http://whatculture.com/gaming/watch-dogs-10-reasons-sucks.php/2
10. The Mini-Games Are Lame
Ubisoft
What do chess, Carmageddon, that ball and three cups guessing game thing, slot machines, a shot-drinking contest, hold em’ poker, alternate reality shooters and parkour have in common? They represent the majority of mini-games in Watch_Dogs. If that seems like a REALLY strange grouping, you’d be right.
The thing with mini-games in open-world titles is that the best ones serve to inform the world or introduce you to something new and fun you didn’t expect. The taxi missions in Grand Theft Auto III were awesome because an entire game about driving a taxi – Crazy Taxi, came out barely three years prior, and its still compelling gameplay was impressively condensed into a side activity.
Even better, Red Dead Redemption introduced legions of people to the little-known joys of Liars Dice, which fit perfectly with the western aesthetic, was an absolute blast to play, and easily modifiable into a ‘real life’ drinking game as icing on the cake.
But it seems Ubisoft has trouble with this sort of thing. Assassin’s Creed III featured Checkers and Bocce, which are almost laughably mundane activities to participate in where there’s naval battles to be had. In Watch_Dogs, it seems like they picked games out of a hat, and then settled on the least appealing ones. Opening up the world map and browsing the various points of interest yields such a “meh” reaction.
Did you really pay 60 dollars to play newspaper-esque chess challenges? What about engaging in the equivalent of the ‘you’ve been knocked down’ mini-games from EA’s Fight Night series?
If you did, then this is the game for you.
But you probably didn’t, and it’s disappointing to look at the offerings and not find one that peaks curiosity the same way Liars Dice did. The games offered in Watch_Dogs are fun, and they do have depth if you find yourself enjoying them a lot, but in a general sense they’re not compelling enough to warrant spending time with them just because you can, which sucks.
9. You Can’t Shoot While Driving
Ubisoft
This entry could be just the heading. The idea that you can’t shoot from your car while driving in Watch_Dogs, while your enemies can, is baffling in the “How is Rob Ford STILL the Mayor of Toronto?!” sort of way. Of all the things to NOT copy from literally every single open world game with cars in it ever, this is not the feature to omit.
Like a kid who makes their mom breakfast in bed and spills the cereal on the way up the stairs, it’s possible Ubisoft’s heart was in the right place here, but that doesn’t make the mess any easier to clean up. Instead of drive-by mayhem, Watch_Dogs encourages texting and driving by giving Aiden the ability to utilise road blocks, spike strips, traffic lights and steam pipes in his quest to dismantle and disable enemy motor vehicles.
This is a great idea, but execution-wise it’s a Lemiwinks sized pain-in-the-rear-end. Early in the game, Watch_Dogs informs you that when the diamond shaped hacking icon turns blue that you should immediately hit the corresponding button to disable enemy vehicles. In practice this rarely happens smoothly.
Instead, getting the timing right to activate these devices is an exercise in frustration, especially in convoy missions when there are half a dozen enemy cars and you’re gunning for just one of them. Missing a steam pipe means following the enemy car until you get another chance to activate blockers or spike strips, and as enemies gain on you it becomes harder and harder to keep up with the target vehicle, let alone get the timing for a hack right.
For many this omission is enough to warrant a complete blow-off of everything else Watch_Dogs has to offer, and its understandable. Players have been shooting from cars in games since open-world video games existed, and for Watch_Dogs to leave this feature so players can hack more stuff, isn’t just frustrating, it’s borderline unforgivable for some, and undeniably lame for everyone.
8. Aiden Pearce Is Boring
Ubisoft
Watch_Dog’s protagonist is Aiden Pearce, angry white guy. Aiden is…grumpy. He talks through gritted teeth, wilfully threatens violence and rarely, if ever, seems to enjoy anything.
He’s a miserable, unlikable, monotone snooze fest, that on paper reads like a 13 year old’s idea of what a ‘bad ass’ video game character would be – down to the fact that every single outfit you can buy for him is simply a take on the trench coat / baseball cap / bottom half of Sub-Zero mask ensemble.
Doing things like wearing a bad-ass trench coat, riding a motorcycle, killing a hit-man or telling a bad guy ‘how it is’, does not a good character make. Aiden is such a flatline that you don’t care about his family, ‘friends’ or plight, to the point that toward the end of the game’s first act it was nearly impossible to figure out what exactly was going on within the context of the story – but somehow abortions, prisons, witnesses, and testimony find their way into a narrative that initially seemed to be about solving the murder of a six year old girl.
Things do improve story-wise, and Aiden develops something resembling a personality toward the middle of the second act, but it sucks he isn’t more dynamic from the start and that Ubisoft wasn’t willing to take more risks with him. When they released Far Cry 3, they made Jason Brody and his friends deliberately vapid, coddled, soft and flawed so that people would have genuine emotional reactions to them. While some of those reactions were negative, you at least felt something, and by the end of the game you’re presented with a choice that asks you to pass judgement on those same characters.
Personable characters can save the most generic and worn-out stories, and generic ones can doom narratives like the one in Watch_Dogs which is about a lot of techie stuff and screams out for a character worth investing in from the word go, versus one you need to spend a lot of time with to truly get behind.
7. Chicago’s Geography And Landmarks Are Wrong
Ubisoft
Have you seen Chicago’s bean? It’s pretty cool, and or cheesy depending on how you feel toward modern art. It’s a giant, metallic…thing that looks like what would happen if the T1000 from Terminator 2 passed a 10 foot high kidney stone. In Watch_Dogs it resembles a shiny fruit loop.
When making a game that exists in a real place people actually live, these kind of smudged-over details are infuriating, and Watch_Dogs is rife with them. The Chicago that Aiden Pearce exists in is a strange place, where the entire North Side has been shifted west, there’s only one baseball team in town in a totally incorrect geographical location, and The Chicago Theater, Music Box Theater, and Navy Pier’s Ferris Wheel are either missing or renamed. Even the infamous face fountain has been replaced by interconnected square-looking things and despite still having the same name.
It’s understandable that getting the rights to a lot of these locations and landmarks could be expensive, but at the same time what’s the point of setting your game in a specific place if you’re not going to get into specifics about that place?
There’s a reason Grand Theft Auto and Saints Row make their worlds analogies to real places, instead of the real places themselves – it’s easier to forgive Liberty City for shafting your favourite part of New York City because it’s not actually New York City.
Worse is that the game deliberately rubs your face in the anachronisms. There are a bunch of landmark hotspots spread throughout Chicago, and if you ‘check in’ at one you’ll be greeted with an informative little blurb about the thing that’s actually supposed to be there, tied to the fake name, which will surely confuse non-Chicagoans and infuriate natives.
But don’t worry, Ubisoft secured the ability to refer to The Willis Tower by its proper name – which precisely zero percent Chicago residents actually refer to it as.
6. Cover Mechanics Are Stickier Than Glue
Ubisoft
Playing Watch_Dogs as a stealth game is a lot of fun. Taking cover behind a bus stop, hacking into a camera via your phone, setting off a series of explosions to distract guards, sauntering into a server room, and then hacking a mainframe is thrilling, and it’s when Watch_Dogs feels the most comfortable in its own skin.
Unless you’re trying to exit cover. Exiting cover in Watch_Dogs requires either hitting backward on the left analog stick or hitting B (or circle on a PS4) button on the controller. You’ll typically exit cover if you want to retreat to a different vantage point, make a run for a door, or in many cases, stand straight up in the middle of a room full of enemies and immediately be detected, shot, and killed.
See, Watch_Dogs doesn’t have a crouch button. Due to this when you exit cover, unless you’re in a ‘restricted area’ you’ll stand straight up like an ostrich taking their head out of the sand. How profoundly this annoyance effects your enjoyment of Watch_Dogs is directly proportional to your patience, free time, and supply of anti-depressants.
If you’re the forgiving type, restarting a mission after getting shot is another opportunity to approach the scenario in a creative way. If you’re a normal human being and have a job, kids, house, bills, and chores to do, it’s so frustrating you’ll scream. Or take the disk out of the system and snap it, all the while cursing the name Bedbug and the stealth-focused mission surrounding him.
Either way, it sucks this particular mechanic is so tacky because it’s something Ubisoft has struggled with constantly in their Assassin’s Creed franchises, where your ‘stealth’ pose is dictated by your location in the game, versus your wants and needs as a player, and that never feels right.
5. It Has A High ‘Embarrassment Factor’.
Ubisoft
It seems a lot of developers forget gamers have families. With every “Hey Effer” or casual reference to a hot-button issue like abortion, playing Watch_Dogs in front of children or squeamish parents feels more and more like walking into a strip club across the street from a church.
The game’s NPCs curse at will, dropping variations of the F word every time Aiden is detected, oftentimes even overlapping to unintentionally hilarious results. When playing alone this is easy enough to ignore, but when in the casual company of others, these sorts of things constantly lavish negative attention on the game, video game stereotypes in general, and worst of all the person playing the game – the “Seriously, how old are you again?” stare of disapproval stings more than most folks would care to admit – especially if it comes during the mission where you’re hacking your way through a high-rise gang hideout teeming with human trafficking victims being used for sex.
While some games like Grand Theft Auto, and films like The Wolf of Wall Street turn their profanity and risqué content into a sort of poetry, Watch_Dogs’ world simply doesn’t have the texture to justify its casually vulgar dialog, haphazard poking at political issues, and graphic sexual content.
It all feels a like desperate attempt to be cool and edgy, like a dad buying a skateboard. While extreme and controversial content can generate a buzz and get folks to check out a game or movie – generally the ones that have staying power use those elements to arrive at a greater point or influence the characters – not because the audience is craving softcore pornography.
Watch_Dogs seems to be doing it because ‘that’s what you do’ in an adult-rated game, and it comes off like something shoe-horned in to appeal to kids who think “boobs” is a naughty word. Toss in the fact there’s a female hacker character deliberately designed to show some oddly off-putting cleavage, and playing Watch_Dogs with any kind of audience will likely result in eyerolls and scoffs, not just from you toward the game, but from your family and friends toward you, wondering what why in the world you’re wasting time on such an immature title.
