Watch Dogs Image See the trailer
Ubisoft
Release Date:
Metascore
77
Based on
18 Critics
User Score
4.6
Summary Back to top
In the modern hyper-connected world, Chicago has the nation's most advanced and integrated computer system – one which controls almost every facet of city technology and maintains critical information on all of the city's residents. Assume the role of Aiden Pearce, a notorious hacker and former thug, whose criminal past lead to a violent family tragedy. Now on the hunt for those people who have hurt your family, you will be able to monitor and hack all who surround you while manipulating the city's systems to stop traffic lights, download personal information, manipulate the electrical grid and more. Use the entire city of Chicago as your personal weapon and exact your signature brand of revenge. Expand
Starring: David Baron
Developer: Ubisoft Montreal
Genre(s): Modern
Cheats: On GameFAQs
Rating: M
Critic Reviews Back to top
Positive:
10
Mixed:
8
Negative:
0
90
Cheat Code Central
May 27, 2014
The game was designed to put control into the player’s hands and it succeeded. I thought the concept was incredibly epic and it didn’t leave me with that “I wish I could do this” feeling I get from some games. The power to play the game how you want is also a bonus. Also, if you’re looking for a game with a ton of replay value, Watch_Dogs will definitely do it. While I figured Watch_Dogs would have been a more sophisticated version of GTA, it isn’t. It can be frenetic at times and sometimes, that’s all you need to have some fun.
86
PC Games (Germany)
May 27, 2014
A delightful open-world playground with terrific graphics, lots of activities and brilliant hacking gameplay. Poor plotting and the lack of a more courageous treatment of its up-to-date scenario keeps Watch Dogs from playing in the same league as Rockstar's masterpieces.
85
GameStar
May 28, 2014
Ubisoft's challange to GTA has succeeded and shows great potential. But the writers should have shown more courage to be different and remarkable.
79
Pelit (Finland)
Sep 3, 2014
Ubisoft's flagship title has a really, really repulsive protagonist. The entire storyline feels like it was cranked out of a automated story generator. On the positive side, Watch Dogs looks really good on PC, especially after modding the graphics to match the visual splendor of the early E3 demos. [Aug 2014]
70
Games.cz
Jun 13, 2014
Watch Dogs are no gaming revolution, but it is definitely a steady start of the new series. With respect to the game's size you may wink at technical issues which are like a really heavy stone attached to the PC version's ankle. However, you may wink at them but only to some extent. Enough is enough. Despite all that, Watch Dogs do not deserve to be damned considering it is an entertaining title, and although it does not run on 100% for the most part, let us say it does not pronouncedly fail in anything apart from its story.
70
Eurogamer Italy
Jun 3, 2014
Ubisoft has a less-than-stellar record with portings of its AAA games and Watch Dogs is no exception.
60
IncGamers
May 27, 2014
Watch Dogs is decent, but as the first entry into the series it’s still trying to find its niche and its style, and as a result it’s a little bland and all too repetitive. It successfully apes a lot of other games without ever really finding a way to stand out on its own, and the hacking isn’t really enough to push it past “me too” status.
User Reviews Back to top
Positive:
296
Mixed:
83
Negative:
511
10
D3viantAssassin
Jun 2, 2014
The game is great but i have run into some serious technical issues which has nothing to do with my system. My specs are the following,a gtx 780 and an i5 3570k processor. The major issue i am having with the game is that every 5-10 minutes, the game crashes and i have to restart the system in order for my pc to work again. I have the latest available drivers and i have even tried lowering the in game settings and reducing the overclock on my gpu but to no avail. The fps is ridiculous and even with the recommended settings used from geforce experience, it fluctuates from 40 to 60 fps consistently which makes the gameplay unbearable. So all i can do now is wait for a patch but until then I can't even play the game. I am so annoyed with ubisoft and their **** this is the worst port i have ever played. This game needs serious fixing ubisoft!!!Get you acts together jerks, i want my moneys worth!!! Expand
9
Venari
May 31, 2014
Notice how 9 times out of 10 the first thing these negative reviews mention is the game's graphics? The answer to this is simply that everyone is super "butthurt" about the "downgrade" in graphics compared to E3 2012. I've seen people claiming that it looks like Saints Row 2 on high, are you **** kidding me? WD on max settings is easily one of the greatest looking games of all time, from the lighting, textures, rain, smoke and wind, to the gorgeous explosions and the astounding character models, this game is absolutely gorgeous, it's still pretty damn good looking even on low settings as well. When hacking cameras I often thought I was looking at real life, especially when spying on the character Iraq, he looks like a real person. Now that I've addressed the elephant in the review, let's get to the actual game.

The campaign is not the longest, but it's considerably longer than most games nowadays. I beat the game in 45 hours of gameplay on my first playthrough, and a lot of that was side stuff and free roam, I'd say the campaign by itself is between 17-23 hours or so, give or take.

Gameplay is fun as **** gunplay is fluid, animations are excellent, stealth is incredible, better than Assassin's Creed's by far. Hacking is definitely the highlight of the gameplay, hacking security cameras to get a better view of the situation, setting off traps, controlling the city at the tap of a screen, it makes you feel powerful and successfully executing a plan using hacking is extremely rewarding. Driving, in my opinion, really grew on me. It's different from most games and cars can be difficult to control, but once I got used to it I found that I was driving better than I was in GTA games. To top gameplay off, there is a difficulty mode called realistic mode, play on this, seriously. Enemies die in 1-4 shots without armor, you die in about 3-5 shots, it makes gameplay really tense and definitely rewards careful planning and stealth, and discourages balls to the wall shootouts, because your face will get shot up. Speaking of shootouts, I don't know specifically, maybe the animations, the fluid combat controls, parkour, just make it so fun to be in a shootout. Hacking isn't as complex as it could be, but would you really want anything more complicated? The way hacking is makes it very accessible and fun to use, anything more complicate and people would be whining about how it's too complicated. One complaint about realistic mode however is that armor is OP. You'll get hitmarkers with a Barrett if they're wearing bullet-proof vests. Armor is unrealistic in this game and realistic mode will become frustrating and a bit cheap later in the game, but that just made it more fun for me.

The story may become confusing at times, and there are many anti-climactic moments, such as taking down couple of antagonists, some of them just end in an in game shootout, not very cinematic and a bit disappointing on that part, but there is one antagonist death that is just so **** cool and outside the box, I'll let you discover that if you get the game. Overall the story is good, combine the ridiculously good character models and graphics with the absolutely amazing voice actors and you get some very touching and emotional moments. Although, Aiden is by far the weakest character in the game, while his voice actor sounds nice, gravelly voice and all, execution of some lines lack emotion sometimes, kind of comparable to male Commander Shepard, Mark Meer, in Mass Effect, although nowhere near as bad. Aiden definitely doesn't lack the depth though, he has a great backstory and history. The supporting cast is really where they shine. From the French accent stereotypical young punk hacker girl with a partially shaved head Clara Lille, the charming, often hysterical and great guy Jordi and even your sister Nicole to the interesting and cold Iraq, the Deadmau5 wannabe Defalt and the manipulative monster "Lucky" Quinn, there is no shortage of lovable and incredible supporting characters and antagonists.

In the open world there is a LOT to do, preventing crimes, criminal convoys, gang hideouts, fixer contracts, they add a lot of depth and variety to the game, and definitely do not get old quickly. Even after 50+ hours of gameplay I am still giddy when I get a gang hideout alert, those are my favorite. The game has a reputation system that can quickly change depending on your actions. You will either be a revered vigilante or a feared monster in the public's eyes, and this affects gameplay. If you're on the latter side of that spectrum you may walk into a store to find you're in a news broadcast on the TV in the back, making it difficult to complete a nice and legal purchase.

Over the past few years, I've learned not to trust user reviews anymore. From the less than 1 rating of Mass Effect to the whiny **** bashing this game, user reviews aren't to be trusted anymore, read the reviews of the people who are PAID to review games, please.
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7
Nomus
May 27, 2014
Ive spent 5 hours in the game. My thoughts:
1. Story wise its pretty interesting. Kinda love that hacker stuff but i think that drama crap is
pretty unnecessary
2. Sandbox feels pretty dull. Yeah minigames yeah kinda. They are pretty repetitive but its just polished Saints row 3
3. Same with the car physics
4. Muliplayer is well...it usually boils down to the target hiding in really empty place where you can't track him unnoticed or its just take the fastest car and leaves you. I kinda like the fact that you can be invaded all of a sudden but again it boils down to someone having a faster car.
5. Gunplay is quite boring. All that hacking stuff becomes boring and repetitive at the 4-5th time.
6. AI is ok. Nothing special
7. Music is terrible except the part where you have to hack another player. Radio is just awful

Again. They had alotof experience with AC series and still failed to come up with something original. Minigames doesnt make the sandbox interesting. The world around you lacks on ambient noises and that makes the world around you even more empty.
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4
SimpleGamer
Aug 11, 2014
The game was supposed to be one of the best games of 2014 but the game disappointed me big time. The graphics were okay but it downgraded a lot from the e3 2012. For me the stealth part was really boring after a few hours. It just got repetitive. The voice of Aiden sounds like Batman and the main character doesn't have much of a personality. The storyline is pretty bad. It's just about a guy named Aiden who's daughter was killed because of his hacking for money. But he decides to keep on hacking things and trying to get revenge on the guy who ordered a guy to kill Aiden's daughter. I mean, that's it. Also, when i decided to take a break from the story and decided to do some side missions and activities. The side missions were all just stealthing and hacking. (which got boring after a few times of doing the same thing) There weren't many good activities either. (Except for the phone games.) So I DON'T recommend this game. Just get gta 5. Expand
2
carlbme
May 30, 2014
TERRIBLE

The story isn't bad. That's the ONLY reason I gave it as high of a score as I did.
Boring city, terrible driving, terrible
graphics, NPC's are on par with GTA3, terrible code causing terrible graphics to slow down a machine that can handle much better. The supposed freedom that comes with these style of games is severely lacking. Expand
0
AzzyTheCharger
Sep 12, 2014
I would like to start by saying that this game is an absolutely terrible port on the PC regardless of the downgraded graphics i performs utterly bad. The story was quite enjoyable at first but then in gets slow and really boring.
in short, the game was over hyped and disappointed many gamers including myself.
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0
Ploutonas
May 27, 2014
Nothing new from the previews sleeping dogs or saints row games, some missions or side missions, reminds you these games.

Big limitations
the way you want to play and look with your character. Cloth stores are basically ink stores, you only change colors. Mini games and CtOS towers reminds me Saints row 4.

Hacking is easy and turns into a borring rutine.

Over hyped and delayed for nothing!
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