#1334
6th Jun 2014 at 1:16 PM
Got Watch_Dogs a few days ago...
Graphics are laughable, even by the old-gen standards from three years ago. No dynamic shadows, pre-rendered reflections, no moving weapon components, no texture filtering option, car smoke vanishes instantly as soon as the car's wheels stop moving, bodies disappear after a few seconds, cars disappear if you move more than a block away from them, and the list goes on. Don't even get me started on the optimization.
Good voice acting is wasted in this game, with a story that couldn't be more over-dramatic if James Cameron wrote it. Basically you play as a "hacker" (I guess that's what you call a person who presses buttons on a cellphone to blow stuff up nowadays) named Aiden Pearce, who is out to get revenge on the people who had his 6-year old niece killed. Well ok that's bullshit, the real plot actually involves Aiden searching for someone to blame for a car accident in which he freaked out and got his niece killed, at least that's how I'd explain his SUV somehow flipping over just cause someone shot one of his damn tires. It also rips-off every GTA plot ever by having you kill your main enemy somewhere near the end, while the actual ending has you killing a more recent enemy.
The gameplay basically revolves around killing, driving, spying on people, more killing, police chases, killing, and cyber-drugs which are actually more fun than they sound. Notice I mentioned killing several times yes? That's because as a "hacker" your main job is to point guns at people and pull the trigger until their head reminds you of the last episode of Game of Thrones. Aiden seems confused about this at some point in the game, when one of the objectives is to... well, kill everyone. And he's like "what have I done? :C" despite the fact that he's been doing the same damn thing ever since the game started. And not only that but in this particular case his nephew's life was at stake, usually he's just killing dudes to get to an EA computer and pirate the latest FIFA game or some shit. In fact Aiden seems morally confused in general. This game features a morality system, but the ways in which you gain or lose morality are questionable. You get bad morality points for robbing a gun shop, but you don't get any at all for hacking $1200 from the bank account of a cancer patient? "They'll die anyway, it's not like they'll need it." fuck you Aiden.
In other words, next-gen? HAH good one Ubisoft, really good one. Still, I've been playing it for over 20 hours. So I guess at the end of the day, Watch_Dogs is really a deja vu of Mafia II. Neither delivered even a quarter of what they promised, only difference being that Mafia II lacks in quantity, whereas Watch_Dogs lacks in quality. Yet they are both pretty fun still.
Even though the guns aren't animated, they look pretty damn good. And even though drive-by's, blind-fire and hip-fire are not possible, and the mouse aiming f***ing sucks, the guns still feel pretty damn good. And there's a lot of 'em, so many beautiful guns @_@
Cars are also nice. The handling could use some tuning, but overall it feels great (which is no surprise seeing as it was done by Reflections). And the cars are very detailed even though some of the designs aren't very inspired.There's also a cockpit view in this game, which is freaking awesome for a sandbox crime game.
And even though the story sucks, the story missions are pretty awesome.
All and all, Watch_Dogs isn't really a bad game. But it's not that game we saw at E3 2012, not even close. What's actually probably most fun about it are the mini-games. Nothing like going all Saints Row up in this b**** with a spider-tank or running over zombies in a Carmaggeddon-like universe.