Recent reviews by JediDwag

Short and sweet. Some might say too sweet...

Watch_Dogs is a poorly made GTA clone that tries to be unique by including magical smartphone "hacking" that allows you to manipulate the world around you, but fails to deliver on basic story and gameplay. The characters are boring, the story is uninspired, the gameplay is generic Ubisoft control towers / collectible / upgradable / kill this copy paste repeat nonsense, and the in game performance is terrible.

The story is short and characters are introduced, fleshed out, and inexplicably disregarded for the remainder of the game. I remember there being promotional art for the game featuring certain characters, and when I would meet them in the game I expected them to be around for a while, but after the mission featuring them was over, they disappeared and were never mentioned again. This was frustrating and annoying when the end credit rolled, because it left me wondering why they ever bothered to create these characters if they barely one notch above faceless NPC on the character list.

The story tries to be deep, dark, and meaningful, but it comes off as generic, bland, and boring. Something something, big brother, something something, gangs, something something, hacking, something something, kidnapping, something something, traumatic past, something something, revenge.

Ubisoft seems to be pumping out copy pasted gameplay mechanics like it's going out of style. With the amount of hype that was behind Watch_Dogs, you might be inclined to think it would break out of the copy paste Ubisoft game format, but you would be sorely mistaken. Control towers, collectibles, gated equipment progression, and so on.

In something like Saints Row IV (which is also a GTA clone) I have like 1 or 2 moments per hour that are awesome/hilarious/memorable/fun, but in Watch_Dogs I don't think I ever got that feeling. In fact, the best part of Watch_Dogs for me at least was the mini game where you retake a city controlled by Robots block by block using stealth mechanics and takedown kills.

And finally, the performance. The graphics have obviously been tanked from the version shown at E3, and in spite of this downgrade the performance is still laughably bad. The game doesn't play nearly well enough for how crummy it looks, and the constant hitching while driving is a deal breaker for me. FPS drops and the hitching while trying to drive quickly make the game borderline unplayable. This may have been patched or fixed since I played it, but shipping with these issues is inexcusable.


All and all, I wouldn't recommend this game for more than $10.