Watch Dogs Review 360

This review has been in the works for ages so here it is...

If you've not at least heard of Watch Dogs then you have either spent the last two years under a rock or you're just not that into gaming but if you don't know Watch Dogs is a brand new sand box experience from Ubisoft and it's effectively the greatest aspects of all the companies recent successes rolled in to one with some extra stuff and a pretty next gen ribbon around it but as I will be reviewing it from the stand point of a poor last gen gamer I wont be going into how nice the graphics look as much as say elitist bastards like [CONTENT REMOVED FOR LEGAL REASONS].

So lets get this underway and get the shit bit out of the way in PRESENTATION-

The graphics are awesome and apart from the odd frame rate dip I've not encountered anything that can be called a glitch. Chicago and the outlying area while not being massive to the extent of GTA 5 or Skyrim is still comfortably large enough for a variety of activities to be available and yet not be crowded in to a small space. Central Chicago otherwise known as The Loop is an area where you will be spending a lot of your time and it's a good job that it rarely gets boring but for me it's the city outskirts that make the game interesting. 8/10

Story- Watch Dogs follows a talking trench coat Aiden Pearce, a hacker with nothing short of a rough past. After a job goes horribly wrong Aiden is targeted a stunt that rather than killing him kills his beloved nice. We join him two years after this tragic event, he's reluctantly in partnership with a fixer Jordie. Within an hour Aiden's sister is kidnapped by the man who he worked with in that fateful job he is given no choice but to work for the man he has come to mistrust. While nothing overly new or interesting the story is made interesting and at points exhilarating with the added component of hacking. 6/10

Gameplay- On the hole Watch dogs plays just like any other sand box experience. On foot you can run around the city taking in all there is to see and do from several unique city games that range from chess and poker to drinking games and gang hideouts. Anyone who gets bored in this game is clearly not trying hard enough. The key gameplay let down and one that impacted my enjoyment on the hole was the vehicle mechanics, even without the dynamic weather making the roads slick after a deluge driving is often like driving on roads of melting butter with the slightest shunt sending cars across in to oncoming traffic. This is something I slowly got used to but it just got a bit annoying even without my dislike for driving which in any game this size is a must if you have to travel even half the length of the game and as such I prefer to use motorbikes with their extra mobility.
   Combat is a blast mixing up all of Ubisofts best combat mechanics from the 'ard as nails gunplay found in Far Cry that mean you feel every shot to the tactical combat that make Tom Clancy games such a joy to play but unlike the most recent Clancy game Ubisoft have sorted out the cover system that let Future Soldier down. You'll combine guns, grenades, hacking and your surrounding to make every encounter a little bit different.
   And with that magical word mentioned we come to hacking, the selling point for the game and something Ubisoft spent ages to work on and thankfully it is awesome. Each new hack you unlock via the extensive skill tree leaves you wondering why you found that last hack so cool when this one is just so much cooler. Aiden is no COD bullet sponge and as such going in guns blazing is nigh impossible without hacking at least one or two things in the heat of combat. In my opinion though it's so much more fun to go in slow and quiet, hacking cameras and from there hacking electronic grenades that even if they throw away there is a fifty fifty chance that the explosive will blow something or someone else up unintentionally.  8/10

Online- When Ubisoft announced Watch Dogs they promised that the online portion of the game would be something a little different and while I've only played through an hour or so of online gameplay I can say that it is everything that was promised, online hacking is particularly exhilarating. In one session I waited in a car while I hacked in to a nearby target (another player) who spent a number of minutes running round like a headless chicken, 75%... 80%... 85%... It wasn't until the download had reached 94% that I was spotted and my target ran off in the nearest vehicle which happened to be a motorbike. It's extra peed and mobility meant that it got away leaving the download at 99%. Bummer. Other modes include races, and more traditional games of domination with the extra spice of hacking and downloading information and keeping it from the enemy team. 9/10

To conclude- Watch Dogs may be somewhat bland when it comes to story and characters, doing nothing more than giving your run of the mill action stars a place to run around but then Ubisoft never said the story was going to be revolutionary so for me at least i'm happy with it, when people call Watch Dogs a disappointment I feel my blood boil, call me a fanboy if you want but I personally like it, no it's not got the edge of your seat tear jerking feel of The Last of Us but what it does deliver is everything Ubisoft said it would so to conclude my first full length game review I will be giving Ubisoft's Watch Dogs a comfortable...

7.75/10 A good game with some hit or miss moments but otherwise an exiting thrill ride... 

Look out for future reviews on the games DLC as well as reviews on Destiny and GTA 5

SCALE THE SUMMIT - "ATLAS NOVUS" Official Song Premiere

This is aibsoluitly incredible

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FUTURE PLANS...

Over the next few months I intend to pick up on activity, finalise the Watch Dogs review (which has been happening I just have other priorities like finding a job so I can by video games anime and booze), review at least one album which may or may not be Tesseract or as I shall now call them Tosseract thanks to Hacktivist (Craptivist). I may also look at a gig or two and of course some anime.

DESTINY IS FUCKING AWESOME

So I just got hands on with destiny and I fucking love it. As It isn't my copy I won't do a full review of it until I have my own and until I get a good portion in to the game. I played as a warlock using all kinds of badass space magic it was brilliant...

DESTINY top 5

So unlike Watch Dogs I only really gave a turd until I saw some of the crap you could do and only got exited when I say the live action and launch trailers. An practically over night I've gone from, "meh, if I see some stuff I like I'll pick up a copy," to "gimme dem special editions..." The issue with that plan is... I'm fucking skint... But if I wasn't I'd buy it on launch. Assuming that I do get it here are the five things that I'm looking forward to most about DESTINY.

5- Character creation/customisation- If you haven't noticed yet from a few of my other posts, I am a massive fan of rpg's especially when there is the option to customise and better still create your own character. There is something awesome about knowing that the chance of finding a character with exactly the same gear as you (even at lower levels) is massively slim, you can be sure that I will be spending hours on this element alone.

4- Class locked weapons or rather the lack of- A common annoyance with many rpgs and mmos is that weapons are often locked to specific class which as an adaptive player really pisses me off to no end. I was rather happy to find while playing the BETA that none of the main guns were set to different classes. Of course each class has it's own traits and abilities that make them unique.

3- Living environment- I mentioned something like this in my Watch Dogs Top 5, of course the two games are totally different in most aspects so each will do something differently. Bungi have made enthuses on community based activities such as Raids and Strikes (can't remember which is which) in which a team of players make their way through "dungeons" in search of rare loot. There is mention of the day and night cycle which on it's own is nothing new but how it impacts these group events is massive e.g. During the day we will see a large number of guards whereas the force is considerably lessened during the night which drives players to plan in advance as to how they are going to tackle the mission and when, especially as they are meant to be crazy hard.

2- Sparrows- these are the small speeder bike things that we've see a lot about, allowing quick traversing of the lengthy environments, I can imagine groups of friends racing these in the "free roam," exploration mode.

1- Evolving world- since the BETA there have been a few complaints that for an MMORPG Destiny is too small. A this point I don't want to say anything as I only played about five hours of the Beta. Bungi have said that there is only one area per planet but as the game goes on they will be expanding the world and giving players more to do. I have my doubts we will get anything major until November when the first expansion goes live.

NEW STUDENTS...

It's that time of the year again, students all over the world are making what may be the biggest leap of their lives, leaving home. Many many act tough, claiming that they aren't nervous but in reality their shitting themselves. I was when I left for residential college at an age where many wouldn't have even started to look at uni and I might have left a little brown one here and there but on the other side it felt great, I may have failed most of the courses I'd set out to complete but I can honestly say that nothing will make me forget those two year. More on topic now is the issue of food, some universities will have catering services an most will have something for during study time but the issue is then what do you do after that, with so many places to go and eat nowadays it's easy to go for the same place and the same thing every time. One alternative that I only really thought about because my mum asked me to go shopping was the idea of discount supermarkets, Aldi and Lidl. A few people may turn their noses up at the idea of discount foods but when you're paying £70+ a week for your room, £20+ a week on clubbing and generally being a student you don't have a massive amount of cash to spend on actually staying alive. Just 99p for a pack of noodles, 99p for seasoning you've got a very basic meal for less than some dodgy take away (one that is massively tempting to order from every time you pass it mind you but dodgy all the same). Most pizzas are under £2 for a good 6" meat feast. So next time you go shopping and you're paying £30 for your weekly shopping at Tesco you may have only payed £15 at Aldi.