Watch Dogs

Watch Dogs is an excellent open-world action game with some unique hacking-magic that makes it a memorable experience.

Watch Dogs' attempts to say something serious are overshadowed by how enormously fun it is to create chaos in its impressive open world.

We've got a Watch Dogs guide that will help you beat some of the trickier missions in the game.

Creative hacking and covert multiplayer modes bring exciting new life to otherwise familiar open-world man-shooting.

WATCH DOGS OPEN WORLD IS TRUMPED BY ITS SMART, LAYERED MECHANICS

Watch Dogs' interconnected world is a wonderful, explosive, high-tech playground. Shame the people who inhabit it are so forgettable.

The hacking abilities are a legitimate game changer and give Watch Dogs its own identity

Watch Dogs is solidly entertaining and a lot of fun to play. And while it could've achieved true greatness if it had followed through on its most ambitious promises, it is still better than a lot of what's been released this year. The hype seems already to be benefiting the sales figures. Everything about Watch Dogs tells us that we are all susceptible in the digital age.

Then I remembered. Those things aren't a game. The game is sloppy controls which cause you to constantly do the wrong thing accidentally with disastrous consequences; is inconsistently interactive world design; is a cover system whereby you get stuck on scenery or it guesses incorrectly where you want to move. The game is insta-fail stealth missions, wave-defense missions, escort missions, missions where what the characters say and what the objective is don't match up. The game is five crashes to desktop, including two which required me to reboot my machine before it would reload. The game is restrictive objectives which don't make use of the possibilities provided by the open city or the hacking mechanics, and checkpoint positions that force you to re-watch short cutscenes or re-perform rote actions after every death.

These games are all crafted with more care than the actual storyline, and come complete with their own skill trees and upgrades. If I ever got bored with anything from the core game I found myself getting distracted by these for hours on end. Even if you don't play open world games, it's worth giving Watch Dogs a try just to get your hands on these experiences.Despite the fact that Watch Dogs hasn't made any meaningful impact on the genre, I found myself having a ton of fun with it. Between the deep levels of customization and the sheer breadth of content, there's no shortage of things to do. If Ubisoft can take the game's core fun factor and marry it with an actual "next-gen" experience the next time around, they'll have something truly special.