So.
This game.
WATCH_DOGS.
Or Watchdogs, Watch Dogs, Watch_Dogs, however you officially™ write it.
Everyone seems to know what it isn’t, and lots has been said about it, how it spectacularly failed to be this
and felt a bit more like this
… and instead of someone you care about, a dog …
everyone felt like you are playing this
- or so makes you the internet belive.
Since I have some kind of awkward taste(s) when it comes to video games, this game was one of the titles I’ve bought the PS4 for, and, till now, didn’t get around to actually play this longer than the first half hour or so. I finally had to get down to the core of this, to find out the truth. Also since the next installment, Watch_dog52 will have San Fran’ as its backdrop, is going to be out soon, and as a SF’-fanboy, I’ll have to play it anyway.
HellfuckingYES
So, to get this out of the way right from the get-go, let me address the elefant in the room then,
it’s not a GTA, and yes, it is all about HACKING. And the game makes sure you get the idea pretty quickly. Let’s just face it, as someone who’s in the IT industry, you kinda have to take a peek into games like this or Deus Ex:HR, watch TV-shows like Mr Robot or movies like Wargames, just to see how the test subject fares showing CS-stuff. You are watching this always expecting them to live hack notepad.exe with cool code-bits that reek of h4ck3r-pr0w355, e.g.
int main()
{
printf(“h4cked world\n”);
return -1;
}
- all hell breaks loose, and mankinds last hope is our hero, who has to save the world from extinction, and bags a nice gal in the process (pid 1337 for all those *NIX-g33ks out there), credits roll, and we can dream again, living the h4rdcore h4ck3r l33t life we never will.
I kinda wanna believe that the brainstorming session for this game was like this, tbh. Disney x GTA with Elefants in cars, hacking everything, all the time.
checks were written, $$$s spent, and then, after a delay to put some more polish on our hacking game, we finally, finally got the real deal,
… so, did we?
This is what I’ve set out to find out:
I kinda went into this game expecting to experience the dangerous life of a hacker,
moving on the fine line between right’n’wrong, being a dog god on earth, getting back at that super-criminal hyper-tech big brother-esque company that killed my family (or relatives or whatever), h4cking h4ckers left and right!
So!
Obviously since it’s an open world-game, I gotta check out all the nice places,
… especially since I’ve never been in Chicago in real life™, and - of course - check out the driving gear, i.e. bikes,
cars,
and - fast cars:
… however. The handling is … idk, a bit weird/needs time to get used to. It is not sleeping dogs-esque problems of handling,
mind you, but it just isn’t feeling as “good” as e.g. GTA-games do.
Still, no reason to give this game the cold shoulder,
there’s other stuff you can turn to in the game:
Hacking?
Not quite:
DRUGZ!
and the inevitable (quite) physical withdrawal;
‘gotta catch them all coins
with headbuttin’ action, and, after bein’ clean again, against all odds, found a means of transportation that just feels right:
<3 <3 <3
… and, after all, having a nice, romantic drive at the beach riverbanks the great lakes:
~fin~ … for now.
bonus-tl;dr-version:
[ x ] It isn’t a GTA, big surprise …… not.
[ x ] It has computers and hacking in it.
[ x ] It has fading brakelights (nice!)
[ x ] You can do weird stuff, right.
[ x ] Gonna play the second one as well when it comes out