Our last Team Review was for GTA V the reason we did that was because we felt everyone on the team would find something different to enjoy about the game, seeing how expansive it was. While I can’t speak for the others, I can use my experiences in previous open world games to describe my feelings of Watch_Dogs. I love open world games, from Prototype and Infamous, to Sleeping Dogs and GTA V. In each of those games movement is a big deal, if it isn’t fun to to move around, and explore your environment, all side activities become uninteresting and just tedious to perform. Unfortunately, that was the case for me in Watch_Dogs.
When I wasn’t driving point to point, you will find yourself doing a lot of vaulting and climbing over objects and that works just fine. The problem is when you are required to climb up anything to reach an objective, like a building to reach a collectible for example. Instead of just being able to scale the building like assassins creed, it turns into a frustrating puzzle game. Find that ONE set of suspiciously placed set of boxes that you can climb, or find the ONE cherry picker you can hack so you can climb what feels like the ONE way up to the next level or a structure or environment. It feels like the developers remembered that Aiden was a hacker and not a traceur. So they had to shoe horn in some hacking, or make it feel like Aiden is really not suited for parkour at all by removing the ability to jump and including some climbing height inconstancies.
So after an hour and a half of trying figure out how to reach a collectible, I decided to just marathon the campaign since I did not find any of the side activities compelling, especially after realising that campaign missions were giving me all the ammo, materials, money and skill points i needed to progress through the game just fine. The campaign structure will be familiar with anybody who has played an open world third person game before. You will infiltrate, assassinate, assault, tail, spy, retrieve, and participate in chases. It’s diverse enough to not overstay it’s 5 Act length. I found I was having the most fun with the infiltration and action missions. I played it a lot like Splinter Cell conviction. I took my time, scouted the entire area via hacking cameras and tagged enemies so I knew where they were at all times then made my way through killing them off one by one with well placed head shots or stealth takedowns.