuclear explosion on the undercarriage.

It doesn’t matter what car it is, they all feel fairly similar, and they all have the same lethargic problem that the last crumpled mess you just created had. They have the durability of a Razer keyboard and about the same amount of flash for how little function they provide. Boats aren’t much better, they have never been the most exciting form of transport, either in games or real life. No matter how many 80s action shows and films had flowery-shirted men shooting at each other in speed boats or on jet skis, they just aren’t exciting. Everything above walking just isn’t fun, and you can’t fly because… Chicago is dull.

Narratively speaking, Watch_Dogs is in the toilet with its unlikeable character of misery and hatred. The fact he keeps reappearing in each game annoys me. With his lack of actual character, he is nothing more than the dark timeline Mario. You never want to hear “it’s-a me!” followed by a gun jamming in the dark. Much like Mario, Aiden is a blank slate for you to project your opinions on to, hence the already mentioned profiler vigilantism earlier. He lacks thoughts and opinions outside of “Hello, My name is Aiden Pearce. You killed my niece, prepare to die!”

As an open world in the typical sense, it isn’t much better either, with random events such as crimes happening that you are supposed to stop. The trouble is you have to observe the crimes as they start. An example is an obviously shifty bloke getting ready to do a crime, because clearly there are too many women taking up important roles, and an unknowing victim walks into the trap like a dear in headlights. This would all be fine if you could just jump out at the perfect time, every time.

However, you can jump out from behind the bins like a cop saying, “Well, well, well, what’s all this then?” As he pulls out the gun to threaten the woman. Then they both snap their necks towards you like pigeons in the high street, as if to say, “Well, that’s ruined the fun now, hasn’t it!” I’m left there with a big piece of metal drooping between my legs held with both hands, and I’m looking like an idiot wondering what just happened. Apparently, if you prevent the crime by making it never happen in the first place, you’ve ruined the timeline and Tom Hiddleston has to flirt with himself before it can be corrected.

Under my hatred for the boring gravel-chewing lead and some very stupid ideas of what constitutes playable gameplay, Watch_Dogs is actually good. Not a 10/10 or even an 8, the industry standard of a 7 being: “playable, has issues, but generally, someone is going to like this well enough.” For me, the biggest disappointment is the bottomless pit of grim for which everything sits. There are no contrasting colors to offset Aiden’s grimy revenge story, just more and more reminders that the world is a horrible place.

There is one thing that brings it back, and it is the use of cameras in the gambling that never returned for 2 or Legion. Throughout the city, there are poker games, all of which have strategically placed cameras so you can see what everyone is holding. There are missions where you are leading someone about using the cameras. When you can use the gimmick of Watch_Dogs it is shining a little more, maybe not like a diamond but a special rock that makes geologists a little too excited. However, a majority of this game about an expert hacker extraordinaire is about guns and beating people to death.

Despite some tired gameplay in what was purported to be revolutionary at the time (either visually or otherwise) Watch_Dogs is fine. I’ve said it many times, and I’ll say it again. Watch_Dogs 2 is what the series should strive for: A colorful and exuberant flash of maybe not the most revolutionary gameplay, but something that isn’t entirely guns and killing people. As I said, the world on its own doesn’t excite me. Part of that is because, for all that it is, Chicago isn’t utilized for anything more than a backdrop, and its history isn’t used or explored. Overall, Watch_Dogs might have been the start, but it was not running out of the gate for one of my favorite franchises of the past decade.

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Watch_Dogs

7

Score

7.0/10

Pros

• The profiler is an interesting tool.

Cons

• Aiden Pearce.
• Driving mechanics.
• A dull location.