Watch Dogs review: horribly hacky story, wonderfully hacky gameplay

When Watch Dogs was first unveiled nearly two years ago, Ubisoft promised an open-world spy thriller for the Internet age. Instead of merely relying on guns or superpowers like some other open-world protagonists, Aiden Pearce would use his hacking skills to monitor citizens' digital footprints and manipulate surrounding devices to his advantage, becoming a new kind of vigilante in the process. Ubisoft has done a commendable job of just that, building a slightly skewed version of the modern world where Aiden can covertly hack his way through for your general enjoyment. Too bad, then, that the people at the center of that world prove so impossible to connect with.

Watch Dogs' alternate version of present-day Chicago is one in which pretty much every citizen and piece of infrastructure is hooked up to a centralized, corporate-controlled system called ctOS. ctOS monitors everything from the traffic lights to the webcams in everyone's netbooks. Having so much information in one system is a setup that's rife for political and corporate abuse, and Watch Dogs' narrative and backstory does briefly touch on these kinds of privacy and security concerns. For the most part, though, the writers seem more content weaving the sort of cyber-thriller tale that would seem hackneyed even for an '80s made-for-TV movie. It's full of lines where you can practically see the '[Insert vaguely tech-sounding words here]' directives in the script.

Things start off simply enough, with Aiden focused on getting revenge against the mysterious hackers who got in the way of a big digital heist and caused the death of a beloved family member. The storyline quickly gets incredibly convoluted though, with seemingly every new mission through the first half of the game introducing some ridiculous new subplot that's only loosely related to that original motivation. One mission has Aiden breaking into and then out of prison just to intimidate a witness. Another might have him taking over someone's identity to infiltrate an underground auction of slave girls. Yet another has you blowing up a convoy of cars just because they contain guards that could cause you a problem later on.

This game tries to hold this meandering series of missions together with the loosest of threads, as Aiden tries to remind the player (and maybe himself) through constant expository monologues. The conspiracy-laden narrative soon weaves together so many conflicting plotlines and barely-related groups of players that urgent plotlines can be completely dropped for hours before being half-heartedly brought up again. This completely ruins any attempt at momentum or tension. It's as if Watch Dogs' narrative was sloppily stitched together from four or five totally unrelated games.

At one point in the second act, my wife asked me why I was tailing a gang-banger through a particularly rough looking part of town. I told her, as accurately as I could tell, that I was trying to get blackmail material on the kid so he'd be forced to help me infiltrate a specific restricted room in a gang-infested housing project... and that would allow me to trace an IP address from someone in the city's criminal underworld... and that might lead to some information that might be of interest to my former partner... and my former partner was holding my sister hostage so I would be forced to work with him again. She kind of blinked at me. I can't say I blame her.

Watch Dogs could get by with a sloppy plot if it had a strong, intriguing set of main characters. Right from the start, though, Aiden is a jumble of conflicting, often nonsensical motivations that never really coalesces into anything close to believable. One moment he's heartlessly blackmailing a kid to achieve his goal, the next he's inquiring paternally about that kid's future. One moment he's consumed with rage over a close associate that betrayed him, then next he's grieving over perhaps playing a role in that associate's death.

Through it all, Aiden alternates rapidly between self-assured ends-justify-the-means drive ('I'll do whatever it takes to save my sister') and ridiculously overwrought self-doubt ('I killed every one of them. That's not who I am... is it?'). The writers bend over backwards to cast Aiden as a morally ambiguous but generally likable anti-hero; someone who only does bad things for good reasons (those prison guards you just slaughtered? Oh, they're all corrupt, so don't worry about it!).

It's all in clunky and direct 'tell, don't show' fashion, with writing that often sounds like it was not penned by someone with a vague understanding of idiomatic English. The scenery-chewing performances from many of the secondary characters, particularly antagonist Damien Brenks, doesn't help, nor does the truly awful voice acting for Clara, who seem to emphasize the wrong word in every single sentence she speaks. The sole exception to this is Jordi Chen, a delightfully amoral mob boss who steals the too-few scenes he's in.

In the end, Aiden comes off as a confused, meandering, center-less nothing of a character, swept along by a ridiculous sequence of events without any real agency or consistent sense of self. During one of his frequent monologues explaining and re-explaining the circuitous story for our benefit, he asks himself a rhetorical question about the motivations he just laid out. 'Do I believe that? It doesn't matter... I have no choice.' Seems to sum up the writers' feeling about this game pretty succinctly, we'd say.