I've been playing this pretty heavily since it came out. I originally wasn't going to get it, but I'm a little burned out on MMOs and wanted to do some single player gaming. My PC can run it pretty well, though I have to keep the settings fairly low so I don't get all the glory of some of you console gamers.
I'll ssy that the game is a mixed bag, it's a lot of fun, and as Jim pointed out there is a lot to do. That said the writing is kind of banal, it seems like these guys REALLY wanted to make a Shadowrun or Cyberpunk game but for whatever reason decided to set it during the present day. As a result you have a rather weak justification for this magical hacking working, based around a special operating system integrated into the city, allowing you to pull off the kind of stuff you'd expect from say "Shadowrun 4E" which was a bit wonky there when presented as well, but I suppose was workable as a futuristic concept. As a result the somewhat strained premise DOES give it a sort of 80s-90s vibe based around what they might have thought today was going to be like if viewed through the lens of that day's futurist writers. They then decided to shoehorn in a bunch of current techno-spying paranoia since it's a hotbutton political issue nowadays, and the result steamrolls into a big mess. A lot of the characters and such are fine, and are exactly the kings of people you'd expect to find in a story line this, and they are written okay, but overall it comes across
as being kind of weak.
I'll also say that Aiden is a big part of my problem in that he's just too disjointed as a character. He's supposed to be a tough guy, but also a fairly straightforward good guy who is running around the city as a vigilante, something which has made him rather famous, to the point where as your rep increases your less likely to be ratted out for
crimes and such. This is how he's played in a lot of cut scenes and such as well, and while a thief and criminal he seems like he's mostly directing himself at "bad people". Then consider that this game encourages you to pretty much sneak around the city peeping on people randomly (which grants you experience points, and let's you get into accounts via systems left inside the homes), not to mention that your pretty much encouraged to walk down the street robbing people left and right with your cell phone. So on one hand I might say go out and beat the crap out of some mugger as I'm "the champion of the poor schmoe on the street", but then as I go walking off I'll be draining the bank accounts of poor schlubs just walking down the street minding their own business, and probably stealing more money inside of 5 minutes than the mugger would likely have gotten by threatening some dude with a baseball bat.
I mean forget the whole "photogenic white guy with a baseball hat" that Jim picks on, the character is just a flat out mess. Not to mention that the dude looks like a hoodlum, if I saw a guy walking around dressed like this my first instinct as security (or just in general) would be to think this dude is up to no good. Though I suppose this is sort of Ubisoft's trademark, going back to how Assasin's Creed protagonists tend to be painfully obvious based on how they dress, yet nobody notices them. Aiden looks like he's perpetually about to try and rob a 7-11, except the guys who do that for real usually have the common sense not to dress like that when they aren't about to rob someone.
As far as the gameplay itself, well, it's probably that I'm on the PC (albeit using a game pad), but I'll say that things are a mixed bag. Jim is right that it's relatively easy to do things, the interface is very streamlined. On the other hand the cars tend to actually handle like crap, making the car-combat missions a serious chore. Compounded by the simple fact that when your doing a mission every car chasing you is magically as fast as you are. Furthermore a lot of the missions require you to "knock down" the target without killing them, which limits your options. Sometimes if your lucky you'll get an option to "neutralize" the car of the enemy, but that's sporadic. Typically I wind up trying to get ahead of, or cut off, my target, jump out of my vehicle, and then use focus mode to blow out their tires with a shotgun. Probably not how Ubisoft intended things to work, but as a general rule doing it "the right way" tends to be an exercise in frustration (this is despite moving things down from normal to easy).
AI wise it's a mixed bag, sometimes the bad guys are so aware of what's going on and reactive that it can amount to a raging pile of BS, especially if your in a straight fight. By this I mean if you are fighting like 8 guys they will surround you, flush you out with grenades, etc... and on a few occasions I've been just outright gunned down by some dude I wasn't even aware of (or lost track of). Of course the computer usually wins in such situations because Aiden is so fragile, while some of the enemies are absolute bullet sponges depending on what kind of weapon your using (they range from Gunmen, to Veterans, to Elites, and then have these enforcer guys that require a special takedown or explosives... the elites can sometimes take a clip of SMG ammo to the chest and laugh it off, although a good headshot will still drop them quick... but that can be hard to line up if everyone's moving as opposed to playing pop and shoot). MOST of the time however this is not what the game is like, if you pursue things "in character" and go in with a bit of stealth and a silenced weapon, it becomes child's play to line up shots with a silenced SMG (or later a silenced assault rifle) and pick the guards apart. They tend not to notice or react much even if you shoot a dude down right next to them, as long as you get back in cover before their notice meter fills your golden. This leads to situations where when the guards "notice" they are under attack they take on a wary stance and patrol around slowly, but never bother to do anything to me as long as their meter never fills. This leads to some comical situations where I'll basically pop out, mix half a dozen times against a guy looking in my general direction, then pop back down and the guy will refuse to acknowledge me because I was faster than his detection meter. I suppose this is better than "magical guard sense" where everyone zones in on you immediately, but it leads to situations that range from very difficult to "absolute bloody joke" oftentimes coming down to the mighty RNG as to whether the bad guys are going to notice you or suddenly pop out
of some weird location. Also silenced weapons are not ALWAYS a requirement they just reduce noise it seems, I've been in situations where I'd run into say an Enforcer, and managed to stealth kill him with multiple grenade launcher rounds, without managing to put everything on full alert (still doing the slow "wary" patrol thing, as opposed to oblivious or on the attack).
It's a decent game, I tend to rate low, I'd consider this to be about 6 out of 10 on my scale. 5 being average, and 10 being something I rarely grant anything (with 8s and 9s being exceedingly rare). Meaning it's above average, especially given the range of content, and it's better than most games as a whole, but it has a LOT of problems. Of course some of those problems (like pursuit cars always catching up to you and being as fast as you are, teleporting if need be it seems) seem to be integral to the genera.
In the future if they keep this series going they need to tighten up the writing, if they want to do super-hacking like this they might want to move the timeline up a decade or three. They should also decide if they want your character to be a hero or a villain, even bad guys can have friends and stuff, but as a general rule if I'm supposed to be "The Masked Vigilante" sticking up for the common man, I should not be engaging in routine home security violations to rob them and peep people, or sucking the bank accounts dry of every person I pass on the street (I suppose I could choose not to do this, but the point it's in the game because it's something Aiden is supposed to be doing to get money). The AI problems and such are things they can be sorted out, I've seen far worse, but I'm not exactly going to praise this game as being able to balance everything out well.... at least when it comes to the PC version they REALLY need to find a way to tighten up driving response I've spent hours replaying driving missions where most other things haven't given me a hard time.
For Watch Dogs 2, not only should they do it in the future, but make someone like Clara the hero, and then we can actually have some Cyberpunk going on. What's more if the whole world is Cyberpunk (to an extent) such a thing could fit in, allowing a character to be flashy bur discrete at the same time. It would have more character at this point, and wouldn't involve the jarring disconnect involved in wondering why nobody seemingly notices Aiden when he sticks out like a sore thumb.
Such are my thoughts, both good and bad. I'm not sure when I'll finish the game, but I've put a decent amount of time into it since it came out, and have seen a good selection of what it has to offer.
The gameplay itself is decent, and once you get past the idea of "I am hacking the city infrastructure to cause steam pipes to explode and maybe take out a couple of cars" or whatever, it's a lot of fun.
I'll ssy that the game is a mixed bag, it's a lot of fun, and as Jim pointed out there is a lot to do. That said the writing is kind of banal, it seems like these guys REALLY wanted to make a Shadowrun or Cyberpunk game but for whatever reason decided to set it during the present day. As a result you have a rather weak justification for this magical hacking working, based around a special operating system integrated into the city, allowing you to pull off the kind of stuff you'd expect from say "Shadowrun 4E" which was a bit wonky there when presented as well, but I suppose was workable as a futuristic concept. As a result the somewhat strained premise DOES give it a sort of 80s-90s vibe based around what they might have thought today was going to be like if viewed through the lens of that day's futurist writers. They then decided to shoehorn in a bunch of current techno-spying paranoia since it's a hotbutton political issue nowadays, and the result steamrolls into a big mess. A lot of the characters and such are fine, and are exactly the kings of people you'd expect to find in a story line this, and they are written okay, but overall it comes across
as being kind of weak.
I'll also say that Aiden is a big part of my problem in that he's just too disjointed as a character. He's supposed to be a tough guy, but also a fairly straightforward good guy who is running around the city as a vigilante, something which has made him rather famous, to the point where as your rep increases your less likely to be ratted out for
crimes and such. This is how he's played in a lot of cut scenes and such as well, and while a thief and criminal he seems like he's mostly directing himself at "bad people". Then consider that this game encourages you to pretty much sneak around the city peeping on people randomly (which grants you experience points, and let's you get into accounts via systems left inside the homes), not to mention that your pretty much encouraged to walk down the street robbing people left and right with your cell phone. So on one hand I might say go out and beat the crap out of some mugger as I'm "the champion of the poor schmoe on the street", but then as I go walking off I'll be draining the bank accounts of poor schlubs just walking down the street minding their own business, and probably stealing more money inside of 5 minutes than the mugger would likely have gotten by threatening some dude with a baseball bat.
I mean forget the whole "photogenic white guy with a baseball hat" that Jim picks on, the character is just a flat out mess. Not to mention that the dude looks like a hoodlum, if I saw a guy walking around dressed like this my first instinct as security (or just in general) would be to think this dude is up to no good. Though I suppose this is sort of Ubisoft's trademark, going back to how Assasin's Creed protagonists tend to be painfully obvious based on how they dress, yet nobody notices them. Aiden looks like he's perpetually about to try and rob a 7-11, except the guys who do that for real usually have the common sense not to dress like that when they aren't about to rob someone.
As far as the gameplay itself, well, it's probably that I'm on the PC (albeit using a game pad), but I'll say that things are a mixed bag. Jim is right that it's relatively easy to do things, the interface is very streamlined. On the other hand the cars tend to actually handle like crap, making the car-combat missions a serious chore. Compounded by the simple fact that when your doing a mission every car chasing you is magically as fast as you are. Furthermore a lot of the missions require you to "knock down" the target without killing them, which limits your options. Sometimes if your lucky you'll get an option to "neutralize" the car of the enemy, but that's sporadic. Typically I wind up trying to get ahead of, or cut off, my target, jump out of my vehicle, and then use focus mode to blow out their tires with a shotgun. Probably not how Ubisoft intended things to work, but as a general rule doing it "the right way" tends to be an exercise in frustration (this is despite moving things down from normal to easy).
AI wise it's a mixed bag, sometimes the bad guys are so aware of what's going on and reactive that it can amount to a raging pile of BS, especially if your in a straight fight. By this I mean if you are fighting like 8 guys they will surround you, flush you out with grenades, etc... and on a few occasions I've been just outright gunned down by some dude I wasn't even aware of (or lost track of). Of course the computer usually wins in such situations because Aiden is so fragile, while some of the enemies are absolute bullet sponges depending on what kind of weapon your using (they range from Gunmen, to Veterans, to Elites, and then have these enforcer guys that require a special takedown or explosives... the elites can sometimes take a clip of SMG ammo to the chest and laugh it off, although a good headshot will still drop them quick... but that can be hard to line up if everyone's moving as opposed to playing pop and shoot). MOST of the time however this is not what the game is like, if you pursue things "in character" and go in with a bit of stealth and a silenced weapon, it becomes child's play to line up shots with a silenced SMG (or later a silenced assault rifle) and pick the guards apart. They tend not to notice or react much even if you shoot a dude down right next to them, as long as you get back in cover before their notice meter fills your golden. This leads to situations where when the guards "notice" they are under attack they take on a wary stance and patrol around slowly, but never bother to do anything to me as long as their meter never fills. This leads to some comical situations where I'll basically pop out, mix half a dozen times against a guy looking in my general direction, then pop back down and the guy will refuse to acknowledge me because I was faster than his detection meter. I suppose this is better than "magical guard sense" where everyone zones in on you immediately, but it leads to situations that range from very difficult to "absolute bloody joke" oftentimes coming down to the mighty RNG as to whether the bad guys are going to notice you or suddenly pop out
of some weird location. Also silenced weapons are not ALWAYS a requirement they just reduce noise it seems, I've been in situations where I'd run into say an Enforcer, and managed to stealth kill him with multiple grenade launcher rounds, without managing to put everything on full alert (still doing the slow "wary" patrol thing, as opposed to oblivious or on the attack).
It's a decent game, I tend to rate low, I'd consider this to be about 6 out of 10 on my scale. 5 being average, and 10 being something I rarely grant anything (with 8s and 9s being exceedingly rare). Meaning it's above average, especially given the range of content, and it's better than most games as a whole, but it has a LOT of problems. Of course some of those problems (like pursuit cars always catching up to you and being as fast as you are, teleporting if need be it seems) seem to be integral to the genera.
In the future if they keep this series going they need to tighten up the writing, if they want to do super-hacking like this they might want to move the timeline up a decade or three. They should also decide if they want your character to be a hero or a villain, even bad guys can have friends and stuff, but as a general rule if I'm supposed to be "The Masked Vigilante" sticking up for the common man, I should not be engaging in routine home security violations to rob them and peep people, or sucking the bank accounts dry of every person I pass on the street (I suppose I could choose not to do this, but the point it's in the game because it's something Aiden is supposed to be doing to get money). The AI problems and such are things they can be sorted out, I've seen far worse, but I'm not exactly going to praise this game as being able to balance everything out well.... at least when it comes to the PC version they REALLY need to find a way to tighten up driving response I've spent hours replaying driving missions where most other things haven't given me a hard time.
For Watch Dogs 2, not only should they do it in the future, but make someone like Clara the hero, and then we can actually have some Cyberpunk going on. What's more if the whole world is Cyberpunk (to an extent) such a thing could fit in, allowing a character to be flashy bur discrete at the same time. It would have more character at this point, and wouldn't involve the jarring disconnect involved in wondering why nobody seemingly notices Aiden when he sticks out like a sore thumb.
Such are my thoughts, both good and bad. I'm not sure when I'll finish the game, but I've put a decent amount of time into it since it came out, and have seen a good selection of what it has to offer.
The gameplay itself is decent, and once you get past the idea of "I am hacking the city infrastructure to cause steam pipes to explode and maybe take out a couple of cars" or whatever, it's a lot of fun.
.