E3. Packed seats. Muffled coughs and the smell of stale sweat.
The stage goes dark. Laptops glow in broken blue lines. Fans hum. Keyboards chatter.
The screen lights up. An athletic man in a heavy coat winds carefully down the street. He enters a crowd and slips past a guard. His target is close. He palms his weapon.
The world goes slow. Heartbeats boom. Our hero begins to sprint.
And then the trailer ends. The audience applauds and gets back to typing raves and glowing previews. Surely this is next-gen: the one true heir of 32-bit plumbers past. So was it proclaimed in conference halls, so echoed in card shops and game stores the world over.
Assassin’s Creed: the future of gaming.
Watch Dogs: the future of gaming.
Yes, Ubisoft has done it again.
Note to the reader: I’ve poured over a lot of reviews in my 16 years as a hardcore gamer. Some are entertaining and well-written, some read like a high-school homework assignment. Very few treat video games as a story-telling medium. For all the lip-service we give to games as art, it’s rare to find a review that covers story first.
I don’t say this to criticize any writer or website. Everyone likes a different side of gaming, and no one wants a five-page write-up on the story of Mario 3D World. That said, the reviews I enjoy, whether film, game, or book, focus on narrative analysis. For that reason, this article covers the story of Watch Dogs only.
Treat this like a film review. I will avoid flagrant spoilers, but please stay clear if you want a clean experience.
For all those hoping that Ubisoft would avoid the first-entry pothole in its newest franchise, think again. Like its stabby, 7th Gen cousin, Watch Dogs’ visual panache is flawed by vanilla character design and a tedious story arc. Though it offers up a breathtaking variety of activities and paints Chicago in satisfying local color, the fun factor is sabotaged by stubborn adherence to a tired narrative formula.
Despite its weighty subject matter, Watch Dogs is not an ambitious tale. The lead is Aiden Pearce, a growly-voiced hacker, weapons expert, and uncle of two. His partner, Damien Brenks, is a keyboard ninja with a style copped directly from Ed Harris in The Truman Show (read: Frenchman caricature). Their primary motive is digital larceny. That is, they crack big-dollar bank accounts and siphon the cash. When a big job goes sideways, the mob retaliates. Personal tragedy ensues—sorrow, rage, revenge, etc.
The story fits snugly inside the Luc Besson mold—think The Transporter or Kiss of the Dragon, and you’re close to where the script wants to live. Unfortunately, Watch Dogs’ rip-roaring revenge yarn isn’t the best fit for a 20+ hour story. It evokes powerful emotions, but they tend to dissipate during longer rounds of busywork. By the time Aiden pays his debts, the plot retains too little tension to achieve the physical relief of a good thriller.
Along his murderous quest, Aiden meets some likable characters. Clara: tattooed, mohawked hacker and member of the enigmatic DedSec. Jordi: wise-mouthed mercenary with a penchant for monologue. T-Bone: redneck. And Aiden has a family: sister Nicole and kids. With the exception of these last, all are well-voiced and visually interesting.
This posse makes a good first impression, but they never get much breathing room. Each character has a role to play, and they exist for that role with single-minded purpose. Take Clara. She has some personal motivations, sure. But dig into any of them, and you're sure to bump into Aiden. Clara is a faux three-dimensional character: her backstory is outlined, and she has a clear plot arc, but it is lashed to Aiden’s journey on every line. As such, she exists only as an extension of Aiden, an expository pipeline.
And Clara is the best drawn of Aiden’s companions. The others are like pop-up ads—annoying or humorous, but ultimately forgettable.
The real miss is our hero himself. “Generic” doesn't say it. Aiden is every video game hero you’ve ever played, without the touch of camp or humor. It's not about the coat-cap-scarf look. Aiden's visual design is a lowest denominated grab for mass appeal, but it's his personality I detest. If, that is, a snarly voice qualifies as a personality trait. Aiden spends most of his time mugging for the camera, doing his best to wring some iconography from his blah-lazy profile. The closest thing he has to a meaningful relationship is his sister, and that stinks of unattended therapy. He murders bystanders on the way to stop petty crimes. And worst of all—I can’t remember one of his lines.
Watch Dogs does some things right. The plot is bolted together well enough, and the denouement is surprisingly enjoyable, complete with an inventive killshot. The side content is replete with audio logs and intriguing story hooks. And if you enjoy French action cinema, you’ll find more than a few smiles along the way.
But if, like me, you were expecting a complex metafiction, ala Assassin’s Creed, adjust your sights. Oh, there are whispers of a connected universe, of hard science fiction with guts and a message. You’ll hear them calling from every server room, echoing from the dark, digital void: mysterious, inscrutable, unreachable.
Unreachable because the game never bothers to stretch. For the better part of 20 hours, Watch Dogs promises something more, something intangible, something that keeps falling off the tongue.
Oh, who am I kidding: it promised us cyberpunk.
Not a city with a few security cameras and a handful of server farms. Not a simple—if enjoyable—pipe-alignment minigame to emulate cyberspace. Not a screen-chewing Christof clone or the Girl sans Dragon Tattoo. I wanted cyberpunk, damn it. I wanted hostile runtimes and projected consciousness, at least a consistent noire atmosphere.
To be fair, Ubisoft never explicitly alluded to any of these things, and the world they created isn’t immediately conducive to Neuromancer-style shenanigans. But I was hoping for a kind of proto-cyberpunk. A ramp-up to the cyberverse, maybe a tease in the final moments.
It comes so close. Toward the middle of Act II, the plot takes a stroll down one of my favorite Chicago lanes. It’s steamy jazz and gut-sucking depravity—everything I want from cyberpunk. But that only lasts a handful of missions, and it's back to boilerplate.
Not until the final credits does Watch Dogs bother with world building or simple exposition. There is a simmering conflict between Blume, the corporation manning ctOS, Chicago's city-wide surveillance network, and DedSec, a hacker organization with dubious motives. However, this fascinating thread is relegated to background noise for much of the game. When it finally surfaces in the main campaign, the moment feels more like a half-hearted patch job than an anticipated reveal.
If there’s one ball Ubisoft hit deep, it’s voyeurism. In presenting its recorded world, Watch Dogs spares no discomfort. Privacy Invasion missions are what you thought they were, and snooping in private homes makes for some genuine feel-dirty moments.
Still, I hesitate to say that the game makes a social statement. It’s discussed: the data we spew across social networks, the fragile intimacy of unobserved behavior, the human experience as data mine. But proper commentary should involve more than some side missions and a handful of optional video clips. The game lacks a strong voice to speak its truths: Hugo Weaving in V for Vendetta, Winston in 1984. It has plenty of talking heads on large screens, including a masked member of DedSec. With so many options for thematic messaging, this is a big miss.
Conclusion
Watch Dogs is a functional first bow that puts too much stock the origin story of a vacuous character. Play it for its next-gen visuals, unique hacking, smooth gunplay, or detailed open world. These have been discussed by numerous outlets at this point, and they are thoroughly amusing. Or play it as an investment in the future of a franchise that is full-stocked with potential.
There’s nothing wrong with Watch Dogs. It has pretty explosions and high speed wipe-outs aplenty. The fiction is lightweight, quaffable, and supple enough to weather feedback. Hacking is no gimmick; it is an innovation that can and will mature as the generation wears on. With a likable protagonist, better pacing, and higher stakes, this franchise can be so much more than a razzle-pop shooter with stealth segments. Watch Dogs can find its Ezio.
Yes, Ubisoft has done it again. Let's hope we can say the same after Watch Dogs 2.