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Is a subreddit dedicated to the video game series Watch_Dogs developed by Ubisoft Montreal. I don't know whether this is true of WD2 because, given my experience here, I won't be buying that one.Multiplayer/LFG Info Announcements List Filters/Views: All So I can't recommend this if you want a great experience. It's an example of the sort of derivative waste of time and money I usually try to avoid. Unfortunately, Watch Dogs doesn't do those things. I know how difficult it is to make a good game, tell a good immersive story, and offer players great experiences. If it sounds like I'm being super-picky and hard on this game, I am.
Ubisoft no doubt had a checklist of items they wanted to include-probably things the designers thought would please the players-and just put them all in without considering an overall theme, story, and mood. There's the GTA franchise, Assassin's Creed / FarCry, Hitman, classic puzzle-logic games, and probably more that I haven't picked up on-all wonderful but weird and awkward packed into the same game / story.
WD also seems super derivative, like a Frankenstein's monster of other game ideas. Seriously, reminding people that there is no real privacy online and that an Orwellian information society is horrible doesn't add anything fun to the game. Other things, some of which have been noted by other reviewers here on Steam: nearly all the cars handle poorly (which is weird, given that one way of describing this is that it's a "driving simulator") the heat system is inconsistent and is generally not scaled to Aiden's activities, making every single thing a run for Aiden's life-usually to the water, where the AI cops are apparently blind (water blindness?) and the moral message about online privacy is so heavy handed that you wind up muttering, "Yeah, I get it, ctOS is up in everyone's sock drawer and this is bad." Whatever. And Aiden's tech abilities (superhero with a cell phone) turn yawn-inducing very quickly. The villains are more annoying and dumb than evil.
"I'm going to b-line it to the next checkpoint and die so I can actually make some progress here), that it breaks the game as far as the story is concerned. And the final mission is so video gamey, so dependent on meta-game thinking (i.e. But many of the main campaign missions do result in Aiden jumping in the water just to avoid what would otherwise be a super-aggravating, grindy succession of reloads in order to get the aggro, bad-AI police off his back. Games regularly do a lot worse with their storytelling. It's kind of on par with a Robert Ludlum-style airport thriller. I just want to note that the online experience might be, or might have been, different and I want to acknowledge that possibility.) (To be fair, the online facets of the game no longer work for me via Steam-whether that's because WD1 is only minimally supported by Ubisoft now or some other reason, I really don't know. The fixer side-contracts are the worst, but this tends to be a problem across the entire game. Watch Dogs fails at this because it seems to provide an open world, but anything you attempt in Aiden Pearce's near-future Chicago either gets you killed within 30 seconds (even on Normal difficulty) or is enormously boring and tedious after the first few sessions. So designers try to keep a delicate balance between mechanics that move the story ahead (checkpoints, main quests) and sandbox geography that encourages player improvisation and engagement. When the player feels more in control, the player feels more involved and has more fun.
At the same time, open world games encourage immersion and suspension of disbelief, which is what we experience when we feel lost in a great movie or book (or video game). This decreases the aggravation of monotonous grinding and merely having to reload and re-attempt until you complete an objective. The cool thing about an open world game is coming up with your own way of telling the story and solving problems. But its biggest defect is where game play converges with storytelling. And after living with it for a while, I've seen a ton of problems in it, including unfixed mission bugs as of late 2021 when I'm writing this review.
So I played the campaign through to the end on my PC. The first time around, I felt like I needed to give it another chance. I first played it on console ($5 used) and then got it on a Steam sale. Overall, my advice is if you really must play it, get it at a < $10 USD discount. The following review might be too picky and analytical for most people thinking about buying the game. TL/DR: Mediocre at best, at worst highly tedious and aggravating.