Sunday 17 August 2014
A Script Kiddie in a Hacker’s World
Minus three points for Ubisoft’s Watch_
Dogsdue to the game’s developers slapping an underscore right in the middle of
its name, much to the annoyance of magazine editors worldwide. Minus two more
points for Ubisoft’s online service, Uplay,
being a complete pain to work with. Finally,
minus all the points for Watch Dogs(insert
your own underscore if you like, we’re done
with it) being a bit of a letdown, squelching
the high hopes we’d carried for this seemingly innovative title ever since its big reveal at E3 in 2012.
In this open-world title, your character,
Aiden Pearce, is a hacker. His cell phone is
his version of The Force. By tapping just a
few buttons, Pearce can hack into a whole
ton of interesting things within the game’s
version of Chicago. The setting is a beautifully crafted recreation of the Windy City
where everything electronic is tied into
a single, universal digital manager: ctOS
(the “Central Operating System”).
The phrase “hacking” might make you
think of a game like Hacker: Evolution. Allow
us to pop that bubble prematurely; hacking,
in this case, is a one-button af fair. The game
highlights things that your UberPhone can
affect when you’re near them—like a traffic light, one of Chicago’s many bridges,
or one of the billion surveillance cameras
scattered around the city, to name a few—
and you tap (or hold) a key on the keyboard
to make the magic happen. No code. No
Matrix-like world-shifting. It’s that easy.
This simplicity ties into the game’s action sequences a little too well, we feel.
Watch Dogshas the usual escalation setup whereby successive evil things you do
raise your police wanted level. For whatever reason, Ubisoft elected to not give Aiden
the abilit y to fire guns out of the cars—even
though he gets an arsenal to pick from
on foot in a game that promotes stealthy
hacks over gunfights. You’re at the mercy
of your cell phone when it comes to fleeing
the very-persistent law (that, and awkward
vehicle handling)
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