Watch Dogs Video Game Review

By David Shields

Manufacturer: Ubisoft Entertainment S.A.
Product Name: Watch Dogs
Price As Tested: $49.99 (Amazon, multiple platforms)

Full Disclosure: The product sample used in this article has been provided by Ubisoft.

What happens when you combine the Grand Theft Auto series with a near future world where big brother is indeed always watching you? You get the new game from Ubisoft, Watch Dogs. Watch Dogs has been highly anticipated by many gamers since it was revealed at E3 2012, but due to production delays it didn’t hit retail until May 27th of this year. Watch Dogs takes advantage of many of the latest advances in graphics from NVIDIA, including HBAO+, to create a stunning, ambient world full of light and shadow.. In this techplayboy.com article, I will discuss the main features of Watch Dogs as well as the graphics before delivering my overall rating of the game.

Watch Dogs is a singleplayer focused game with an integrated multiplayer component. The main part of the game comes from the singleplayer campaign and various side missions, but at anytime during play you can accept multiplayer challenges or have your world invaded by other players trying to steal your data. Featuring a large, open world ripe with opportunities, Watch Dogs provides an entertaining and varied gaming experience.

In Watch Dogs you play as Aiden Pearce, a former member of the Chicago Mob who was targeted by his employer, and as a result his six year old niece was killed. Grief stricken and filled with a lust for revenge, you will use Aiden’s hacking skills to search the city to find who is responsible, no matter the cost. The game’s setting of Chicago is well represented and has plenty of variety, but is not the largest of open game worlds. A fast vehicle can easily cross the map in a minute or two. The city is interconnected by a technology called ctOS, which links with all electronics in the city and is used to spy on everyone’s lives. As you might expect, not everyone is happy about this, and the hacker group DedSec has been formed to fight against ctOS. DedSec has created a hack that allows control of the ctOS system via mobile phone, a technology that Aiden can use to aid his quest for revenge. Take down criminals using a variety of vehicles and weapons as well as your trusty mobile phone, or become a criminal yourself, taking on Fixer contracts to keep the city under control and eliminate the competition. Sneak your way into areas, use cameras and hacks to defeat your opponents from a distance, or go in all guns blazing with access to various pistols, automatic weapons, and explosives.

Aiden’s mobile phone is easily the most important tool in Watch Dogs. With it, you can turn Chicago itself into your weapon, like hacking phones to listen in on conversations and access bank accounts. Or unleash much mroe damaging abilities such as making steam pipes explode to damage or destroy your enemies or even cause a temporary city wide blackout allowing you to move about unseen. Moving from camera to camera or “Camera Riding” as Aiden calls it, is an important skill to learn and required for several missions. Hacking is also quite useful when being pursued, as you can disrupt traffic lights, raise blockers and bridges, and generally create a large number of hassles for your enemies.

The mobile phone also has a number of apps, including a music player and a pair of apps that act as a shortcut to available contracts. The Car on Demand app lets you request or purchase vehicles from a variety of categories including trucks, motorcycles, and high performance and delivers them instantly to your location. There are also three “virtual” minigame modes, Cash Run, NVZN, and Digital Trips, which include games such as Madness and Spider Tank. These modes are enjoyable and offer a nice distraction from the main game.

 
Side missions are a large and varied part of Watch Dogs, but also it’s greatest failing. Missions range from taking down convoys or stopping random criminal acts to acting as a decoy for the cops or chasing down stolen data. The problem is that many of the missions require driving, and while no small variety of vehicles are available for you to buy or hijack, driving can end up being a frustrating exercise. Vehicles often overreact to steering or just completely spin out of control for no reason at all. Others handle like tanks and refuse to steer no matter what.

This can be considerably problematic when trying to avoid damaging your vehicle, pursuing a target, or evading pursuit yourself. Some vehicles are entertaining to drive, but many times you’ll end up getting stuck delivering a car that no matter how hard you try, has a mind of its own.
Multiplayer is integrated directly into the singleplayer experience. At any time, an opponent might enter your game world and attempt to hack or tail you, resulting in you needing to pause what you are doing in order to eliminate that player. And of course, you can also accept missions yourself. Multiplayer does also feature a racing mode, but this feels out of place with the other modes present in Watch Dogs. Defeating your opponent garners you reputation points and can improve your leaderboard ranking, but little incentive actually exists outside of that. I had a little trouble finding opponents as well.

Watch Dogs is an overall good looking game that takes advantage of some of the latest technologies out of NVIDIA. It’s main strength is the dynamic lighting and FX effects, especially on high or ultra settings. Detail suffers a bit on all settings, especially with the foliage, character faces, and structures, and vehicles (especially the L-Trains), have a nasty habit of appearing out of thin air due to the draw distance. I also had a major issue with a graphics glitch that caused small walls to appear randomly on my screen. I am unsure what the cause of this was, and to my knowledge I don’t think other reviews have mentioned the same issue. Vehicle models are possibly one of Watch Dogs greatest graphical achievements, and look great even on medium settings.

On low graphics, shadows and lighting are very bland and non existent. Ambient Occlusion and AA is disabled, and the buildings look plain.

Taking it up to medium vastly improves lighting effects, and details, especially water, look much more passable. But that is the only major change. Explosions and other effects still appear bland and uninteresting.

On high settings, not much seems to have changed, which is unfortunate given the huge loss of nearly 20 FPS incurred when upgrading from medium to high. The biggest visual improvement came in FX effects, especially explosions, boat spray, and collisions. High settings also add motion blur, which can heavily impact performance while driving. I think that high and ultra settings were not as well optimized as they should have been. The recommended specs are an i7 3700 or a FX-8350 with 8GB of RAMand a GTX600 or HD7000 series GPU. I have an FX-8350, 8GB of RAM, and the recently released GTX750TI SC, and my maximum FPS on high is around 40 (assuming I’m not outdoors and moving, in which case it drops to around 35).

Ultra settings honestly do not look much different from high. Unfortunately, I was unable to really test the settings at ultra because the FPS dropped to about 25 or below. Considering that Watch Dogs was supposed to be optimized for the latest hardware it’s a little disappointing how poorly it performs on high and ultra. I’m guessing that to play Watch Dogs on ultra with a strong FPS you would need a high end i7 chip and GTX600s in SLI or a GTX760+. Also, Watch Dogs is clearly designed for NVIDIA GPU’s and some players have complained about poor performance on AMD hardware.

Watch Dogs is certainly not a bad looking game. In fact, with the settings turned up it can even compete with Frostbite or CryEngine. However, it is a pity that in order to get Watch Dogs to look its best you really need such a beefy system.

Watch Dogs is an entertaining open-world experience, but it lacks depth. A wide variety of skills and vehicles are available to unlock throughout the game, but the skill unlocks don’t feel much like rewards and honestly should have been available from the start. Furthermore, the large multitude of vehicles seem to exist merely for the purpose of collecting them. The campaign, while backed with a story that has its twist and turns to keep you engaged, is not much more than a narrated collection of the standard side missions with a bit of extra variety. Side missions in particular feel like a missed opportunity to do more, can be frustrating to complete, and offer little reward for completion.

Using hacks to clear out areas and mess with pursuers was the best part of the game. You can’t help but have a little evil grin when blowing up an electrical panel to kill a bunch of enemies from a block away, or launching your vehicle across the skies with a well placed bridge hack, or changing the many signs across Chicago to read a large collection of amusing phrases (some of which include spins on various popular internet memes). Hacks are especially useful during pursuits and chases, and can be used seamlessly while driving.

Watch Dogs probably won’t be winning any awards for graphics, because while it does look good, its not anything we haven’t seen before, and requires a pretty beefy rig to be seen at its best. While Ubisoft succeeded in creating an environment that is attractive to look at day or night or in any kind of weather, the details are where it fails. I have observed this complaint in another review on Benchmark Reviews with Assassins Creed, another popular Ubisoft game (@ https://techplayboy.com/9647/assassins-creed-iv-black-flag-pc-video-game-review/4/).

Again, the performance of Watch Dogs is disappointing. Sure you can play at medium, but other popular games on the market (Battlefield 4, Crysis 3) still look great on lower settings, whereas Watch Dogs loses much of its quality on lower settings. If you want to play Watch Dogs maxed out, start thinking about upgrading. The difference in the settings compared to the performance loss is also minimal. You really don’t gain the visual improvement that you would expect in exchange for a loss of 20 FPS.

With the way I’m talking about graphics I’m probably coming off as graphics obsessed. My concern with Watch Dogs is less about the visuals themselves and more about how they compare to other games that aren’t quite so demanding on your system. I particularly liked the car and clothing models, along with the ambient lightning effects, but again you won’t get to see them unless you play at least on high settings.

My final point concerns the depth of development in Watch Dogs. While a large number of activities exist in Watch Dogs, a compelling reason to actually pursue them does not exist (outside of the sake of completion) and many of them share similar objectives or play out similarly. For example, when it comes to “Gang Hideout” side missions, all that really changes is the location of the hideout, not what you actually need to accomplish. Ubisoft included a “reputation meter” which changes depending on your actions as Aiden. Unfortunately this also just seemed like a small addon instead of something players can strive to use. I was trying to play as a “protector” but between the fact I kept running over civilians due to poor vehicle handling and the fact that your are occasionally forced to shoot the police, its not easy. However, Ubisoft did include a few appreciable attempts to improve depth. For example, depending on your reputation, a news flash will appear on TVs that forces you to avoid civilians or they may recognize you and call the police.

Many people compare Watch Dogs to being a small version of GTA V with hacking. Some basis does exist for this comparison, but I think Watch Dogs brings enough to the table to merit picking up a copy, especially for us PC and next gen console players who have yet to receive GTA, or for 360 and PS3 players looking for a new experience that they can just jump right into and play. Singleplayer is the obvious draw, while multiplayer can be entertaining assuming you can find opponents. The hacking gameplay is the biggest draw and can provide hours of experimenting, and once you finish you can start all over and play a different way. The overall lack of depth and the high system demands are unfortunate, but you can’t deny Ubisoft has created an entertaining product in Watch Dogs.

Watch Dogs is available now for $49.99 at Amazon, for multiple platforms.

+ Entertaining gameplay.
+ Seamless integration of hacking with regular combat and driving that feels like a natural part of the game.
+ Tense, captivating singleplayer story.
+ Ambiance and FX effects look great thanks to NVIDIA integration, but only on higher settings.
+ Some touches, such as TV reports and the way AI interact with the world, add a level of immersion.

– Demanding system requirements.
– Overall lack of depth in missions.
– Poor vehicle handling mechanics.
– Does not provide much flexibility in character development.

• Performance: 8.00
• Appearance: 8.75
• Development: 8.50
• Gameplay: 9.00
• Value: 8.75