Watch Dogs preview: barking up the right tree

Last Friday on May 23 I got the opportunity to preview Watch Dogs, an open-world action-adventure game about the potential power of hacking, and the grievances and responsibilities that come with it.

Watch Dogs is a huge game with so much going on for it, and a preview article after a one-hour session with it is really just giving you guys a single drop of the ocean. But it is a pretty refreshing drop, which I am more than happy to share. (Watch out for our full review coming later in the week!)

(See: Watch Dogs bundle pack official release date and price announced)

Watch Dogs is a third-person game set in Chicago, and when I first walked into the showroom displaying the game, the first thought that came to me was not whether there was going to be a buffet line; it was “dang, Watch Dogs is a good lookin’ game”. The graphics are about as polished as they get these days, and then some.

Watch Dogs starts off pretty story-heavy, and spoilers abound. If you absolutely do not want to get any details about the game’s story, feel free to skip over the hidden spoilers.

The story puts you in the shoes of Aiden Pearce, a hacker who uses his smartphone in conjunction with a disregard for the law to siphon money from banks. On one such hacker run, Pearce bites off more than he can chew, and ends up getting caught up in a big hacking conspiracy that leads to the murder of his niece. Pearce, armed only with his smartphone, the help of a hacker friend, and lots and lots of guns, embarks on a mission to distill his own brand of justice to the parties responsible for her death.

In general, the game plays very similar to the Grand Theft Auto series, with the same shooting and car-stealing mechanics. But to be fair, that’s something that a lot of open world games share, like the similarly-named Sleeping Dogs.

What does set Watch Dogs apart from the pack (pun intended) is the hacking system. Whenever you activate your phone’s hacking software, you’re shown various data lines that spiderweb across the screen. And by focusing on a person, you get a line of information on each of them, the most interesting and disturbing one I saw being the person who was an internet pedophile.

More practically, you can use this hacking function in a variety of ways—you can steal money from people’ bank accounts, hack traffic lights to be green on your entire route, cause blackouts, see through security cameras, and many more. It really shows you just how network and technology-based our society is, and how potentially powerful a person could be if he could control all of that literally from the palm of his hand.

(See: Hacking China’s online games for profit: an interview with a Chinese hacker)

I found my hour with Watch Dogs was incredibly overwhelming, to say the least. The story moved along quickly, the tutorial showed off ten thousand ways you can use your hacking powers, and just by exploring the world, I came across many mini games, one of which letting you blast away at virtual aliens to get a high score. There were many things to do, and I wanted to do them all, which I think is the mark of a great game.