Watch Dogs
System Requirements Minimum
- OS: Windows Vista (SP2), Windows 7 (SP1) or Windows 8 (Please note that we only support 64 bit OSs.)
- Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q8400 @ 2.66Ghz or AMD Phenom II X4 940 @ 3.0Ghz
- Memory: 6 GB RAM
- Graphics: DirectX 11 graphics card with 1 GB Video RAM – Nvidia Geforce GTX 460 or AMD Radeon HD 5770
- DirectX: Version 11
- Hard Drive: 25 GB available space
- Sound Card: DirectX 9.0c Compatible Sound Card with Latest Drivers
Description
Watch Dogs isn't a full-fledged stealth game in the usual sense; you
can't hide bodies or tranquilize mafiosos. However, slinking from cover
to cover is smooth and weighty, as if Aiden is Sam Fisher's bulkier
cousin. I came to rely on a move I call "riding the cameras," hacking
into one camera so that I might in turn hack into another until I was
able to tag all of my enemies and devise ways of thinning the herd.
Riding the cameras is also the primary way you hack into ctOS centers,
each of which presents an environmental puzzle to solve so that you
might reveal more hot spots on your map. Many of these puzzles are quite
clever, though some story missions take the camera mechanics a few
steps further, particularly a prison level in which you hack into
guards' personal cameras and investigate from their perspectives.
One
type of optional mission--the digital trip--deserves special mention.
There are four digital trips in all, each one an expansive minigame
explained away as an audio-induced hallucination. One of the trips is a
fun bit of frippery in which you bounce from one giant flower to the
next, remaining in the air as long as possible. The other three,
however, could be fleshed out into full games in their own right, which
is a testament to how good Watch Dogs' individual pieces are. In the
best of these, you gain control of a humongous spider-bot, battering
police cars and leaping up the sides of buildings from which you fire
rockets at helicopters and pellet the authorities with machine-gun
bullets. Games that have focused on wall-climbing have rarely made these
acrobatics feel so intuitive, and I'd gladly see the spider-bot find
its way into a game fully devoted to it. The other two digital trips--a
stealth sequence in which robots seek you out, and a car combat game in
which the highways are lousy with zombies--are almost as delightful, and
all of them have their own skill progression trees. The trips are
structurally simple, but their foundations are rock-solid and rich with
possibilities.
Watch Dogs does a lovely job of keeping its many interlocking systems
from becoming overwhelming, though some systems ultimately feel
superfluous. You can buy different outfits, but they all hew to the same
basic style; you can buy new vehicles for ordering on demand, but fast
cars are perfectly easy to find. As a result, the economy is never as
meaningful as it might have been; apart from a sniper rifle and silenced
pistol I purchased from an ammo shop, I rarely went shopping, simply
because I rarely needed to. Even hacking scores of random passersby
begins to feel excessive: when you have access to everything, no
one person or piece of information is special anymore. Precious little
of that information is actually a gateway to a human soul.
Aiden's
soul is still locked away, too, even though I spent dozens of hours
with him. But while I can't say who Aiden truly is, I can confidently
say that Watch Dogs is a lushly produced and riotous game with an
uncanny ability to push you from one task to the next, each of which is
just as fun as the last. This version of Chicago is crawling with a
hyperbolic number of degenerates, and I didn't mind squashing
pyromaniacs and slavers under my tires as I plowed through the streets
chasing after a hacker, hip-hop beats blasting from the radio. After
all, the struggling mothers and homeless beggars wandering Chicago
deserve some peace of mind, and doling out some street justice is a good
first step.
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