Watch Dogs

In an attempt to differentiate itself from other open-world games developed by Ubisoft –  by the time of its release – Watch Dogs’ story takes place in a modern urban setting and is focused on the use of technology. The game, however, only stands out from the rest of its company’s catalog because it is an even bigger mess than usual: its narrative is poorly developed, long and inconsistent, while its gameplay is repetitive and, despite the interesting premise, mostly uninspired.

The story follows the quest for revenge of Aiden Pierce, a hacker who lost his niece in an armed ambush that was targeting him. Years later, consumed by guilt, he is approached by his former partner, Damien, and decides to accelerate his plan to find out who was responsible for his niece’s death.

The game begins with a bit of melodrama: in the scene where the girl dies, for instance, the camera focuses on her teddy bear for a long time to push the tragedy down the player’s throat – “look at how young and innocent she was,” the game seems to scream – and the narrative doesn’t improve afterward, since, well, it stops making sense.

Pierce is already obsessed with his niece’s tragedy, having constant nightmares about it, which means that he shouldn’t have to need his friend’s push to resolve the situation. Furthermore, Damien’s plan seems more like a forced attempt to inject tension into the narrative than a logical solution to his personal problems, since instead of exploiting Pierce’s obsession to achieve his goal, the guy prefers to antagonize the protagonist for no logical reason.

There is not much happening in the game. Watch Dogs has a relatively long campaign, but only because its narrative is egregiously padded with numerous pointless small conflicts: its long extension is the result of the bureaucracy around each of the protagonist’s goals. In other words, Aiden doesn’t do much, but for each of his actions, there are numerous preparatory missions. Just the goal of hacking into a gangster’s server in the middle of the game, for instance, takes up the game’s entire second act.

Watch Dogs’ story is full of problems: there’s an interlude involving a mysterious hacker, which, despite lasting a few missions, never gets anywhere; there are completely unnecessary characters that are used just to inject more melodrama or tension into the story, despite their motivations not making a lick sense, such as the hacker Clara; there’s a big, laughable twist that hopes the player will be surprised to find out that the bad guy in the game really was the bad guy all along; there’s a final random but pretentious choice with no consequence at all; and there are ridiculously anticlimactic side quests, such as one involving a serial killer, which, after a long investigation, just copies one of the game’s most banal activities. And, above everything else, there is a one-dimensional protagonist that is unable to show any trait beyond his desire for revenge.

Watch Dogs even suffer from a serious case of the infamous “ludonarrative dissonance”, showing a clear incompatibility between Pierce’s characterization during cutscenes and the one that happens during normal gameplay. On the one hand, the game tries to present a boring protagonist who acts as a vigilante in the city of Chicago, fighting criminals. On the other, it allows the player to commit hundreds of crimes on the way to our goal. The result is a narrative chaos, with the player’s actions constantly contradicting the character’s: there is one time that Pierce gets very angry that a guy hit a woman, but, on the way to teach him a lesson, he can very well murder another woman, steal her car, and run over five more women without a word being uttered about it.

The game simply doesn’t react to the player’s actions, merely punishing them by increasing the police heat level. In Watch Dogs, this is something particularly serious, since the protagonist is not a criminal or an outlaw, but a vigilante. His personality is shaped around the fight against injustice; his main drama involves revenging the death of an innocent person. Therefore, when he starts to act like a genocidal madman without any scruples, becoming far worse than those he pursues, and the game simply ignores that, everything falls apart.

Similarly, Pierce can take money from strangers’ accounts and, without any motivation, become a stalker, invading people’s private cameras to watch them during intimate moments. This is even worse, as it’s no longer the case of the developers failing to prevent dissonance caused by the player’s actions: now, they are actively encouraging players to break the game’s internal coherence through unique secondary activities. The goal is to discuss the end of privacy due to technological advances, but the game puts precisely the protagonist committing these crimes and then tries to paint him as someone destined to punish criminals.

Watch Dogs doesn’t even come close to making up for the problems of its narrative with its gameplay. After all, its stealth sequences are equally lazy – “Nothing wrong here,” attests to a security guard as he encounters two co-workers lying unconscious on the floor – and its main gimmick –  hacking – is too simple for its own good: we simply press the same button every time it appears on the screen or have to solve a minigame in which we spin some pipes.

While driving cars, hacking means blowing up gas pipes, moving bridges, and activating barriers to bring down opponents – actions, however, that are performed without much thinking involved: besides the result always being the same regardless of what is being activated – stopping enemies from getting near us – it is also the same signal that flashes on the screen to indicate the right time to press the button, removing even the worry of checking the enemy’s position.

Similar logic is applied to normal action sequences: it is possible to hack into the guards’ mobile phones and distract them by sending messages; activate the bomb they are carrying; or cause static on their communication devices, but the player has no choice about what to use, since there is only one specific action for each guard. The only interesting use of hacking is in moving around buildings through security cameras. Movement becomes completely different, as you must jump from one camera to the other, which is thematically appropriate: it shows how Pierce doesn’t need to be physically in a place to invade it.

Nevertheless, Watch Dogs fails at managing even the player’s progress, since we can acquire most of the improvements and hacking skills early on, leaving most of the stages quite repetitive, without anything new to offer. What most of the missions never fail to offer, however, is an uninspired design. There is a set-piece that takes place on the rooftop of a building, for example, where Aiden’s enemies instead of appearing through the only door to the place, simply pop up right there next to the hacker – and open fire immediately. Not to mention the checkpoint that is activated right before the boss exchanges insults with Pierce, forcing the player to listen to the whole exchange again if we lose the fight.

The game’s only saving grace is some of its insane secondary activities – called “Digital Trips” – which are amusing because of their sheer absurdity: bumping into plants, running over zombies, and destroying Chicago with a giant metal spider are good examples of what Watch Dogs offers. However, it’s never a good sign when the best part of a game doesn’t involve its main systems and mechanics.

Watch Dogs is full of contradictory ideas. It has a long story that is utterly devoid of important events; a protagonist hell-bent on delivering justice, but who can murder countless innocent people without batting an eye; and several opportunities to hack people, although it’s basically the same action every time with just a slightly different context. In the end, the game appears to be more a prototype than a genuine, finished work.

February 17, 2020.

Review originally published in Portuguese on November 11, 2016.