Watch_Dogs Review

Guess what, it's not the pizza guy!

There was time of innocence, long ago, where I used to believe it when adults told me lies. It was very different time, a time when the sky was bluer, the evenings less cold, and the future a lot brighter. But then everything changed, after Watch_Dogs attacked. You have to understand, it had been such a long time since anyone had the last big discrepancy between an E3 trailer and the offerings of the full game that most couldn't even remember what it felt like to be betrayed like that. So when we saw the footage of Watch_Dogs' Chicago with it's dynamic wind bustling detritus across the street and stunningly realised human animations not just from the main character but the living residents around him, topped off with an impressive ear soothing sound scape, we just assumed that was the game which Ubisoft was going to deliver. Obviously is was not, by quite a margin, and so began the spiral of distrust and backwards glances that has plagued the player/developer relationship ever since.

It was such a shame because on it's surface, the proposition of Watch_Dogs seemed so effortlessly promising. It presented a open world similar in grit and realism to Grand Theft Auto but spruced up with a Big-brother style surveillance system called ctOS that governed all the world, directed traffic, ran the phones, kept all the doors locked and powered every camera. And you, the bug crawling in the middle of this well-oiled machine, influencing it however you dare with powerful and unquantifiable technical wizardry. Hacking was the in-word for this game, and though the developers over at Ubisoft seemed content boiling the art of security breeching into little more than a single button press; the idea of interacting with the world on such a level that you could freely and dynamically influence the rules of the world felt like it was putting us in the shoes of the conductor of the world's play. As such, that larvae of a concept wiggled it's way deep into people's minds and grew into a hype parasite.

But like with everything that Ubisoft have ever promised in their entire history, that hacking system turned out to not be quite as 'freeform' and 'player empowering' as were led to believe. Hacking with the touch of a button does permit the player to create traffic accidents, set off grenades in enemies pockets, blow steam valves and even switch out the lights of entire city block; but the design of the game caters towards the most intractability in specified and designed pockets of action. You felt less like a conductor and more like a talented trumpeteer who flourishes their part at times but otherwise sticks to the clearly laid-out sheet music. That being said then and even now, the actual gameplay of hacking and combat fit together surprisingly neatly save for a few niggling 'dynamic snapping' issues that occurs when two interactable targets are close together. And the ability to sit in one corner of the map and jump from camera to camera, not only spotting your targets but identifying opportunities to manipulate them, is just as empowering as it sounds. It added a very fun new approach to the typical Ubisoft stealth play premise.

Whilst that is all well and good, however; the real reason I came back to Watch_Dogs after all this time was because I was spurred on by my recent playthrough of Grand Theft Auto 4. That grounded and gritty journey through the criminal underworld reminded me of taking down gangsters in the back alleys and blown-out factories of urban Chicago as the imposing Vigilante. (Who I keep forgetting is nicknamed 'The Fox'. That moniker is desperately under-represented throughout Watch_Dogs) For some reason my mind equated the two experiences as equitable to one another, with the understated but effective violence of GTA IV matching the street-level grounded action of the original Watch_Dogs. And did my compunctions serve me well? In part.

I always forget about the how Ubisoft games never quite feel the best that they can be in your hands. In the case of Watch_Dogs, cars lack the proper weight and either float across the road too much or refuse to turn like a stubborn brick. Aiden Pearce, the protagonist, sticks too staunchly to cover sometimes, and can dash about too much when you're attempting precise and specific movements. But it's not terrible by any regard. Just not ideal for the style of game that is being attempted, which GTA, on the otherhand, is a lot better at. (Rockstar had been at their craft for decades longer at the point of IV, so I guess that makes sense.) But what about the really important element of the gunplay that I remembered; the actual loop of trading gunfire?

Watch_Dogs has a decently satisfying third-person aim and shoot gameplay set-up that benefits from a mobile and versatile player character to give you lots of options in confrontations. Sliding over cover, performing takedowns, hacking the cameras to get the lay of the land, tracking enemies through walls; all of these tools are handy and oft used tools in the players arsenal that make the abundance of combat the game presents feel fresh for a bit longer than they might in another game. Stealth is a very important aspect too and Ubisoft leveraged their experience with Assassin's Creed to make this feel intuitive and functional, mostly. There are some small technical bugs, such as the fact that the enemy AI can't distinguish between aggro targets so in the very few instances in game when you're with another character, the second they get spotted the enemy will instantly know where you are too. (Magic) The actual aiming and shooting feels nice on the thumbstick, and is benefitted by a great, if thematically bizarre, focus fire bullet-time mode. Though most encounters are functionally the same, the ways you can approach them are distinct enough to feel dynamic and impressive in moderation. The very deliberate nature of how hacking is set up can feel limiting in less directed action scenes; such as if you get into a fight after a car chase that led you away from a designated encounter arena, but if you paint between the lines there's some leeway for fun times.

Unfortunately, Watch_Dogs' gunplay does suffer from offering too many guns to the player, such as to the point where not enough of them feel like they have a purpose to exist beyond "The number of stars in it's description say this gun is better than that one." Bizarrely, despite going to the effort of ranking every gun with a quality rating, Watch_Dogs offers absolutely no restriction on what guns you can pick up at any point during game progression. (Outside of some special guns that are almost always less impressive than whatever gun you used to earn them.) What this means is that as soon as you can afford them, which isn't very long at all if you play any of the side content, you can buy the best guns and then never need to pick up another one again as long as the game runs. Less guns with greater emphasis on distinct rates of fire or firing modes, and a more clever distribution of those guns would have been preferable.

Watch_Dogs also boosts a Ubisoft staple; a half-assed RPG-light system which has you unlocking abilities on a web-tree using EXP you earn from killing people and completing missions. There's a web of abilities, and some of them are pretty good and interesting, but there's no justification, or in-universe explanation, for gating off hacking or combat abilities for arbitrary skill point windows. It does nothing to enrich the flow of progression and aside from experienced players going 'Why can't I do this? Ah, I forgot to unlock it in the stupid tree'; you'll totally forget the system is there. I wish I could critique this as an oddity misstep of Ubisoft's past; but unfortunately the lunatics insist on making their games like this even to this day. (#killRPGlightsystems!)

The hacking is really the highlight of Watch_Dogs, it's flagship feature that sold all the copies and launched this franchise to begin with. And it all starts with the Profiler, one of those flagship symbols of power that make this franchise special. The Profiler is a phone that connects to every electronic item in the world and can interact with most all of them, or just present information on the subject for your voyeuristic pleasure. People at the time went crazy over the way the Profiler provides basic details on every NPC in the world including name, income, occupation and one random fact about them. Maybe they have a particular fetish or recently get arrested for stealing garden gnomes. The Profiler knows about it. The Profiler knows all. It's just a shame that this only serves as window dressing because there's no way to interact with most of these NPCs beyond shooting them, which is frowned on by Ubisoft through their morality system.

Where the gameplay really falls off, in my opinion, is when it comes to driving and vehicular combat; which this game focuses on a lot. Several missions will task you with driving away from pursuers or hunting down a car-bound enemy and disabling their car, and Ubisoft lean obnoxiously hard on their hacking gimmick to make these sections work. A dynamic prompt will appear on your screen if a nearby vehicle in pursuit happens to drive into the danger zone of a potential road pipe burst hack or traffic light switch, but this is more reactionary from the player instead of active steps the player is taking. Which, incidentally, makes the resulting carnage feel less like an achievement of skill or ingenuity. And if you're wondering, Ubisoft made it impossible to drive and fire your gun at the same time; killing the possibility of replicating 90% of movie car chases. (I really missed trading gunfire during high speed chases like I did in GTA IV.)

Visually the world that Ubisoft bought to life is actually quite pretty with a decently large and distinct rendition of actual Chicago. This isn't some fictional city based on Chicago but called something else for legal reasons, Ubisoft actually made a microcosm of Chicago to serve as the backdrop to their tense action drama with a hacking twist; and their world builders did as fine a job as they always do. I particularly liked the night-time lighting and the way that independent light sources really popped in the dark; specifically car headlights. Even today I think the game is quite visually strong and pretty in a manner that is very grounded to the reality of depicting a city. You're going to be surrounded by concrete high-rises and steel beams, but there's a personality and heart to the city that you won't find in similar built-up open worlds of this era such as Saints Row 3's Steelport. (One of the advantages of borrowing the land and culture from a real place, I suppose.)

I also found the sound effects to be very punchy but mediated; again feeding into that illusion of reality over flamboyance. Guns in particular are great for highlighting this, for the way they pop and rattle in a manner that feels quite authentic. But ambient traffic and city sounds can be just as stark, with the nearby screeching of a speeding car carrying on the wind with an energy that evokes strong curiosity. I never remembering noticing other NPC's traffic incidents by sound alone in a GTA game! And a few of the hacks have very pleasing, if a bit more sci-fi and less realistic, sound effects applied to them, such as the shutting-down fizzle of the Blackout hack; reinforced by the near iconic (thanks to that original gameplay trailer) visual of the city power shutting off block by block. 

All of which makes this game on the very surface feel like something of a successor to Grand Theft Auto IV as the world waited for V to come out and take back the series crown; but unfortunately as with a lot of Ubisoft open worlds; that veneer is skin deep. Civilian AI is that Ubisoft brand of dumb where people amble about their pointless lives until the player does literally anything, at which point they lose their minds and react. Pull out a gun, they react, hop a fence, they react, dare to crouch down in their presence, they react. It breaks the illusion of being an individual in a bustling city when you constantly appear to be the main character of everybody else's stage play. Also, as with any Ubisoft game, the majority of activities in the world are giant icons that litter up the world map and present identical gameplay challenges forever until you lose your mind. Watch_Dogs does offer a few genuine minigames to fill in the void, but they are largely unpolished and forgettable. The Drinking minigame is awful and boring, the AR Space Invaders game is fun for about a single playthrough and the various 'fully encompassing minigame' Digital Trips are such a waste of development effort it hurts.

Let me focus on this for a bit because I still get annoyed about it. These digital trips all offer fundamentally unique gameplay scenarios where you're doing something crazy like flying through the air trying to pick up icons or jumping about the city as a giant robot spider that sticks to walls. These all should be great additions to the player's repertoire of gameplay. But every one of them prioritizes style and flash over substance and purpose. They look great but play like bare basic minigames that never left the brainstorming stage of idea creation, and they each offer absolutely zero effect on the main game. No transferrable rewards, no stat increase; nothing. It's an absolute crime that Ubisoft sold a whole digital trip as a DLC as though it's worth that separate price tag. I'd feel insulted if I didn't get it as a bundle deal with Watch_Dogs Legion. (Yeah, I might be reviewing the whole series. Send help.)

But enough going on about the side activities that don't work with the game, what about the one's that do? Well you've got the Fixer Contracts, which are all vehicle based challanges that range from increadibly boring checkpoint races to comparatively less-boring 'tail the target than kill them' missions. Criminal Convoys which task you with interfering with a conga line of badguy cars to get to a target, which are pretty fun overall. And you have the best activity, the Gang Hideouts which are small guarded areas of enemies that you get to clear out in whatever manner you so please. These are the moments when the game's toolset is free to be manipulated however you can work them and the player can really start having fun approaching the game's more branching gameplay options. If only the game didn't repeat all of the side activities far beyond their entertainment value! Trying to complete every one of these missions for completion percentage is like pulling teeth when you have to do forty bloody driving contracts! In comparison, you only get about 15 gang hideouts and even less criminal convoys. (So they made the most boring side activity the most plentiful one; genius?)

There's also an online mode fitted into the game which, beyond the typical deathmatch premise, (I found that mode was always hampered by the lack of meaningful weapon variety) comes to life through 'invasions'. Other players can join your world in order to spy on you or 'hack' your data. It's actually a very cool system where other players, disguised as NPCs, have to pretend to be fixtures of the host game world as they can remain undetected within a circle of hacking for a few concentrated minutes, meanwhile the player host can spot them if they either shoot or highlight them with the profiler. It's a fantastic game of cat and mouse that evolves upon the 'Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood' multiplayer mode (which I loved back in the day) and is so well made that on PC, at least, you can still expect to be invaded to this very day. I dealt with maybe 20 or more intruders during my playthrough and even learned how to figure out when my world was invaded before they triggered any hacks by pausing every now and then. (When someone invades, the game live pauses.)

All of these are the building blocks that make up the game around the drama narrative that Watch_Dogs presents; which is the next aspect of this game that I want to dive into with detail. That's because I really wanted to confront the way that Ubisoft chooses to characterise this franchise of theirs with analysis and examples to try and present how I feel about the theming of this hacking revenge story framed around a world of hacking exploitation, systemic corruption and a bit of low-stakes conspiracy to complete this trope pie. Maybe by the end of my in-depth dive you'll be able to see for yourself why I feel the way I do about this game and you won't even have to hear my opinion in the summary. But I'm still going to give it anyway, because that's me.

Watch_Dogs follows the hard-edged and lightly haunted Aiden Pearce as he acts as the one-man stalker of the streets of Chicago under his alter-ego: the Vigilante. Pearce has been thrust into this world ever since a hacking heist job with his old partner, Damian, went awry and in retaliation his six-year old Niece was killed in a hit attempt. Since then he's been trying to keep his secret life of hunting the people who attacked his family separate from his public life as the uncle who dotes on his nephew and his sister. He's not very good at it, clearly lacking the conviction to emotionally connect with the two of them who are trying to move on from a loss he refuses to, but it's a very valiant effort when you take into the account that the media who have been following his vigilante antics know his full name and spout it on air often.

You read that right; the media know who the Vigilante is, by name, and thus so do the cops; and yet his family have no idea about his double life. Jacks, his Nephew, is even said to be a fan of the vigilante and roll-played as him during his birthday party; but I guess everyone just turns-off the TV when it comes to the boring news reporter mentioning his name! I can only assume that there was supposed to be a point in the narrative where Pearce's name becomes public, but it must have been entirely written out. It feels pretty stupid, however, especially considering the entire first act finale of the game presents Aiden breaking into a prison in order to intimidate a felon into not identifying him. What's the point; everyone knows who you are!

One thing you'll notice very quickly about the dialogue of Watch_Dogs, is that a lot of it seeped in that boring jargon that sounds impressive from a distance, but very easily makes the player switch off from the specifics of conversation. If you can't follow the words that are being regularly thrown around then the dialogue will start to feel like it's lacking the substance to be worthy and engaging. And the writers use hacker jargon as an excuse not to actually delve into specifics; because when they do the narrative starts getting wavy and plotpoints start to slip. I seriously wonder what the team thinks an 'encryption' is, and why they seem to think that an incomplete corrupted file just needs an encryption key to fix the file. Unless I'm missing something from the three times I've played this game; that's not how data works.

Luckily when the player starts to tune out of specifics they won't be missing a whole lot of substance, because Watch_Dogs is built on the bones of a prototypical 'revenge' plot that plays heavy on the cliché-dialogue in some of the early emotional scenes. Hearing him reminisce about Lena (the dead Niece) and how she used to sing Happy Birthday off-key just makes my brow twitch. What kind of neo-noir, half-drunk, edge-sucking protagonist notices and recounts the timbre of his Six-year-old Niece's singing prowess? I get what they're trying to do with his dialogue, but the specific execution feels hollow and manufactured.

In fact, I felt that a lot with the early dialogue of the game, such as in the way Aiden's sister Nicky interacts with her surviving child in a manner that sounds pitch perfect for how every adult speaks to children in those low-budget horror movies from the 2000's. You know, in that really limp and unnatural way that seems to exist only to fill script space by playing lip service to a character bond that is already implied by the familial link and so the writer doesn't care enough to put intent behind their dialogue. I'm nit-picking here, but when it comes to dialogue and character relationships I can't help myself. There's more dimensions to the relationship between a mother and child than- "we are related". And it's so weird because they knew how to present Aiden as this kind-of surrogate parent to Jackson who can't break through the boy's protective emotional shell and so spends most of their time on screen together talking at him with the distance representative of the walls Aiden spent the past year erecting between himself and his family. So why couldn't they do the bear minimum for Nicky and Jacks? Yes, I know they are only in three scenes together and I'm being neurotic about this; but dammit, this annoyed me!

I'm also not a fan of the forced drama between Aiden and his Sister. Their friction is important and needed to be introduced, but they could have found a much better way than 'Hey Aiden, I know this guy over the phone is threatening to break into my house and kill me and my son, but why are you getting involved!' The literal line is "Please stop trying to fix our problems! You're always doing this!" Which is just... utterly ridiculous writing. Her life has been threatened, at the very least she should be saying 'Don't get involved, just leave this to the police.' But then I guess that would take some of the wind out the moment where Nicky, in the very late game, realises that her brother is the Vigilante! Yes, she has to realise this; even when his name has been plastered on the front page of every news report for half of the game by that point... the whole start of this game's narrative upsets me.

Morality is a creeping presence over this game that bothered me greatly throughout this, distinctly more introspective, playthrough of Watch_Dogs. Ubisoft have a terrible fear of presenting the player in a position that can ever be considered morally dubious, even when they're playing a vigilante who murders criminals instead of letting them face the justice system. For Watch_Dogs they even implemented a 'morality bar' to reward and encourage the player to do 'good' things like stop crimes and help panicking civilians out of their cars during gunfights. And then punish and get upset at bad activities such as running over civilians, engaging with cops in firefights, (even when the game literally forces you to) and shooting a surrendered criminal in the face. (He was a career crook; he'd have been back to gangbanging in a week! I make no apologies!)

The problem with this is, whilst Ubisoft likes to think this system merely enriches the player's choice to be as 'moral' as they so choose, in reality it's just the backbone that reinforces Ubisoft's very specific ideas on what it is to be the 'good guy'. There's one hilariously ham-fisted moment wherein Aiden, on his way to clear his first ctOS station so he can partake in this game's version of 'Synchronisation towers', is subjected to a randomly pertinent news report over the radio where it's made explicitly clear that all the personnel acting as guards for the ctOS stations are actually hired-gun mercenaries, all of whom are ex-military. Some with criminal records. You hear that player? That makes it totally morally okay to shoot them! Except...

As with many instances of Ubisoft straw-manning the morality question, there's holes here. We don't know what criminal records these mercenaries have, so they might have just been done for smoking once when they were fifteen and now have a target on their backs. Also, only some have criminal records? So then the rest are just ex military. Is being ex military in itself a heinous enough sin to justify your prompt execution by the Vigilante of Chicago? (Damn, I didn't know Americans meant it to be so final when they say "Thank you for your service.") Also, going back to that mission where you have to intimidate a con into not revealing your identity; the more sensible course of action, which the game even brings up, would be to kill him, but this strikes against the moral cord of the game. 'He's just a passer-by' Aiden says 'he doesn't deserve to die'. That passerby was a gangbanger from the same gang he happily slaughtered, who just happened to be out getting groceries when everyone else was being murdered. Aiden's morality is really touch and go, which might have been a character trait if Ubisoft's writers was smart enough to notice their inconsistency; instead Aiden is said to have a 'curiously strong moral fibre'. (My ass.) 

All of which makes it insane that the game has the absolute balls to turn around and do the 'am I the bad guy' question at a couple points in the narrative. One time in particular being after wiping out a gang hideout in order to save a character in trouble who watched the whole thing on the camera. Aiden has a real moment where he has to ask himself "What have I done? I killed all of them." And I'm just there thinking; 'nah, Ubisoft says your still the good guy bro. I can tell because out of everyone you just killed the 'morality' bar didn't slide down once. You good.' You really take the bite out of the moral weight of your narrative when you lack the conviction to really commit. I don't buy Aiden's moral panic because he's never slipped up from his own softy standards, he's as immutable as a literal superhero; it's nauseating. 

  

Ubisoft did however, despite themselves, manage to go dark during one quest chain in particular that takes you to the centre of a human trafficking ring, during auction time. It's perhaps the furthest this franchise will ever go into dark topics, but even then there's that aura of Ubisoft lameness dampening the whole thing. Why are there random dressed-up mannequins all over the auction house? Oh, I'm sorry; was the fact that these rich asshats kidnap, drug up and then sell young women as 'love' slaves not adequately getting across the point that these guys are kind of creepy? We needed to be introduced to the idea that these guys play dress-up with human sized dolls to seal the deal? 'I wasn't sure about that sex pest, but the second he whipped out his freshly manicured ken doll I knew he had to go! You can't be playing with dolls as a grown man!'

The narrative does, however, have it's highlights. Jordi is a totally amoral fixer who's dialogue is fast paced and funny due to the fact he seems utterly uncaring to literally anything but his own idle musings and anecdotes. The entire chapter with the Rossi-Fremont is damn near perfect from set-up, having the player camera hop up the whole building to get an idea of it's intimidating size, build up, several missions around the place, to pay off, assaulting it in a campaign highlight set piece. And sometimes you get to make those unforgettable moments for yourself thanks to the solid hacking tools the game provides you. Such as, for me, the time when I cleared out a whole car showroom of enemies by switching out the lights, taking out my silenced pistol and wiping out the whole place before the lights kicked back on again. That's just a badass moment that will stay with you, possible because of the decent bones this game is built on.

To build on the positivity, I think that the building blocks of Aiden's narrative are actually very solid and the general main story of the game has great understanding of pacing and flow. I just don't buy a lot of emotional moments beside from Nicky's last scene with Aiden. When Clara has her little twist moment with Aiden, it's brushed over so quickly despite it being such a huge confrontation that when the consequences of that came to roost in the penultimate mission, the moment doesn't land like it really should. (Being as vague as I can to avoid massive spoilers) Also, I think the cohesion of the story starts to unravel near the end, specifically with the introduction of 'The Bellweather' as a random plotpoint that is shoved into the narrative as a literal footnote with no elaboration as to what it even is. To be fair, there are clues hidden in tapes about what it is, but the concept only really gets explored in Watch_Dogs 2 so it didn't really need to be mentioned. (It's not even that crazy of a concept anyway, I don't know why Ubisoft thought they had to be so cagey and conspiratorial about it. Maybe they were just used to doing that from the early Assassin's Creed games, back when that franchise still had mysteries to unravel.)

And finally there's the finale, which I have to admit was actually alright. Nothing amazing, but not a resounding disappointment either. I liked the way that they choose to slightly nudge at the forth wall by having your navigation markers be hacked into and twisted about. (Very cute.) I was also pleasantly surprised to, in this final mission, have a line of insight addressing why it was Aiden became the Vigilante and tying it to those specific finale events. "Not anymore, now when I see a problem: I step in." It wasn't a question hanging over the narrative like an absent parent, most people probably didn't care why he made the decision  to don the mask by that point, but I think it's a very nice way to bookend the narrative and present some character insight. But I can hardly wrap up my impressions without another nitpick- can I?

Why does every thematically important building in this game have an inexplicable speaker system built into it? The blown-out rooftop of the Rossi-Fremont housing complex? Damian's dilapidated Lighthouse getaway? It seems a tad contrived. But no, seriously; my real gripe is with the ending voice over that shoots off immediately after the final confrontation. During which the writers, I can only hope unintentionally, recreated the absolute sin that the theatre release of Bladerunner did in it's final moments. They write a voice-over in which the protagonist dumbly goes over his suppositions of the blindingly obvious character motivations that just played out in front of him. To be fair, in Bladerunner it was worse because that was the literal entire purpose of the story being laid out in front of the audience like they had just slept through the movie, but Ubisoft still managed to leave us on a decently sour note.

The Badblood DLC set after the events of Watch_Dogs and featuring 'fan favourite' returning character T-Bone, fixes up that sour note right proper. In all my previous playthroughs of Watch_Dogs I never actually played Badblood before, and I didn't intend to this time until I accidentally got the DLC for 'free' alongside yet another copy of Watch_Dogs 1 when I bought Legion. (I own four copies of this game now: 1 physical, 3 digital. What is wrong with me?) I remember hearing good things about the DLC at the time, but I always found 'Character Swap DLC' to be usually quite gimmicky and underwhelming; (Who remembers the 'Joe's Adventures' DLC from Mafia 2) but I'm rather surprised to say I was very wrong with Badblood.

T-Bone might play largely the same as Aiden, but he has new animations which are pretty cool, a genuine character arc that builds upon his story from the main game and a brand new gameplay feature in his RC car that turned out to be so good that Ubisoft expanded and bought it back for Watch_Dogs 2. (In Badblood is does suffer greatly without the jump button, I must say.) I was also amazed to see that the team learnt how to better create story missions that have value to them, instead of having story missions just being exactly the same as side objectives with cutscenes strapped onto them. (Which Watch_Dogs actually did a few times.) The team also learnt how to stretch out car rides so that characters can interact with one another during the ride; GTA mission design 101! (Too bad they forgot that for Watch_Dogs 2)

Ubisoft also shattered my understanding of when these DLCs are usually conceived of by actually focusing on all the best side content of Watch_Dogs and bringing it back better for Badblood. Gang Hideouts are now a totally revamped mode called 'Street Sweeps' which adds optional objectives like 'don't get detected', 'don't use guns' and 'complete in five minutes' to make these already fun side missions more interesting. They also did something innovative, which is a word I never thought went with Ubisoft in any circumstance ever! They tied these side missions with an ongoing side narrative where these three gangs are being investigated and every hideout T-Bone clears pushes the investigation along. A really clever way of tying narrative and free-form gameplay together in a manner that makes these side activities feel important. If only the game didn't ask you to do sixty of them straight. That's no typo. It seems the same lunatic behind the overcooked bouncer missions in Yakuza Kiwami 2 struck again with Street Sweeping. How the heck did they expect any game mode to be engaging for sixty runs? I got bored after nine.

T-Bone's narrative is appropriately condensed in concept and scale to fit within the smaller game, whilst still being meaty enough to warrant this DLC outing in the first place. The cohesion of events is a bit weaker, there were times when I literally had no idea why I was going to a certain location until I got there, even with how much more interesting and impressive those missions were. The new machine gun turrets are a nice idea, but the best thing about them is the fact that AI doesn't know how to register them and so those enemies just get gunned down whilst standing there gobsmacked. And I really liked the back and forth dynamic of T-Bone and Tobias; two characters I would have never have thought worked together but absolutely did. Not just because of their history, but their clashing personalities too.

My only hanging point, and this is mostly due to my own issues, is the main villain being Defalt. Here's my problem with that. In the main game, after you've hacked your data back from Defalt the game asks you to deal with him; which in my playthrough meant shooting him in the back of head with a pistol. So imagine my surprise when he popped up again in this DLC as the new big bad! (If you didn't want me to kill him; why let me?) Still, I like the way that T-Bone was actually able to confront his past in a way I didn't expect the writers to address, and although there's no great revolution of this sort of formula on screen; there doesn't need to be for the DLC to feel satisfying. So overall I was pleasantly impressed with the Badblood expansion, and I'm glad I gave it a chance.

In summary

Watch_Dogs was a deeply ambitious modern day spin on the Ubisoft formula that didn't quite live up to it's promise back in the day. But divorced from that E3 trailer and looking back with the gift of hindsight, the game presented was actually decently serviceable with one blindly interesting gameplay gimmick backed up by solid mechanics and a, mostly serviceable, narrative. What pains myself, and a great many who liked this game, is the many points at which Watch_Dogs seemed to brush at something better but pulled back, whether in scope of design or narrative, to be an above average game instead of an exceptional one. At the very least I can say this with the power of hindsight; I don't think Aiden is a boring protagonist, just not an exceptionally unique one. I wouldn't actually recommend this game to anyone who isn't already a Watch_Dogs fan as 2 better realises the promise of this concept, but I am going to give the game an arbitrary C grade with a more solid raise to C+ if you include the Badblood DLC. I quite enjoyed myself and look forward to moving onto my second playthrough of Watch_Dogs 2 in what I guess is now a series retrospective. Wish me luck.