I'm racing a stolen motorcycle through a sprawling cityscape, cops wailing behind me in pursuit, when I suddenly smash into a car, shoot through the air like a missile, and slam face-first into a wall. Nothing new I've done this many times, in many games. While I'm sailing through the air, however, my smartphone informs me the driver of the car I've struck is Martin Huntley, age 39, who works as a telemarketer, makes $24,000 a year, and is into autoerotic asphyxiation. OK. That part's new.

There's no shortage of the familiar in Ubisoft's third-person open-world action game Watch Dogs, beginning with our protagonist, Aiden Pearce. He's got a few days of beard stubble, speaks in a whispery growl, and has zero sense of humor. He's haunted by, and feels responsible for, a tragedy in his past, and he s out for revenge or is it redemption? To find those responsible for his misery, Aiden needs to uncover a shadowy conspiracy, secret organizations, organized crime, and government corruption, and will employ the help of get this an eccentric cast of oddball characters, some with secrets of their own. There is one new and interesting thing about Aiden, however: he's got a really, really cool phone.

Is there anything smartphones can't do? Not in this game.

I have a lot of issues with Watch Dogs, but Aiden s phone is owed a lot of credit for how much I enjoyed it. In profile mode, the phone identifies citizens around me and allows me to hack into their phones with a keypress, downloading bank information and letting me listen in on their phone calls and read their text messages. And, of course, it tells me their secrets. Miles Renner is late with child support payments. Conner Eggers is on probation. Bill Woods is affiliated with a racist organization. Think of everything you've ever typed into an email, text message, or search engine yes, even in incognito mode, weirdo and then think about some mopey, stubble-faced man in a stupid futuristic coat, standing on the opposite streetcorner, reading all about it.

Hack & crash
 
Hacking people is just the beginning. My phone has access to ctOS, an omnipresent computer network that manages the entire city of Chicago. I can change traffic lights to cause accidents ahead of me (useful if I'm pursuing someone) or behind me (handy if I'm being chased). The doors of city parking garages can be opened and closed and drawbridges raised and lowered for quick escapes. After a few skill upgrades, I can blow up steam pipes buried beneath the streets, raise barricades and tire spikes, disrupt radio transmissions, cause massive blackouts, and even disable helicopters. Not only are these abilities a lot of fun, they're absolutely necessary: Aiden's is constantly being chased by both crooks and cops, and he can't fire a gun while driving.

Hacking traffic lights is useful for escape. Or just for fun.

Where the magical smartphone truly shines, however, is during the infiltration of secure locations crawling with armed guards. No need to rush in, just scout the perimeter until you spot an external security camera on the side of a nearby building. Accessing it with your phone allows you to "hop" into the camera and look through its lens. If you spot another security camera with the camera you're controlling, you can project yourself into that one, and so on, forming a chain of digital leaps Aiden refers to as "riding the cameras." It's not just wall-mounted security cameras, either: you can jump into cameras built into laptops and even a camera someone is carrying with them.

These line-of-sight infiltration puzzles are wickedly fun. Riding cameras allows you to cross streets, zoom around corners, travel down hallways, see into secure areas, and traverse entire buildings, top to bottom. While in a camera, you can also hack anything you can see. Spot a computerized lock and you can open it, peer at a server and you can infiltrate it, find an elevator and you can activate it.

Back to those armed mercenaries patrolling the building: many of them are hackable as well. If they have a phone, you can distract them by sending a loud blast of music from their speaker, or disable it, preventing them from calling for backup. The best is when they're carrying an explosive device, which you can trigger, giving them just a few seconds to frantically dig it out of their pocket and get rid of it. Sometimes they're too slow and perish in the explosion, and sometimes they're successful, lobbing the bomb away but still causing a general panic. (One time, wonderfully, a guard threw it directly at the feet of specific bad guy I was there to rub out, saving me a lot of work.) If they don't have explosives on them, feel free to overload a nearby junction box: they explode nicely too.

We meet again, horsey ride. But now I'm the one in control.

The result of all this camera-riding and goon abuse makes me feel like the electronic ghost of Batman: swooping silently between vantage points, peering down at moronic henchmen, picking off enemies one by one. There are entire buildings you can infiltrate and escape from, all while standing safely outside on a street corner, looking like just another dude absorbed with his phone.

Isn't it refreshing to hear about hacking that doesn't require a pipe-based minigame? Now, let's talk about hacking that requires a pipe-based minigame. Some servers require a puzzle-solving session called intrusion, in which you must direct a stream of blue hacking energy (water) to an endpoint by rotating nodes (pipes). It's actually sort of enjoyable, though it gets repetitive and naturally becomes more complex the deeper into the game you go, occasionally including multiple levels and timers that reset your progress.

Hang up and throw down
 
Remote hacking and camera riding gets you a lot of places, but many missions require a personal touch, by which I mean stealthily sneaking through buildings, shooting a thousand men in the face with guns, and driving at top speed all over the city. Stealth first: Aiden is nimble while moving from cover to cover and gifted in the ways of parkour and silent takedowns, not unlike some assassins I could name. I found the gunplay mostly satisfying: mouse-aiming felt natural without being too easy, the bigger guns had a reasonable amount of recoil (except for the full-auto shotgun, which somehow has none), and while Aiden doesn't have access to a rocket launcher, the single-shot grenade launcher got me out of more jams than I can count. There are plenty of ways to increase weapon damage and precision on the combat skill tree, and Aiden has the slow-motion bullet-time ability that all true heroes are born with these days. Enemy AI isn't fantastic, but they do put together rushes and flanking maneuvers if you stay in one spot for too long, meaning you can't just sit there waiting for heads to pop out one-by-one.

Thanks, grenade launcher.

Less satisfying is the driving, which I found fairly awkward with keyboard and mouse. I eventually switched to my wireless 360 controller during the driving portions, swapping back to mouse and keyboard for everything else. On the plus side, the game detects what you're using when you're using it, instantly updating any on-screen prompts to reflect your control scheme. More evidence of the game's design for console: the minimap is ridiculously huge and the notifications are scenery-blotting. Also, brace yourself for yet another irritating checkpoint save system. Did you enjoy that lengthy phone call at the start of the mission so much you want to hear it again? Interested in re-killing those first twenty goons before getting to the boss goon who killed you? Want to restart the driving mission standing a hundred feet from the nearest car? If not, I'd suggest never, ever failing a mission.

If you're wondering about Ubisoft's usual complement of insta-fail tailing, stealth, and escort missions, yes, there are several of them, though occasionally you can follow your target by jumping into security cameras, which is considerably more fun. Other times, you'll be guiding a companion from cover to cover while you watch them through cameras and distract the guards in their path, which is a nice change from having to protect someone vulnerable while dozens of enemies swarm in. (There are a couple of those, too.)

Those blockers will stop the cops before my car gets damaged! Oh, wait.

Chicago itself feels a bit bigger than GTA IV's Liberty City, and downtown, the docks, the projects, and the suburban areas are all seamlessly connected (the only loading screens you'll encounter are while fast-traveling). I found the city attractive if not particularly memorable, perhaps because there are no planes or choppers to pilot over it, nor infinite parachutes to leap off its buildings with. Speaking of buildings, they are mostly facades, with the exception of mission-based buildings, stores, and the occasional enterable skyscraper lobby. As far as the citizens go, they're not as loud, profane, or obnoxious as those in GTA or Saint's Row, which makes them considerably less fun to terrorize with explosions or reckless driving. You're discouraged against tormenting them anyway, as killing or injuring citizens (not to mention the police) damages your reputation and makes them more likely to call the cops on you.

Luckily, there are plenty of enjoyable diversions, activities, and side-quests to distract you from the semi-blandness of Chicago and its residents, and almost all of them involve hacking of some sort. I loved solving the ctOS tower puzzles, which unlock new locations and hideouts (as in Assassin's Creed games and Far Cry 3). You get to Camera-hop up and around buildings, solve environmental puzzles, and perform a bit no-pressure parkour, easily making it one of the most enjoyable activities of the game.



Watching people through laptop webcams reveals what you'd expect: people like porn.

Busy signals
 
There's also plenty of extra work in Watch Dogs for the eager vigilante. Notifications pop up (a little too often for my tastes) alerting you to upcoming crimes in the area. Some hunting around will reveal either the potential crook or possible victim, and you can tail them, covertly witness the crime, and then chase down and punish the offender.

Other activities are scattered around the city and feature a mish-mash of camera-based infiltration and observation, device hacking, combat, stealth, high-speed driving, and sometimes all of the above. There are also games like chess and poker (you can use a camera to sneak a look at an opponent's cards and monitor his stress levels), parkour challenges and auto races, and if you're looking for straight-up city destruction, you can take a "digital trip," allowing you to take a virtual skyscraper-scaling spider tank on a rampage, which makes up for the lack of actual, driveable tanks in the game and lets you blow up cops without damaging your reputation. Good fun.

Yes, you can go nuts and blow up the city. In virtual reality, anyway.

There are also mysteries to solve: codes that can only be viewed from certain cameras, a serial killer stalking the populace, and audio files to collect and use to piece together additional stories. And, of course, you can unlock new vehicles, buy new guns, and visit clothing stores to purchase slightly different versions of your stupid coat. There's genuinely a lot to do in Watch Dogs, dozens of hours worth, along with a main storyline that takes a little over twenty hours to complete.

With so much to do I was a little worried I wouldn't have time to check out Watch Dog's multiplayer modes, but that problem was solved for me when I was notified that multiplayer was, in fact, checking me out. Another player was in my game in my single-player game hacking into my data. In this one-on-one hacking game, you'll need to locate the intruder with your phone (they're disguised as a normal citizen) and kill them before they finish their download and slip back out of your game.

Suddenly realizing another human player is in your game is wonderfully unsettling, especially since they've potentially been there for several minutes before you were ever alerted. Shadowing you. Watching you. Thematically, it's perfect, what with all the spying you do in Watch Dogs, and it's especially fun when you're the invader. In one heart-pounding match, I sat hunched behind the wheel of a parked car in a busy part of town, watching my mark circle the area again and again, frantically scanning for me among the NPCs. My hack slowly climbed to 99% so close! before he finally spotted me and ran toward my car. I gunned the engine and screeched away into traffic, his gunshots thunking into my hood, and lost him after jumping a drawbridge, safely returning to my game with most not all of his data. Incredible fun.

Watch Dogs is a single-player game, until it suddenly isn't.

There are group activities too, like races, as well as some co-op play, but I think the one-on-one hacking and tailing challenges are far more interesting. If you don't like the idea of players entering your game unannounced, or if you just don't want to be disturbed by invitations to join in multiplayer shenanigans, you can always play in offline mode.

I found little to like in Watch Dogs story, however. Aiden's gloominess and introspection are immediately tiresome, and the most enjoyable character, a fixer named Jordi, gets almost no screen time. There's a sex slave auction scene that seems to serve no purpose but to provide another woman for Aiden to rescue. She is immediately forgotten, though saving her opens human trafficking side missions: complete ten of them and you'll unlock a new car. With so much thought put into Watch Dogs' enjoyable hacking systems and creative multiplayer modes, it's disappointing to discover that Ubisoft's storytelling hasn't made any advancements.

Aiden has many sads. Prepare for Mope Factor 10. This is not a drill.

Technically, Watch Dogs gets a pass. I ran it mostly on medium settings (my specs: Intel Core i7 @ 2.80 GHz, 8GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 Ti) and got a steady, medium-looking performance, with the only noticeable framerate drops occurring while driving. There's a standard number of video options to fine tune, but no FOV slider, though I thought the FOV was fine as is. I don't recall encountering any bugs or glitches the game never crashed or froze and as much as I was dreading it, Uplay worked fine.

At times, Watch Dogs can seem like a game we've played before, just another open-world city to speed through in a series of stolen cars, another crowd of hoods and hitmen to add to your body count, another moody, growling protagonist to endure in cutscenes. When it deviates from the familiar, however, it really soars: hacking the city of Chicago and all its cameras, utilities, and communications is freeing and fun, and invading the games of unsuspecting players is an unusual and welcome thrill.

Thanks to Ubisoft Australia, PC Gamer is giving away copies of Watch Dogs: ANZ Special Edition for PC. Worth $79.95, the ANZ Special Edition comes with the 'Breakthrough' pack, which adds a bonus single player mission and a vehicle expert perk. Most importantly though, you'll be getting the game for exactly $0 dollars.

Watch Dogs releases in Australia tomorrow. There are a bunch of midnight launches happening at EB Games if you're averse to buying it digitally, and for some reason like to be around other people.

To go in the draw, just click this link and answer the following question: what is the main protagonist's name in Watch Dogs? Seriously, that's the easiest question you'll ever need to answer.

Entries close Friday, May 30. The competition is open to Australian residents only.



 

Ubisoft are doing another one of their '101 trailers', where they painstakingly explain one of the their upcoming games. This time, it's Watch Dogs. Across the 10-minute video, you'll learn about hacking, see a range of multiplayer modes, hear the line "T-Bone doesn't plays by his own rules", and find out what the hell is up with the bizarre spider-tank thing.

The only thing the trailer doesn't explain is why Ubisoft have felt the need to release so many editions of the game. As explained by an amazing, but now removed, Wikipedia chart, there are nine editions of the game available across various platforms each one containing and omitting various pre-order bonuses and DLCs.

Click for large.

Watch Dogs is out May 27th. For more on the game, check out Tyler's recent preview.

Up until now, the marketing campaign leading up to Watch Dogs has focused primarily on its features and technology. If you re looking for more info on that kind of thing, Tyler got to play Watch Dogs for a few hours last month, and you should read and watch his hands-on impressions. He came away surprised at how much he liked the main character, Aiden Pearce. But there are more people to meet in Chicago, as Ubisoft's newest trailer shows.
The gravelly-voiced Aiden Pearce is a master hacker that moves outside the system, and he ll only hang out with you if you re equally or cooler than him. Case in point: Clara Lille, a suspected DedSec hacktivist. She has a neck tattoo, a mohawk, and piercings. She s also the best hacker Pearce knows, so she s pretty cool. T-Bone Grady, who s still rocking dreadlocks at 52, is also cool enough by virtue of his nickname alone, and the fact that he likes to blow stuff up.
I m personally partial to Jordi Chin, a fixer we saw quite a bit of during the Watch Dogs preview event. Like the rest of the crew, he s pretty silly and over-the-top, but he s well-written and voiced, as are the other characters, which is what matters most.
Watch Dogs is out on May 27.

As a fellow hacker-warrior in Watch Dogs, T-Bone has a special complementary relationship to gruff nerd Aiden Pearce's vigilantism. Where Pearce douses for critical data within ctOS's sprawling net, T-Bone taps a few keys on his phone and blows up a bunch of cars. When Pearce draws heat from the law and kills power to a city block to sneak away, T-Bone shoots at a bunch of cop cars. Which blow up. I'm sensing a pattern here and I'm sure there's more to T-Bone beyond detonations and dreadlocks but finding out more means nabbing the $20/ 12 Season Pass for the single-player DLC, as Ubisoft's latest trailer reveals.

T-Bone seems like an outcast from a Grand Theft Auto game, ranting to Pearce with the air of someone gripped by conspiracy theory before jumping into a car and wreaking havoc on the streets. As Tyler touched upon in his preview, the Season Pass content looks like it's trying to simultaneously deliver a story-driven episode and another outlet for just running around and causing chaos in Chicago. I'd like to know more about T-Bone and how he got involved with Pearce or I can switch on They Live mode and start zapping disguised robo-civilians. At least that's a bit more subtle than giant spiders.

Watch Dogs and its Season Pass launches on May 27. Until then, take note of its system requirements and reliance on Uplay.

Each week PC Gamer probes the previous seven days to scientifically establish what rocked our world and made us despair for its future. As usual, we begin with the good stuff

THE HIGHS

Tyler Wilde: It s my birthday as I write this, so that s nice. Or is it? I m never sure whether or not I m supposed to enjoy getting older. I did enjoy playing Watch Dogs recently. I m disappointed by the fidelity-breaking parts of the world (the dumb pedestrians, the lack of consequences for terrorizing Chicago), and by the lack of experimentation in the story missions I played but where it s open-ended, where I can choose my own plan of attack (or plan of sneaking), and where hacking is a real tool for survival, I m happy to say that Watch Dogs diverges from GTA and leans in the direction of Far Cry. I m most surprised that I m looking forward to the story. I can t tell if Ubisoft wants Aiden Pearce to come off as a badass, or if he s supposed to be the way I see him: a loser who messed up his life and his family by running around in a trench coat acting like a big time tough guy when he d be better off at home watching Hackers again. I like my goober version of Aiden, so I m sticking to it.

Wes Fenlon: We're two weeks into our Dark Souls 2 coverage, and I'm still over the moon with the work that modder Durante has done for us. First, he analyzed the Dark Souls 2 PC port. Then he wrote a tweak guide for the average user to make the game look better. And now he's debuted a brand new tool with us that he calls GeDoSaTo that enables downsampling, texture modding, and other graphical enhancements in Dark Souls 2 and other DirectX games. It's still a work-in-progress tool, but I can't wait to start taking 8K screenshots with GeDoSaTo on the Large Pixel Collider. And the fact that he's helping gamers mod Dark Souls 2 the very minute the game launches on PC that's just too cool. I'm glad we can help spread the word.



Evan Lahti: Hell yes, Rising Storm got a big update. The indie-developed WWII FPS is one of our favorite games over the past few years, but it could certainly benefit from a larger playerbase. It s great to see Tripwire pouring more content into it in addition to making its sibling game Red Orchestra 2 temporarily free earlier this week.

Tim Clark: It s entirely improper for someone of my age to get excited about box art, but Dragon Age: Inquisition is delivering almost Frank Frazetta amounts of epic here. Luckily, we ve had plenty more to go on that just the box art this week. Like Chris s huge interview with the game s executive producer, info on the game s digital edition bonus content, and this very saucy looking gameplay trailer. Although it s of course right to remain cautious given that not everyone thought Dragon Age 2 was an unalloyed triumph, but the delay to The Witcher 3, and the fact Bethesda will surely revisit Fallout before doing another Elder Scrolls game, means Inquisition effectively has the high fantasy field to itself.



Andy Kelly: FRACT OSC is a first-person exploration game that sees you wandering around a bizarre, abstract world that shifts and pulses with music as you solve puzzles. It s initially confusing and a bit aimless, but as you feel your way around its surreal, vivid world, it starts making a weird kind of sense. It doesn t hold your hand at all, which demonstrates a trust in the player I wish more developers would have. As you solve puzzles you unlock different parts of a giant step synthesizer. You can create bass lines, pads, and synth leads, tweaking volume, tone, filters, and pretty much everything you d expect from a VST, but represented in 3D. I know nothing about the developers behind this, but they already have my attention. If you like exploratory games, music, and puzzle-solving, it s pretty much a must play.

Tom Senior: My game library shrank drastically last week thanks to a severely throttled internet connection (more on this later), but Dark Souls somehow worked, even with its cumbersome Games for Windows Live wrapping. I'm glad. My abortive first attempt ended in frustration, and not because of the game's oft-mentioned difficulty. It's easy to play it wrong. The bonfires scattered throughout the world offer comfort and replenish your health flasks, but bring nearby monsters back to life. I would run and re-run an area to amass souls and level up, locking myself into a cycle of boredom. I was trying to game Dark Souls as an RPG, when I should have been mastering Dark Souls as a combat game.

Now, with light armour and a fire-enchanted club I dodge under each enemy's thrusts and swings, and deliver crunchy critical hits to their exposed spines. I'm moving through each area at a satisfying pace, and can finally admire how the world has been intricately knotted together. I've been locked into the game by a scuppered connection, so perhaps this the Stockholm syndrome talking, but now I love the mystery and melancholy vibes of Lordran. I hope Dark Souls 2 can capture that too.





THE LOWS

Andy Kelly: The image of an in-game rendered soldier from a presentation slide at GDC was used this week to run teaser stories about the next Call Of Duty game. Yes, that s right, the next CoD will contain soldiers. I don t have anything against Activision s world-conquering series. I don t play it, but people like it, so whatever. But it says everything about the paucity of the series ambition that a close-up of the hyper-realistic pores of a face is considered newsworthy.

Before Ghosts came out, they wouldn t shut up about that dog and its fur. Now maybe they ll do a series of elaborate making of documentaries about that guy s pores, and how you can make out individual blackheads if you look really closely at his nose. Call of Duty is formulaic because Activision won t dare mess with the formula. It s the gaming equivalent of a Marvel film. A dumb, flashy distraction. But I really wish they d make some attempt to innovate beyond frivolous visual details.

Wes Fenlon: I'm afraid that the dream of net neutrality is dead. The Wall Street Journal reported that the FCC soon plans to introduce new regulations that would allow Internet Service Providers to charge different prices for the data they're carrying. This is doomsday scenario I outlined a few months ago when I wrote about how net neutrality affects PC gamers. Companies like Comcast could charge Netflix or Valve more money for a faster connection to their end users, since their services require vast amounts of data. Those kinds of costs will likely end up being passed down to people like us.

And it's not just about the money. If the Internet isn't open and equal, ISPs could charge us more for access to certain sites, or block services entirely to promote their own stuff. Comcast's Video on Demand vs. Netflix, for example. I think something like that happening is less likely, but I'm still worried about it, and unless some good news comes out of the FCC soon, things aren't looking great for the Internet as we know it.



Evan Lahti: CS:GO has been my main game for four months, and it s wonderful. What it s made me unhappy about, though, is how absurdly few shooters we have on PC that feature competitive matchmaking. Across the other genres, StarCraft II, Dota 2, Hearthstone, League of Legends, and Smite all offer skill-based matchmaking. Can you name another FPS with a smart matchmaking mode? I love dedicated servers, but CS:GO s five-on-five, structured, carefully-balanced competitive mode is so reliably tough and fair (save for the handful instances where I ve been matched with hackers) that it s the only thing I play. It makes me long for the return of arena shooters. I m hoping something like Extraction will help fill this near-void.

Tyler Wilde: I spent the beginning of the week getting over a flu I picked up at PAX. It was horrific. If you ever go to PAX, douse your entire body in hand sanitizer every two hours. Drink a bit of it, too. I m also very disappointed, as I touched on in my From The Archives column over the weekend, that I can t play along with the NHL playoffs on my PC. I m not mad at EA and 2K for focusing their sporting efforts on the consoles a few years ago, I d probably have made the same decision but I do hope someone plugs the gap. On PC, where modding and customization reign, it doesn t even matter to me whether or not sports games are licensed by the NHL, NBA, MLB, or whatever. It would be convenient to have the rosters and stats built in, but if not, I ll figure out how to get 2001 02 Evgeni Nabokov in his number 35 solid black jersey into the game, don t worry about that.



Tim Clark: While I m delighted with our first guide article for Hearthstone, which details the decks that are dominating the current metagame and explains why they re so effective, I m also conscious of the fact we ve probably just helped unleash even more Zoo Warlocks onto the server. Which, as shown here, is unfortunate. However, next week our expert will be showing you how to build your own killer deck, so perhaps a PC Gamer reader will come up with a perfect countermeasure for all those Zoos. (Other than fire, obviously.) To help the process, we ll also be listing our 40 favourite cards soon. I d be curious to know which ones you think are must haves in your decks. Hit me up here with suggestions. Job done.

Tom Senior: My internet router has existed in a state of near-death for a week now, allowing only the faintest breath of data to reach Steam's authentication servers. At times like this I'm reminded that my digital library is a transient thing, reliant on systems that may one day fail, or fall to market forces. Will Steam last forever? Gamespy's shutdown has inspired some quick action from 2K, but what will happen when Games for Windows Live meets its maker? Dedicated fans have been known to set up their own servers to save games from the scrapheap, but often it's down to publishers to maintain a game's online infrastructure, and that may not always be in their financial interests. Physical media is hardly infallible I've lost a few golden oldies to dust and disk scratches but the death of third-party authentication systems threaten to take relatively recent games out of circulation. I can only hope Dark Souls survives the GfWL cull.

Yesterday, Tyler posted his impressions of Watch Dogs after he spent several hours terrorizing Chicago with blackouts and burst steam pipes. Here are more of his thoughts on playing Watch Dogs, this time with words from his mouth and gameplay video provided by Ubisoft. Watch Dogs is out May 27th, walking tank and all.

Ubisoft has finally released a video that delves into a number of Watch Dogs multiplayer modes and it s one video you'll definitely want to watch.
The above video offers a great look at three unique modes, which, gratefully, are nothing like your typical deathmatch or capture the flag modes. All multiplayer takes place in the same world as the single-player campaign, and in the first mode called Online Hacking Contracts we see how they blend together seamlessly. You goal is to invade another player s game, hack him for points you can use for upgrades, and hopefully get away without getting caught.
The second multiplayer mode uses Watch Dogs ctOS Mobile Companion App, which runs on both iOS and Android. In this mode, players can challenge each other to a race, where the player on the PC is trying to get through a series of checkpoints while the player with the the mobile app deployed traps and cops to stop him.
Finally, in the Competitive Decryption Combat mode, two teams race to steal data from a specific location and escape.
It's all pretty cool stuff. Tyler got to play with all of this for a good number of hours, and his hand-on preview has a ton more info. Watch Dogs is out on May 27.

I keep pausing at doors, fumbling with the controller to find the open button. Watch Dogs world is better than that. I remind myself to just walk through the door, and borderline-schlubby hero Aiden Pearce pushes it open and steps into a dingy pawn shop, all shrouded in darkness until his eyes adjust to the dim bulbs. I walk out, then back in, untraining myself to stop and wait for a loading screen.

Watch Dogs near-future Chicago feels incredibly real, indoors and out. It's dense, full of debris, full of life. It feels a lot more like a city than the playgrounds of GTA and Saints Row, and I said the same after I played the high-tech crime drama in Montreal last year (just before it was delayed). After four more hours of play at an event in San Francisco last week (which was PS4 only, I'm afraid), I still think so, though it s exposed more of its flaws now.



The pedestrians have dumb mouths, for instance. Standing in one spot, I heard the same conversation three times in a row, the same voices miraculously coming out of different pairs of pedestrians. I rode a motorcycle by the curb at all of five miles per hour and someone on the sidewalk flipped out and called me crazy. The pedestrians are very stupid, and that s disappointing in a Chicago that s otherwise intricately simulated. But far more damaging to my suspension of disbelief is how many of them I kill.

How I terrorized Chicago
When I'm put into a system, I can't help but want to test the rules, to see how far I can go in any one direction. So, I pull out my gun and unload it into a group of pedestrians. It feels a bit horrific in such a well-realized city, but I can do it, so I do it. The police take me down, and I reappear where I was with my reputation meter reduced to "hoodlum." There's no restraint to the violence outside a meter that represents your public image (oh no, a meter!), so outside of missions and side missions, Watch Dogs is GTA: a big city where you can steal cars, drive recklessly, kill pedestrians, kill police, and suffer no consequences.

I missed this part of the demo, but yep, it's a thing you can do.

Aiden Pearce doesn't seem like someone who'd use the city as a playground for indiscriminate violence, but Watch Dogs tries to have it both ways. On one hand it addresses the perils of vigilantism and the surveillance state with tricky decisions and characters who I think we'll come to like a lot, and on the other it offers a Saints Row-style death and destruction bonus mode with a spider tank. It struggles to be both at once: I felt like I was playing two games, one as Aiden, and one as a crappy Spider-Man villain.

For sure, though, being a crappy Spider-Man villain kicks ass. I love driving muscle cars around Chicago, barreling into lesser vehicles, zapping traffic lights to cause crashes, sticking up gun shops, shooting criminals in their backs before they can even commit a crime, and casually wandering around bursting underground steam pipes. (They erupt through the pavement, launching cars into massive plumes of superheated water, and it's glorious.)

Aiden's form of the justice system.

Life gets even worse for the residents of Chicago when, teleported to a later part of the game, I discover that Aiden's blackout gadget is my favorite thing ever. It does what it says, cutting the power to the city so I can drive around waiting for the awesome moment when all the lights flick back on I do it over and over just because of how cool that looks. I also spend a full minute raising and lowering concrete blockers under a small car, watching the driver freak out as I give him the hydraulics experience, eventually flipping the car over. Being a dick is fun.
Being Aiden Pearce
Aiden Pearce is kind of a dick, too, but the biggest surprise of the demo is how much I like Watch Dogs' protagonist. I like him more than the low-rent villain I spent so much time playing as. Though he mopes and rasps like Batman, he doesn't have the chiseled jaw of your vanilla comic book hero, and really, he's kind of a loser.

A man who hasn't made good life decisions.

Aiden's a not-quite-reformed criminal who lives to protect his sister and nephew while taking bloody revenge on the rival somebodies who killed his niece (she was in his car, someone shot out a tire, it crashed, she died, very tragic). He seems to like his cool, distant, hardened-by-the-world persona, even though it got his niece killed and he's a bit too old to be running around in a leather trench coat, living in a motel and fancying himself a badass. It's kind of sad, but charmingly sad. Aiden is that guy who watches Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels every weekend and wishes it were real life. Kind of dopey, not anyone I'd peg as a hardboiled criminal. I want to pinch his dumb cheeks, except he has a gun and no big qualms with using it.

His hired sidekick, Jordi, is even better. In the few brief scenes I saw with him, he effortlessly became my most anticipated part of the game. Jordi could be the funniest, best-acted character Ubisoft has ever created. There's generally a sense of humor to Watch Dogs that surprised me. Outside of the intro cinematic, in which someone actually says "this guy's hacking days are done," the writing is smart and funny it's a game story I look forward to, which is rare.
Having it all
One concern is just how much Watch Dogs tries to do it's like a restaurant with a 20 page menu, where you know that at least the fish dishes are a gamble. There are cars, guns, hacking, gadgets, crafting, skill trees, story missions, side missions of every variety, minigames, several multiplayer modes, and on, and on. The world is dangerously cluttered with hackable stuff too: I was trying to hack a someone s phone and blew him up because I accidentally hacked the circuit box next to him. Justice is blind, and an arsonist.

It's very Ubisoft game design: an open world where there's a marker every five feet with something to do. I was disappointed to find that the main missions stick to the familiar fail, start over, trial-and-error until you succeed structure, but I generally had a lot of fun being Aiden, even the reckless, "somebody stop him!" version of Aiden I mostly played as.

This exceptionally staged screen is supposed to demonstrate mutiplayer.

In side missions, I identified potential crimes and creeped in to intervene, but kept blowing my cover and spooking the criminals before I could witness a crime. I shot them anyway. Justice! In another side mission, I raced cars to check points against the clock, at one point driving a motorcycle through a glass window to shave off a few seconds. Justice! I guess. And that barely begins to cover all the things to do in Chicago.

I just worry that I'll get tired of being Aiden too quickly. He's loveable, but he's also a loser. After five hours of playing, I was more than ready to not be him anymore, to stop chasing down and beating people, to stop getting into gun fights all the time. It's a little exhausting, and all his bravado really kills my suspension of disbelief. Watch Dogs' Chicago feels like an invention of Aiden's mind, a place where he can live out his action movie revenge fantasies without consequence. Maybe the car accident was his fault all along and he's coping by pretending he's a whip smart vigilante. Oh, poor Aiden, constantly imagining car chases and bloody shootouts while he wanders around looking at his smart phone.



I admit I'm getting a bit curmudgeonly I mean, the highlight of my demo was visiting Aiden's sister (it just seems like something a real person would do, OK?) Even that ended with a car chase, though, so clearly Aiden's dream world doesn't let him be a real person for long. It's good then, that the car chases are fun fast, destructive, and with a satisfying conclusion where I chase the guy down on foot and beat him with a night stick.

As long as the story gives me enough motivation (threaten my sister? I have three sisters, I can relate to that, and now I'm in a world where I have unlimited judicial power, so careful there buddy), Aiden's goofy revenge fantasies might become my own. Or I'll just be rampaging around like a villainous maniac, which is fun in its own way, but a little less fulfilling.

Each week the PC Gamer convenes an emergency committee of transatlantic editors to discuss the best and worst things to happen in the past seven days. The Elder Scrolls Online appears in both

THE HIGHS

Andy Kelly: The new trailer for Shinji Mikami s The Evil Within has me excited about his return to proper survival horror. I saw an early build of the game last year and was particularly impressed by a siege scene reminiscent of Resi 4 s village opening, but with an interesting trap-laying mechanic. It s come on visually since then, and there s some brilliantly dark, and weird, imagery in the trailer, like that shot of the hero walking through an incongruous field of sunflowers. Debussy s Clair De Lune drifting through the scenes of jarring horror only add to the creepiness. Mikami was the driving force behind reviving the Resident Evil series with the mighty Resident Evil 4 (which I consider an almost perfect game), so I have faith in this one.

Chris Thursten: My week has been dominated by reviewing The Elder Scrolls Online, so I m going to pick the most positive experience I ve had in that game. Discovering Cyrodiil was a welcome escape from Glenumbra s drab PvE experience. It s a massive PvP area on par with Guild Wars 2 s Eternal Battlegrounds (or DAoC s Frontier), and in these early days of the game s life it feels very fresh like players are still getting a feel for the landscape, and locking down strategies that ll become standard practice in the future. This is always the best part of an MMO s life, if you ask me: the early days, when friendships and rivalries form. I m already pretty convinced that the Ebonheart Pact and the Aldmerri Dominion are working together. How else would they have pincered us so decisively outside Ash?



Ben Griffin: I conduct a ritual before I play a great game. I shut the curtains. I blink my eyes a lot to get all the blinks out the way. And I delve into the video settings to make sure everything is perfect. In Dark Souls II, I did what I couldn t do in the original. I kicked the resolution to 1800p. I fired up the SSAO. Water quality, models, effects and shadows? All maxed out. I felt like Captain Picard on the bridge of the Enterprise Mr. La Forge, set anisotropic filtering to strong. Controls are ultra-tweakable, too. Every single binding, whether spell switch, backstep or bro-fist multiplayer gesture, can be customised. After the fiasco of Dark Souls PC port, which ran at a maximum of 720p and needed a pad to function properly, From Software listened, and listened good.

Phil Savage: Okay, sure, there are reasons to be concerned about the raising of system requirements. For one thing, it stops those using older, mid-range hardware from playing the latest games, thus reducing the audience size of the platform, and potentially killing the momentum of a growing PC market. For another, it potentially excuses poor optimisation, with developers using this trend towards big numbers without the underlying tech that makes such sacrifice worthwhile. Buuut... that was one hell of a long last-gen console cycle. It's encouraging to see that Watch Dogs and Shadow of Mordor are asking more of our PCs, because as long as they really need that power it suggests they'll be doing things we haven't seen from other AAA multi-platform games. Whether it's better graphics, bigger worlds, or more complicated computations, it's exciting to be on the cusp of new technology.



Tim Clark: So much was strange about the original Hotline Miami, from its darkly surrealist plot, to its brutal treatment of, well, everything, that it was hard to imagine how Dennaton s Jonatan S derstr m and Dennis Wedin might go about improving on their singular vision. Or at least so I thought. That fanciful notion is mown down 26 seconds into the Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number Dial Tone trailer. Specifically, by a pair of SMGs. The animation might be as gloriously crude as ever, the sprites still a clunky riot of colour, but goddamn it just looks so good. There are myriad other lovely touches too: Getting a gun from the trunk of a car. Pulling back the slider on a pistol. A group of goons knocking expectantly on a door, while the pig-masked killer waits on the other side. Dat soundtrack. You can keep your Dark Souls II, this is the only way I want to die.

Wes Fenlon: Frog Fractions 2 ended a successful Kickstarter campaign this week, raising a hair over $72,000. Designer Jim Crawford is as independent as they come he didn't do anything to monetize the original Frog Fractions, even when it got huge viral buzz and I'm glad to see him succeed with such an unusual Kickstarter. Frog Fractions 2 will not, in fact, be released under the name Frog Fractions 2. He'll release it silently onto some platform like Desura, and only those on the hunt for a game-within-a-game like the first Frog Fractions will find it. As more and more Kickstarter campaigns treat backers as glorified pre-orderers, it's nice to have a game do something really different with crowdfunding.





THE LOWS

Chris Thursten: Despite what you might read in comments threads, I certainly didn t start playing The Elder Scrolls Online with a desire to have a bad time. I m reviewing the game, and intend to play a lot of it. I want to enjoy that process. As I ve pointed out above, I have enjoyed playing the game s PvP mode. But that s not what the bulk of the experience is comprised of. There s a monotony to questing, compounded by the slow pace of levelling, that I find very draining and I m somebody who usually likes MMOs. I m starting to suspect that the Elder Scrolls setting simply doesn t reduce very well it needs spectacle, simulation and freedom to have an impact. Stripped of those things, the setting is exposed as something rather drab and lifeless. I d never had said that about Morrowind but here I am, and it s the best explanation I have for why I ve found it so difficult to enjoy the game.

Andy Kelly: I love The Elder Scrolls. I love MMOs. So why don t I love The Elder Scrolls Online? I ve tried to get into it. I really have. You should have seen me, wincing at the screen, trying my damndest to squeeze some enjoyment out of it. But it s so grey and lifeless and boring. How did they manage to make Tamriel boring? The limited draw distance makes it feel weirdly claustrophobic, which is a word rarely attributed to the Elder Scrolls games. You don t get that moment of gazing across a huge vista brimming with possibility. I ve rolled a few characters, and tried all three factions, but it just isn t grabbing me. The writing is incredibly dull, and I don t care about anyone. I m going to keep at it, though. I read in Chris review-in-progress that the PVP in Cyrodiil is the best thing he s played in it so far, so I need to try that before I give up.



Phil Savage: Er, right, lows. Um. Looking back over the week, nothing stands out as having got my goat. Not even Goat Simulator, which is getting a free update a positive move for a game so short on stuff. Maybe I'm becoming a more positive person, no longer annoyed by the industry's machinations. Maybe the industry itself has changed: doing away with cynicism and negativity, in place of an attitude that promotes fun, challenge and an advancement of the art. Or maybe it's because I've spent the last week house-hunting, a quest so tediously thankless, stressful and repetitive, that everything else seemed quite good in comparison.

Ben Griffin: I blame myself. So eager was I to tear into Dark Souls II s long-awaited PC port I forgot one thing: no one else is playing it. There are no humbly bowing invaders to scrap with, no buddies to invite for jolly co-operation. There aren t even any uplifting orange tips on the floor. I miss those the most, even if many a Dark Souls player got the better of me by writing try dropping down before a bottomless pit. Dark Souls worked because, despite an insidious atmosphere, wretched difficulty and extended periods of isolation, you were never really alone. There was always a guiding light in the darkness, however dim. But for all Dark Souls II s brilliance brilliance which I m not technically allowed to write about because the game isn t out yet it all feels a bit lonely at the moment.



Tim Clark: I m a huge fan of EMA, and had quite the obsession with Past Life Martyred Saints. However, I m not sure about the wisdom of wearing an Oculus Rift dev kit with a Photoshopped exterior on the cover of her new record, The Future s Void. Yes, the LP is thematically concerned with the dehumanising effects of technology and especially online culture, but, erm Isn t that picture going to date quite badly, in a look kids, I just bought a Betamax sort of way? It doesn t help, either, that one lyric uses the word interwebs . I mean, honestly, who still says that? Oh well, at least she s rocking the Rift better than any of these bros.

Wes Fenlon: This may make me sound hypocritical since I just reviewed Smite and loved it, but my reaction to EA's Dawngate is "do we really need another MOBA?" Smite has won me over with its third-person camera, and it's been improving throughout a two year-long beta. Dawngate's just now going into open beta, and at this point the competition for top-down MOBAs is just silly. Maybe Blizzard's Heroes of the Storm has a shot at League of Legends or Dota 2, but it's hard for me to see Dawngate, Infinite Crisis, Guardians of Middle-earth, or Sins of a Dark Age doing anything but muddying the waters. My cynical side says they all went into development as League of Legends became absurdly popular, and now they're all coming out at the same time, and there's not much reason to play them.