Watch Dogs

After playing Watch Dogs Legion recently, I was interested to go back to the first game in the series to see how it compared. The main character is Aiden Pearce, a dour cyber vigilante very much in the mould of Reese from Person of Interest, who is on a mission of revenge after the death of his young niece. He does this by tracking down and hacking a variety of criminal gangs and corrupt fixers in the underworld of a realistically rendered Chicago and surrounds. 

A lot of the gadgets from the latter game are missing here, making it a challenge to try and infiltrate various gang hideouts by hacking security cameras while remaining hidden. If you time it right you can take down a guard silently, but there's no way of hiding the bodies so there's a good chance that the alarm will be raised fairly quickly. You can also set things to explode remotely to kill someone if you time it right, but this also alerts anyone else nearby. There are only a couple of silent weapons available, so things usually escalate into a firefight fairly quickly. Even on the easy settings these can be quite tough, especially when enemies dressed in bullet proof armour make an appearance. 

As well as gang members, the police are pretty sharp at taking an interest in your activities with a cat and mouse game of trying to evade attention by ducking down side alleys and hiding from surveillance helicopters. The driving is satisfying with noticeable differences between the different vehicles available and the ability to shake off pursuit by switching traffic lights, exploding steam pipes (which I assume is a thing in Chicago) or most entertainingly by triggering one of the many elevating bridges over the river. If you time it right, you can jump over gap as the bridge raises and leave anyone chasing you on the wrong side.

Whilst walking down the street you can hack any phone in the vicinity, listening in on conversations, getting the location of crimes and stolen items, and draining bank accounts into your own. This is a handy source of funds for buying guns and ammo, explosives, drugs and electronic parts for gadgets, but it seems a little bit unethical for someone who is supposed to be a vigilante fighting crime to be ripping off innocent passers by. I think that I had over a million dollars in my account at the end of the game, but unlike the GTA games where you can buy fancy houses and apartments, my character still seemed to be living in a dumpster.

The side missions are entertaining, and a good way to earn experience points and upgrade your skill tree quickly (which is something of a necessity). I especially enjoyed the random vigilante missions where you get a tip off to a location where a crime is predicted to be about to happen and have to scan the crowd to find the potential victim and perpetrator, and then time your intervention to save the day. This has the effect of also boosting your reputation which cancels out the negative impact you get if you happen to run over a bystander while speeding down a street while escaping. 

The missions are mostly fun, but there are occasional huge spikes in difficulty towards the end of the game. The story line is also quite grim with the villain being a sordid old business tycoon pretty obviously based on Rupert Murdoch, with drugs, gang violence and human trafficking thrown into the mix. It's never really explored where Aiden gets his l33t hacking skillz from and the Dedsec group are mostly in the background. I did finish the main storyline and most of the side missions, clocking up 49 hours in this compared with 73 hours in Legion.

Graphically, it's pretty good on the PS5 and runs smoothly during the inevitable chases. It's particularly impressive with rainy streets and night time illuminations. I remember a bit of controversy when it was initially released with the actual game not matching up to the pre-release screenshots and trailers but I had no complaints. 

Watch Dogs 2 next!