Watch Dogs Critic Reviews

Watch_Dogs combines an astonishingly detailed world, a gripping storyline, creative game mechanics, a myriad of missions and activities, and improvisational tactical sandbox gameplay to create a truly next-generation open world game. Phenomenal. No other word for it.

This is the game that makes spending that hard earned money on a next-generation console worth it.

Maybe Watch Dogs doesn't have GTA's highlights, but it's still one of the most impressive debuts to date. The game is huge and the hacking adds an interesting new layer to the free roaming genre.

Despite an insipid plot and a cross-gen look, Watch Dogs is one of the most dense and interesting free-roaming released in the past few years.

Polished to a mirror sheen, and bursting with content, Watch Dogs is a great looking game with a thriving open world and an empowering premise. It suffers from being an amalgamation of every other major Ubisoft game, to the point where it doesn't feel as fresh as it deserves to, but it's still a varied, rich, thoroughly dense experience.

Though gang warfare slightly overtakes the more pertinent theme of personal security and government surveillance, Watch Dogs is a superlative technical achievement. Its interpretation of Chicago is painstakingly detailed and sets a new bar for open worlds, with only a spare few hiccups in frame-rate.

After a generation that brought us seven years of countless linear and identikit shooters, Watch Dogs is the open world adrenaline shot that fatigued gamers needed. While the story could have been better and Ubisoft have made a few questionable design choices, it’s rare to see a big budget game that offers players freedom in almost every aspect of its design – and, more importantly, one that is this much fun while doing so.

It raises social and governmental questions around a person’s right to privacy. It delivers combat, stealth, story, and an incredible amount of side content to bring the whole world to life. I’m amazed at what the team at Ubisoft has delivered here, and I’m glad that they treated the hacker world with more respect and attention to detail than any other game or movie to date.

It’s not without quirks, but Watch Dogs can be fairly described as close to astonishing in both ambition and execution for the first game in a wholly new and original license.

Watch Dogs doesn’t have the depth you’ll find in a Grand Theft Auto title, but it does have a unique gameplay experience through hacking abilities, a gorgeous gaming environment to play in and enough added content via side quests and online play to make it worth your time.

Watch Dogs is far and away the best game to released for the new consoles.

It’s not often a new game franchise comes into the world so fully realized and without major shortcomings, which is why this is such an impressive achievement. Not only is it more polished, expansive, alive and fun to play than many predecessors in its genre, it’s also the best example yet of next-generation gameplay.

Watch Dogs is a good game and a beginning like Assassin's Creed was prior to a few years ago. It has its own downfalls but in the end it emerges standing and winning.

Watch Dogs has had a lot of adverts revolving around the promise for some crazy unseen next gen’ graphics. But if Ubisoft’s title is not the eye-watering masterpiece we were sold for the last two years, it easily makes up for that with gameplay that cleverly mixes action, stealth and hacking. Actually the whole structure of the game was built around this balance and the result is a success. As a matter of fact we would have enjoyed a more intriguing plot, a more charismatic hero and a bit more depth in the story. But open-world game fans will find some satisfaction in the huge amount of content and a well-integrated multiplayer mode. Some game design choices can be weird (no jump, impossible to shoot while driving, or disappointing close combat animations), but for a first try, Ubisoft Montreal’s team has done it well. Overall, among the GTA competitors, Watch Dogs is the most serious one.

Incredible design, tons of content and a deep, interesting concept in a product that ties every aspect together very neatly. Quite simply the best game from Ubisoft since Beyond Good & Evil.

Innovative, unique and straight-up impressive in the gameplay department... Ubisoft has created a masterpiece. Yet nobody's perfect, as both the story and graphics could have been done better.

Watch Dogs definitely needs some improvements (the side missions for instance) but what remains is a game that pulls the impossible; the realization of its high expectations. Many games focus on specific target groups, but Watch Dogs creates an experience that we can recommend to anyone. And that's something in which few other games succeed.

What it is, though, is a supremely well- made open world game with some great new ideas and a really intriguing sense of paranoia and technological fear.

Despite some standout visuals though there’s nothing here that feels like a leap forward in gaming, and I can’t imagine the core game feeling much different had I played a last-gen version. It doesn’t tarnish the experience, but players looking for a reason to need a new console still don’t have one.

Oodles of fun in perhaps the most living game world we've ever experienced. Holster your weapon and hack the planet.