Let's Talk... Watch Dogs

Watch Dogs is a game that has been plagued by a lengthy and strenuous development cycle, with a development lasting five long years. Naturally, when a game has this much history and hype and then is quite abruptly delayed numerous times, the expectation and anticipation of the what the game should and is going to be can often cause its eventual release to be shrouded in disappointment. For a lot people that'll be one of their biggest gripes with Watch Dogs: it simply isn't the innovative, "next-gen" experience people were hoping for. What it is, however, is a solid and highly enjoyable open world sandbox with a gripping story and some cool little gimmicks.

The story of Watch Dogs opens with hacking superstar Aiden Pearce losing his niece in a fatal car crash in which he was the intended victim. Hungry for revenge and blaming himself for the incident, Aiden seeks to find the men responsible and avenge Lena Pearce's death. Naturally, this puts him the crosshairs of some very bad people and very quickly makes him the notorious vigilante of Chicago (where the whole game takes place). The revenge tale set-up is a decent premise, although it certainly feels very familiar, but the game's narrative very quickly evolves into a spy-action thriller that is way more exciting and a lot more interesting. Although the ending leaves a lot to be desired and some parts of the story feel a little disconnected from one another, the story is generally sound and manages to be fun enough to remain appealing towards the end.

Typical of Ubisoft's style, Watch Dogs features a number of really great characters, including a twisted mob boss, the aspiring and extremely dangerous leader of a dominant gang, and a paranoid, untrusting, anti-government type hiding from the authorities. The problem with these characters, however, is simply that they just don't do enough with them. Each of these great characters has one or two really amazing moments of their own, but that's almost all you'll see of them. Much like how Far Cry 3 set up Vaas as this fantastic, spine-chillingly evil villain who had a couple of truly incredible moments but still had a lot of potential that felt wasted by the end wasted, the most interesting characters in Watch Dogs feel woefully under-utilised, relegated to their spotlight moment before being put to one side for the larger story to take place.
Furthermore, although the game features a number of excellent characters, the main character, Aiden Pearce, is an extremely dull and rote character whose motives feel somewhat questionable and whose supposedly altruistic actions feel ultimately selfish, making his quest for revenge a little hard to empathise with.

The game's profiler system in action

As far as gameplay is concerned, Watch Dogs is a very standard city-based sandbox, the likes of which you're likely very familiar with by now. You drive cars, you shoot guns, you take on side missions with a disappointing lack of variety, and you'll probably unintentionally run over dozens of innocent civilians along the way. The one thing that Watch Dogs uses to try to set itself apart from the competition, however, is its constant use of hacking mechanics. Hacking is all done through Aiden's seemingly magical super-phone, which allows him to tap into almost anything in the city and gain some sort of benefit from it. Hacking is very much the supporting tool of your arsenal, aiding your endeavours rather than actually leading them. Evading the police or taking down a gang hideout, for example, can be made significantly easier through clever use of your environment (such as hacking road blockers in order to stop pursuing vehicles, or hacking something to create makeshift cover in a firefight) but very rarely can you do something exclusively through use of hacking and nothing else. Conversely, however, in a lot of cases, it's more than possible to get things done without any use of hacking (though you'll definitely have a harder time doing so), since almost all types of missions involve either shooting guys and/or driving. Consequently, although certainly not the forgettable gimmick it could well have been, the hacking just doesn't feel like the main event here and it certainly isn't enough to make Watch Dogs feel entirely fresh and original and the familiar tricks Watch Dogs relies cannot truly separate it from the likes of GTA or Sleeping Dogs.

Despite being very similar to such games, however, almost every part of Watch Dogs manages to still feel distinctly Ubisoft in its execution. The fairly dynamic free-running feel of the movement is not too dissimilar to the that of Assassin's Creed, hacking into ctOS towers displays activities in the surrounding area much like the radio towers of Far Cry 3 and the gang hideout side missions feel extremely similar to the stronghold takeovers that populated Far Cry 3, and even the game's stealth feels very similar to that of Ubisoft's latest Splinter Cell game, with its stealth-action hybrid, dynamic cover system and focus on cool, futuristic gadgets. They make no effort in trying hiding the fact that this is a Ubisoft game, which feels like the only thing that gives Watch Dogs an identity of its own (which, even then, it doesn't really have). Perhaps the crazy homogenisation of all Ubisoft games is a problem larger than just Watch Dogs, but Watch Dogs does very little to create its own distinct identity other than just being a very standard open world game with a little of the Ubisoft touch, which is something that may be a huge problem for those hoping for something new and innovative but may be completely fine for people looking for a solid open world game. 

The action may not be the most original, but it still manages to be satisfying and engaging

The game presents a number of minor mechanics that can potentially aid your endeavours in some way. Such mechanics, such as the ability to craft usable items on the go or the ability to slow down time at will to help you get off that life-saving headshot, range from essential and highly intuitive to needless and unnecessary. Focus mode, for example, the time-slowing bullet-time gimmick, is highly useful and quickly became an ability I was using in every fight, and it was certainly an ability that saved my life a number of times. Although the shooting in Watch Dogs is never particularly difficult (since enemies go down very quickly), focus mode was a neat little gimmick I very much appreciated. The crafting, on the other hand, felt completely shoe-horned in and was a system that I very rarely engaged with. The items you can craft (such as grenades, temporary city-wide blackouts and consumables that replenish your focus meter) are certainly very useful, and I definitely found myself using the system when I was in dire need of some C4 or other items, but it felt extremely unnecessary and I would've much preferred such items to be dropped as loot. 

Watch Dogs may not be the technical tour de force some were hoping, but it still manages to look quite nice

Most of the enjoyment I got from the hacking systems actually came from a lot of the smaller

activities and capabilities granted to you. Namely the profiler system, which allows you aptly profile anybody you can see and uncover information about their name, their income and even a dirty secret or two. The system isn't particularly deep and essentially serves as a HUD overlay that can be toggled on and off. Profiling a person is done by simply looking at them, but the range at which you can actually profile someone can get a little finicky and it can take a little too long to appear on screen (especially when you're searching a gang hideout for the required target and you have to awkwardly hang around until it triggers). Another example of blatant privacy invasion is, ironically, a side activity quite appropriately named "privacy invasion", in which you can hack into people's homes to observe their weird, dirty or otherwise comedic rituals. You can also "hack" into people whilst roaming the streets, ravaging their bank accounts or stealing their music as a way to unlock the game's full soundtrack. These systems are a lot of fun to mess with, and there's an impressive variety in the number of different conversations or activities you can come across.  

The world of Watch Dogs certainly looks very nice (although the frame rate sometimes fails to keep up, especially on PC, where frequent and extremely obvious hitching often ruins the frame rate), with motion-captured cutscenes boasting some excellent and extremely evocative facial animations that allow characters to be impressively expressive. The sound design is also solid and the game makes excellent use of its soundtrack to really emphasise some of the story's most evocative moments.

Ultimately, Watch Dogs is by no means the innovating blockbuster some were expecting, but its excellent execution of familiar concepts and mechanics taken from other crime-focused open world games and some of Ubisoft's best work still allows it be an exciting and gripping open world game. Furthermore, although there are a couple of grievances I had with Aiden as a character and a number of really interesting characters that they just don't do enough with, the game's narrative is still pretty well-executed as a whole. Even though Watch Dogs might not be the most mechanically original game, it certainly manages to build the foundation for a potentially incredible (and pretty inevitable) sequel.

Let's Talk... Outlast: Whistleblower

Outlast was an extremely interesting game when it released, a game that played upon the (semi) newly found no-combat-revolution that the horror genre seems to be undertaking (very much inspired by 2010's Amnesia: The Dark Descent). Both an exciting and sometimes terrifying experience, Outlast set up an excellent foundation on which it to build its further iterations that proved extremely successful. Whistleblower takes the very same foundation and implements it into some new environments and half a dozen memorable and disturbing set pieces to make for a somewhat iterative but well-made DLC.

Whistleblower offers a variety of new, yet somewhat familiar environments 

The set-up and overall premise for the story of Whistleblower are both more interesting and more engaging than that of the original Outlast. Rather than assuming the role of Miles Upshur, a journalist investigating the allegedly horrific misdeeds taking place at the Mount Massive mental asylum, you instead take the role of Weylon Park, an employee at the asylum. After witnessing the disturbing results of one too many twisted experiments, Park informs Miles Upshur of the troubling corruption taking place, before being caught by his boss and consequently being "committed". The rest of the DLC essentially has you desperately roaming the asylum in search of escape, whilst being chased by a bearded cannibal, a psycho who seeks to make you his bride and one too many downright mentalists.   

Whistleblower expands little on the core of Outlast, both mechanically and in its choice of setting. The DLC takes place in new areas of the same abandoned asylum and the minimalistic mechanics remain completely unchanged. You're still gingerly making your way through a hellish abandoned asylum/experimenting site for evil things, and are still armed with nothing but a single night vision-equipped video camera with some serious battery life issues. The focus of Whistleblower remains entirely on the complete and utter avoidance of combat and getting the hell away from the crazy people who want to cut you and sometimes eat you. Although nothing is changed about the mechanics of the game, the DLC sets up enough crazy and memorable set pieces and situations for it to still feel appealing. 

One of the game's many truly disturbing set pieces

A lot of what made the original game great was its chilling setting and truly nightmarish scenarios, which, although Whistleblower does maintain that quite well, the DLC manages to create a stronger feeling of actual horror rather than just being thrill ride of jump scares and strong tension. The original game definitely had a lot of horrifying moments, but Whistleblower provides a lot more premise for genuinely scary moments and scenarios. Batteries (used to power your video camera, your only light source and only ally) were plentiful in the main game, for example, and it was extremely difficult to run out of batteries, meaning that it was easy to take your camera (a resource that should be scarce and utilise a solid risk-reward scenario for each individual use) for granted. Naturally, this sucked a lot of tension out of a possibly excellent idea. The battery count in this DLC feels a lot tighter, however, creating a more desperate situation and forcing more conservative camera-usage. The scarcity of batteries in the world created a number of situations where I opted to wade through the darkness rather than risk wasting anymore of my precious light source.

Unfortunately, the game suffers from a couple of examples of frustratingly obtuse level design that usually spawns from the game sometimes being a little unclear about where you need to go. Although mostly not a huge deal, and in most cases simply a result of the game's extreme tension rattling my nerves to point of disorientation, it can be actually be a real tension-killer. Being forced to run around a certain area in search of an exit can get a little tedious, and at some point you stop worrying about the guy chasing you and just focus on finding the way out. These frustrating moments are absolutely fatal for the game's suspension of disbelief, since when you're focused on simply escaping rather than engaging in the tense and exciting scenario the game has set up for you it's easy to be reminded that you're dealing with programmed AI with pre-set, easily exploitable patterns and behaviours rather than crazy,
unpredictable psychopaths, an illusion that the game is generally very effective at maintaining.

Although not particularly long, Whistleblower manages to make up for its short length by consistently and effectively using a well-paced mixture of slow and tense traversal, thrilling chases, and well-timed jump scares. The condensed longevity of the DLC allows it to feel significantly more focused than the original game, keeping its fairly thin base from losing its appeal.

Let's Talk... Dark Souls 2

For those for aren't familiar with the strange systems and mechanics of the Dark Souls games, the basics are essentially as follows: killing enemies and bosses grants you with souls, which act as the game’s currency. These souls can be spent on a variety of things: levelling up a handful of useful stats that offer a variety of different benefits, upgrading weapons and armour to increase their effectiveness or enchant them with certain magical bonuses, or buying items that will aid in your endeavour. Every time you die you drop all of the souls you currently have right where you died, and must return to collect them in your next life or they will disappear forever. And I mean forever. That’s basically the core of all you really need to know about a game that, despite its reputation for being inaccessible and extremely difficult, is actually a surprisingly approachable game. All it requires is a little patience and the acceptance of the fact that you will lose souls, and a lot of them.

Majula, the game's hub, where you'll be returning to very frequently to level up, repair items and see just how many times players have died worldwide

The core gameplay mechanics that Demon’s Souls and the original Dark Souls set up remain relatively unchanged intact. The small learning curve is still very much there for new players, but veterans of the previous games should have no problem jumping back in. Souls still work in the same way, stats are generally the same, and the obtuse dedication to animations being punishingly difficult to cancel and almost always the main reason for your death. Although Dark Souls has a reputation for being an extremely difficult game, it really isn't. The games have never been downright hard, but simply extremely punishing, and although that may makes the game hard in its own rights, the game really isn't all that hard once you accept that you have zero margins for almost any error. Thanks to its improved presentation and UI elements, better streamlining of tutorials and explanations, and general decline in overall difficulty from the previous games, Dark Souls 2 is probably the most accessible the game has been for a while. However, that’s a large part of what made it feel like a diminished experience when compared to the extremely unique and entirely memorable experience that was the original Dark Souls.

A hugely convenient fast travel system is available as soon as you've lit your first bonfire, which, although a huge time saver, inadvertently makes the world feel a lot less like the continuous and sprawling world that the original Dark Souls created. The ability to quickly zip from one place to another from any bonfire makes returning to locations in search of items, bosses or simply to farm out some much-needed souls significantly easier. However, this time-saving mechanic has the confusing effect of making the game feel a lot less focused from a narrative perspective (since you're going from one very different area to another fighting boss after boss with no apparent narrative connection between them) whilst simultaneously making it feel more focused from a gameplay perspective (since there's more boss fights and less finding boss fights). Dark Souls 2 basically feels a lot more like an elongated endless boss run, which somehow manages to both diminishes a lot of what Dark Souls 1 felt like whilst also cutting out a lot of the middle-man and just getting to the meat of what Dark Souls is really about: banging your head against boss after boss until eventually it breaks through. 

Multiplayer summons and being "invaded" by other players remains a very big part of Dark Souls 2 

This creates the inadvertent effect of a lot of the areas feeling very disconnected from one another narratively (in that each environment is so radically different from the last, and it seems infeasible that you would go from between such areas in such quick succession), this comes with the added side effect of allowing the environments to have a really nice degree of variety to them. Instead of a lot of the very samey castles and fairly stale environments (for the most part) of Dark Souls 1, Dark Souls 2 offers some impressive variety from its dense forested area to an apocalyptic ruin with ruined structures that stand above a large stretch of water. Excellent variety which is typically followed up with some gorgeous art to match, meaning that even when the game’s technical prowess can’t quite get there, the fantastic art is usually there to keep it looking interesting enough.

Although this may sound like Dark Souls 2 has done a great job of streamlining the core of the Dark Soul’s experience, in reality it’s actually done the opposite. Despite the many interesting and immensely challenging boss battles being the core of what people loved about the original Dark Souls, it was the little things that really made it special. The sudden realisation that the entire world is connected by these little passages and doorways, the weird, mini-boss-like elite enemies that were almost as difficult as some of the bosses, the exasperated sigh of relief when you finally stumbled across that bonfire you’d so desperately been hoping for. That was so key to what made Dark Souls such a unique and memorable experience, and, for the most part, Dark Souls 2 feels like it lost a lot of that mystery and unpredictability in a somewhat disappointing attempt to recreate such an amazingly unique game. The inherent and consistent focus on quantity over quality is one of Dark Souls 2’s biggest downfalls. More areas, more bosses, more weapons, more loot. Dark Souls 2 has around 32 boss fights in total, around a dozen more than Dark Souls 1. However, all that having more boss fights does, in reality, is make the majority of the bosses bland and fairly generic (the majority of the game’s boss fights are just tougher-than-usual dudes with a large weapon, a handful of plain attack patterns and a lot of health). Furthermore, the extreme over-saturation of boss fights also ruins the excitement and unpredictability of finally reaching a boss fight, mainly because there are just so many of them, but also because most of them are incredibly trivial (which was extremely disappointing considering the crux of the Dark Souls experience is that it’s meant to be extremely difficult). I should probably clear up one thing, however: for all my complaining about the extreme ease of the game, Dark Souls 2 is not an easy game, especially not by typical RPG standards, my problem is simply that compared to the gruelling fights that filled Dark Souls 1, this game feels substantially easier.

The HUD and on-screen information remains pretty much unchanged

Another side effect of having so many boss fights is that you accrue a hefty amount of souls a lot quicker than you did in the first game. This time round bosses give you a lot more souls per kill, which quickly add up as you zip from one area to the next killing boss after boss (there are some diminishing returns that make souls eventually lose a lot of their worth, however, once level-ups begin to cost upwards of 15k souls). This is also added to by one of the game’s new, and very interesting, mechanics that come from items called Bonfire Ascetics. These items allow you to “intensify” the flame of any bonfire, thus increasing the difficulty of enemies, respawning bosses and items, and essentially making the area re-doable after you’ve cleared out many of the enemies and bosses. Naturally, these more difficult enemies and bosses drop significantly better items, loot and “boss souls” which can be turned into better-than-average weapons and armour. It’s a really interesting mechanic that sets up a lot of risk-reward scenarios that revolve around using these reasonably rare items (early on, at least) for a shot at some better items and more souls, but with the knowledge that the effect cannot be reversed.

The obnoxiously cryptic nature of how information is delivered to the player is very much a part of Dark Soul's unique charm; the sheer lack of useful information (i.e. item descriptions that actually explain how much stat X is increased by, instead of simply saying “increases stat X”) can get a little frustrating. Discovering what weapons, items, spells etc. can or cannot do can be quite a lot of fun in itself, but some things are just unnecessarily mysterious (severely lacking explanations for pretty rudimentary spells, for example, just feels a little over the top). The non "hand-holdy" nature of Dark Souls 2's approach may serve as a refreshing reprieve for those who have grown tired of the crude and somewhat condescending way in which many (typically Western) role-playing games treat new players, and a lot of people love Dark Souls for that very reason. However, when a lot of the game’s core mechanics are hardly explained, that's just bad game design and not something that should be so heavily praised. By all means keep the description of some really rare, obscure item a secret and allow me to find out for myself, but when the player has to go to walkthrough to understand how to summon in NPCs and other players (a fairly core mechanic, and the crux of the multiplayer), there's a problem.

An example of one of the game's earlier bosses, the Flexile Sentry

One of the biggest and most obvious improvements Dark Souls 2 brings is its huge improvements in both visual fidelity and overall frame rate performance. No longer will a certain enemies' ability cause the frame rate to drop into single digits, and, thankfully, the game looks considerably better than the, frankly, broken PC port of the original Dark Souls. Vastly improved lighting and particle effects make for a much better-looking game, whilst the nice lighting adds a little much-needed atmosphere to the series, with bonfires creating ominously looming shadows whilst simultaneously looking oddly eerie themselves. Furthermore, Dark Souls 2 brings some small improvements to its UI and menus, but they still need some work to even reach the standards for menu interfaces in most modern RPGs (which really aren't even that high themselves, in fairness). Although certainly an improvement to the clunky and awkward menus and UI of Dark Souls, navigating through your inventory and sorting items could be a lot more streamlined in its execution, especially with the sheer volume of items you quite quickly accrue whilst playing. As for PC-specific controls, playing with a mouse + keyboard is no longer the death wish it was in Dark Souls and is certainly possible, but is by no means a preferable alternative to simply using a gamepad. This time round the PC is easily the best version to pick up, if you can of course.

Ultimately, Dark Souls 2 is, for all my grievances, still a great game. It’s just that when compared to the incredibly unique game that the first Dark Souls was, this feels like a cheapened and diminished experience. If you played and enjoyed the first Dark Souls, then you’ll most likely still have a good time here, and, in a lot of ways, it’s a better game than Dark Souls (from a technical and mechanical perspective). The game looks, plays and runs a lot better than its predecessors, and there’s still a lot of satisfaction to be gained from slaying boss after boss (however easy a lot of them may be). If you were hoping for a harder and even more punishing Dark Souls, then unfortunately this isn’t it, but you should be more than happy if you’re looking to get in on some more accessible Dark Souls action.