*NO SPOILERS*

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Watch Dogs takes place in the wonderful city of Chicago which stars a man named Aiden Pearce who wants to seek revenge against the people who killed one of his precious family members. The death of that family member is Aiden's only true motivation in the game. Aiden is a big time hacker who has the ability hack certain things in Chicago because of a system called the CtOS, where everything is connected and controlled by this system. So if anyone like our protagonist was to take it over, they would become very powerful.

The story of Watch Dogs has very little interest. Aiden Pearce has no personality. I found that the supporting cast was sometimes more interesting than he was. Watch Dogs has 5 acts which will take up about 35% of the overall competition. To sum it all up without any spoilers, Act 1 shows off the World of Watch Dogs and introduces the story very well, but when we get into Act 2, the story starts to slow down a bit and gets a bit boring until it picks up the pace again in Act 3 and Act 4. Act 5 wraps the story up! There are some points where instead of continuing on with the story, you would rather go and do something else in the city. Then there are other times where you would be racing across the map, using fast travels, trying to start the mission as soon as you can to play more. The story will only serve one play though, I don't feel a need to go back and replay the story, when there is other stuff to do in Watch Dogs.

The strongest thing in Watch Dogs is the gameplay. Watch Dogs supports wants you to play how you want to play, you can pretend your rambo and go takedown a camp full of enemies gun blazing or be a stealthy mastermind watching everything you do and how you do it. As much as I could, I played stealthy using my hacking skills and my silence pistol, I was able to complete many parts the way I wanted to, but the stealth system can be faulty at times. If enemies do catch you during stealth, it is usually your fault, because of how easy the stealth system is. For those of you who want to go rambo, you have a wide selection of guns in the store. You will find everything you have in your traditional shooter, rifles to launchers to shotguns. For me, I felt no need to visit the gun store, because I would always have full ammo some way.

Most of my time with Watch Dogs, I was able to complete the missions with just my pistol and hacking. I found myself doing the same thing over and over in different locations. Go hide behind cover, use Aiden's focus, kill, and repeat. Hacking adds a twist on how you want to take down your enemies because it gives you the opportunity to plan.

Aiden also has a skill tree which is broken up into 4 sections: Hacking, Combat, Crafting, and Driving. One of the best skills to unlock is Focus, Focus shows off Aiden's quick reflexes. Focus can get you out of sticky situations such as when you have 4 enemies in front of you while you have no health. Use focus and you chances of killing them will be higher.
Watch Dogs also offers a reputation system, which is how the city views you. Players can be a hero by stopping crime and saving people or they can be a menace terrorize the people. Chicago has lots of activities to offer it is very over whelming. They have Investigations, Drinking Games, Criminal Convoys, Digital Trips, Gang Hideouts, and much more. They are all very fun and are different. You will be putting lots of time into this, if you wanted to get 100%. These extra activities can get a bit repetitive after a while, but there's so much to keep you interested.

The graphics in Watch Dogs are alright, not anything special though. You can tell there was a downgrade from e3. But, we probably could have if the PC had a better port. I was playing on PS4, the graphics were good. Chicago looked better at night time during the day. I would sometimes find myself staring into the clod dark rainly city because of how beautiful the environment looked . Frame rate was usually stable unless there was massive explosions happening on screen. There is one major problem that all platforms suffer, which is the pop in textures. You will see tons of pop in when driving through the city, but there are other things Chicago shows to make it up.

The multiplayer on Watch Dogs is great. . During multiplayer, other players see you as a random character, while you see yourself as Aiden. There are 6 different game modes on next gen and 5 different game modes on last gen. The one game mode next gen and pc have that last gen doesnt is online free roam. Online free roam just lets you screw around with your friends, there is no main objective in this. Online Hacking is when you join someone's game and hack them while the victim needs to go and find the hacker and teach them a lesson. I found that the best way to hack someone was to make my way around a car as I would watch my victim run around in circles. Unfortunately you can't hack your friends, that was a big letdown for me. Online tailing makes you join someone's game and observe them, this is just like online hacking, but involves no hacking but tailing. Online Decryption is one of the funnest, you have to steal data from the other team and the decrypt it. Process can be sped up when teammates are close to each other. One team could be winning and at 99% then they could die and the other team can easily win. You also have CtOS mobile challenge, where a mobile player takes control of the police and any hack able items to try and stop the Watch Dogs player from getting where they need to go. The last game mode is Online Racing, which is pretty self explanatory. Players will race through a series of checkpoints.

My final verdict of watch dogs is an 8/10. The game provides a somewhat interesting story with tons of activities to do, to keep you playing for a very long time. Watch Dogs is definitely worth a pick off.

Thanks -Oni