Watch_Dogs - Review! - Was it worth the wait? - SPOILERS

After spending every available minute I had on Watch Dogs over the past 2 days, I have finally completed the campaign mode and a few of the little extras. Now considering that I've been waiting for this puppy since the first reveal trailer early last year, I was major league bummed to turn up to Eurogamer and find that they only had a stinking demo presentation that we couldn't get our hands on, then to find out that it was pushed back until now stung. The 3rd person sandbox RPG was enough to capture my attention after my huge admiration for Red Dead Redemption a few years back (Still one of the best games known to man...) and blended with a modern world piggybacking on the recent NSA coverage makes this quite a topical game.

Since playing that game, I have got a lot of gripes with the game. For something that I've spent a year waiting for, I'm rather pissed. If I'm annoyed now, I dread to think what was wrong originally to push it back. Straight away we have the driving. Normally, I'm a good driver in games and I get the hang of it very quick but setting foot in a car in this game is one of the worst possible things you could do. Every damn vehicle has the turning circle of a lorry and apparently the ability to perform a burnout when you gently accelerate. The camera angles may as well have been shoved up Aiden's ass as they are some of the worst possible angles I've ever seen and when the majority of time is spent in the fuckers, you have no hope of avoiding them. I'm not expecting that Watch Dogs should be like GTA, but when you can't shoot out of your own damn car or throw/use equipment, it is useless to expect us to be able to take down certain targets who spend all the time on highways in armoured trucks and are near no environmental factors. The only decipherable way to ram them and in doing so do more damage to your car than you inflict and then stealing other cars only to wreck them a moment later. By wreck and run them off the road, by that I mean the poorly animated collisions which are more likely related to morphing. Hitting vehicles along the road almost always looks as if you're transpiring through them like a ghost... So yeah, I despised the driving. To the point I would be willing to never drive in game again. A quick tip, get the Uplay points and unlock that car or steal a car. Buying them is pointless. Other than getting the bonuses, Uplay works whenever the hell it chooses and the ubisoft servers would regularly not work for me and trying to exit to the menu doesn't work at all for me and stayed at one spot while I was away for 3 hours.

Now the core part of the game is the hacking. In advertisements, it portrayed the fact that you could

manipulate everything or a high proportion of things, yet when in the thick of the game play, its

rather sparse for variety but a lot of copy and pasting which can become repetitive if you play as sessions like myself. Apart from the driving mechanics, hacking was easy to do and infiltrating places was also incredibly easy if you didn't fancy the run and gun approach and have some patience. Using the environment to pick people off was rather amusing but if you didn't feel like it, you could easily beat your way through with very little resistance. If you hadn't heard, not long before its release, information was revealed that Watch_Dogs was in a higher resolution for the PS4 rather than the Xbox One. I cannot tell much difference on the One but I do get a little wound up by the fact that its scratched in on a 720p setting for HD. Albeit, the game looks nice and plays the Final Fantasy trick. Luring people in with images from cut scenes that use high standard visuals rather than the core graphics is always a cheap move to make but otherwise it looks good. The gripe is when you're being hacked, the full screen starts blacking out. Now, in reality, why does the screen go black? How can we actually be blinded? Are we a fucking robot!? Let's put ourselves into the future into the Watch_Dogs world. In a time when HD is advancing incredibly fast into 4K, why is it that music and screens glitch in game. Surly the outcome would be crisp shapes with no static and light skipping? Apparently not. In the words of Sips, it makes me want to rip my dick off.

Now, the real reason many by games is the story. I as one of them were satisfied. The campaign was sufficiently long, spending an age going between them probably prolonged the period and there is a lot of side missions to do along the way. The story is hinged upon the past actions by our lead --Aiden Pearce. The loss of his niece has led Aiden to become this masked vigilante called "The Fox", although you only find out the name at 2 instances; midway through and right at the end. As he tries to do good Aiden's new persona has put his remaining family in danger and they need his help to save them. It spirals through 3 villains that all have a lot of roots in the underground and cyberspace. Without spoiling much, the end was a little dramatic but satisfying after the hours you invest. The inevitable "boss" was pretty damn easy when you can set up a load of bombs and the death by the hacking of some personal equipment was an brilliant idea. Somewhat morbid but I couldn't help but revel in how much awesome there was in that moment. As an over arching story, it was average. It's been enough to spark the interest of media outlets who want to discuss its inevitability in the real world but they do the same in Die Hard 4.0 so it's not this new big thing...

So my overall score really focuses on how much I enjoyed it. Apart from the fact that it glitches like a bitch at times, the driving is enough to drive me insane and that the story could be covered in the next buddy cop comedy movie with Ice Cube and Kevin Hart, it was rather fun.  Blowing stuff up and shooting people is what's at the core and that does it for me. Although I can't quite justify the wait, I'm giving this a 7/10. Also the fact that "collectors edition" is more, "collect these 5 different additions with different things if you want everything because we are going to milk you like a little cow"...Cheers, guys. Plus, when you advertise something, don't ruin the secrets and create new scenes which never appear in game...