Watch Dogs

No one develops underbaked, bloated, and poorly written open-world games quite like Ubisoft. But even among many illustrious peers, such as * checks notes * most Assassin’s Creed games, Watch Dogs is special: taking place in a modern setting, focusing on the use of technology, the game is an even bigger mess than usual.

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

The game begins with a bit of melodrama: in the sequence where the girl dies (filled with so many glitchy effects that it may push you to check if everything is alright with your console), the camera lingers on her stuffed lamb on the ground, with Pearce’s car toppled in the background, and then fades to her tombstone, with the lamb positioned at the center. “Look at how innocent and helpless she was,” Watch Dogs seems to scream, “Why aren’t you crying?”

The narrative only improves afterward if we consider turning nonsensical a positive aspect. Pierce is already obsessed with his niece’s tragedy, after all, having constant nightmares about it, so why does he need Damien’s push to take his revenge to the next stage? Damien’s plan also seems more like a forced attempt to inject tension into the proceedings than a proper solution to his personal problems, since instead of exploiting Pierce’s obsession to achieve his goal, the guy prefers to antagonize him for no logical reason.

To make matters worse, not much happens in the game. Watch Dogs has a relatively long campaign, but only because its narrative is egregiously padded with countless small conflicts: even butter scraped over too much bread would be bothered by the game’s thin, stretched structure. Its long extension results from the bureaucracy around each one of the protagonist’s goals, which are always preceded by numerous preparatory missions. Just the goal of hacking into a gangster’s server in the middle of the game, for example, takes up the entirety of the game’s second act.

Watch Dogs’ story is full of problems: there’s an interlude involving a mysterious hacker that, despite lasting a few missions, never gets anywhere; there are completely unnecessary characters whose motivations don’t make a lick sense, such as Clara; there’s a big, laughable twist that hopes we’ll be surprised to find out that the big bad guy really was the real bad guy all along; there’s a final random but pretentious choice with no consequence at all; and there are some ridiculously anticlimactic side quests, such as one involving a serial killer, which, after a long investigation, just has us doing of the game’s most banal activities. And, above everything else, there is a one-dimensional protagonist who is utterly unable to show any semblance of a personality that goes beyond his desire for revenge.

Watch Dogs also suffers from a case of “ludonarrative dissonance” so serious that even the most potent narrative antibiotics wouldn’t be able to heal: there’s a clear incompatibility between Pierce’s characterization during cutscenes and our actions during normal gameplay. On the one hand, Watch Dogs gives us a protagonist who acts as a vigilante in the city of Chicago, fighting criminals, to see justice done. On the other hand, it allows us to take that man and 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’s this one time that Pierce gets very angry that a guy hit a woman, but on the way to teach him a lesson, we can very well shoot another woman on the face to steal her car, and then run over her body several times just for the lolz… all without a single 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 because the protagonist is not a criminal or an outlaw, but a vigilante. His personality is shaped around a battle against injustice; his main drama involves avenging the death of an innocent person. Therefore, if he can start to act like a genocidal maniac without any scruples, becoming far worse than those he pursues, without the game ever acknowledging that, everything else falls apart.

And it doesn’t stop with the option to murder people for no reason, since Pierce can also take money from strangers’ accounts and even 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 our actions, as they’re the ones now actively encouraging us 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 its vigilante protagonist committing these crimes and then tries to paint him as someone destined to punish criminals: you can’t eat your pie and have it too. Believe me, I’ve tried.

And Watch Dogs doesn’t even come close to making it up for its several narrative problems, since its gameplay is hardly engaging. After all, its stealth sequences are all in the vein of a security guard saying, “Nothing wrong here,” after encountering 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 must solve a repetitive minigame in which we spin some pipes around.

While driving cars, hacking means blowing up gas pipes, moving bridges, and activating barriers to bring opponents down. The problem is that these actions are performed without much thinking involved: besides the result always being the same regardless of what is being activated – they stop enemies from getting near us –, it’s also the same symbol that flashes on the screen to indicate it’s the right time to press the button, removing even the need of checking the enemy’s position. In other words, hacking while driving amounts to just reacting to a quick-time event.

On-foot action sequences don’t fare much better either. It’s possible to hack into the guards’ mobile phones and distract them by sending messages; remotely activate the bomb they’re carrying (don’t ask); or cause static on their communication devices, but we have no say about which action to use, since there is only one specific action for each guard.

The only interesting use of hacking is moving around buildings through security cameras, as movement becomes completely different: now, we must jump from one camera to the other, which is thematically appropriate, as it shows how Pierce doesn’t need to be physically present in a place to invade it. Nevertheless, Watch Dogs fails at even managing our progress, since we can acquire most of the hacking upgrades and 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 to their set-pieces. There is one that takes place on the rooftop of a building, for example, where we can position Aiden to better cover the only door to the place… unaware that enemies will simply pop up out of thin air right next to the hacker and open fire immediately. To add aggravating insult to infected injury, the checkpoint is right before the boss exchanges insults with Pierce, forcing us to listen to the whole exchange again if we happen to lose the fight.

The game’s only saving grace is some of its insane secondary activities – called “Digital Trips” – which are amusing precisely because of their sheer absurdity: they have us bumping into plants, running over zombies, and destroying Chicago with a giant metal spider. 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 offers 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 different opportunities to hack people that are basically just the same action every time, under a slightly different context. In other words, it’s a Ubisoft game through and through.

May 06, 2025.

Review originally published in Portuguese on November 11, 2016.