Watch Dogs Review
Cast your mind back, if you will, to the afternoon of June 4th, 2012. The pre-E3 press conferences were in full swing, with Ubisoft taking its moment in the spotlight in front of the assembled gaming media. Aisha Tyler had just wrapped up her second stint on presentation duties for the publisher, introducing the public to several titles that would go on to be hugely successful, including Assassin’s Creed III, Rayman Legends and Far Cry 3, and just as everyone was preparing to high tail it over to Sony’s conference, we were informed that there was one last game to be shown; a brand new IP by the name of Watch Dogs.What followed was nothing short of astonishing. We were seeing our first glimpses of genuine next gen gaming, almost a full year before the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One were announced to the world. Visually sublime, Watch Dogs promised to take gamers on a journey like they’d never experienced before. An entire living breathing city was there to be manipulated, hacked and explored, wrapped in a storyline that touched upon the notion of world run by a single, centralized, omniscient operating system, capable of tracking the movements of almost everyone living within it.We were asked to consider the potential ramifications of living in such a world; left to ponder just what we’d do if it became reality and, more pertinently, what we’d do if such a system wasn’t entirely secure. It was, in short, much weightier material than we had grown used to through the previous decade of triple-A releases, but it promised to be a breath of fresh air – a new start for gaming, pushing the envelope not only in terms of visuals, but also gameplay, mechanics and authenticity. The Watch Dogs shown to the world that afternoon heralded the potential rebirth of gaming.The Watch Dogs released in May 2014, however, is not that game.
