Watch Dogs is now out; here’s our Watch Dogs review.
Ubisoft’s dark, gorgeous, open-world crime thriller Watch Dogs didn’t just steal the show at Ubisoft’s E3 conference, it kicked the show in the guts and made off with its wallet. The trailer below portrays a very-near-future Chicago in which smartphones, CCTV and all nearby electronics are linked, hackable and controllable. It’s as slick as an oil-spill pelican on a skateboard. Screens and video follow.
Open-ended mission structure, advanced iTelePhones, seemingly intelligent pedestrian AI that responds to your actions (in this carefully controlled demo, at least)- Watch Dogs iscasting itself as Deus Ex meets Grand Theft Auto.In one instance, the player is jamming localsignals to distract and evadean iPad-wieldingbouncer before scanning a room of party-goers, pulling their personal data from the cloud, snippets ofwhich flash briefly across the bottom of the screen. The action rapidly escalates following some tinkering with traffic lights, as a busy intersection becomes a mess of mangled car frames, screaming pedestrians attempting to help one another out of their cars, and slow-mo, bullet-time firefights. The trailer ends with a car chase in which the player can still use their magic phone to operate nearby lights and, more interestingly, raise and lowerbridges.
A bit of E3 catharsis then, after a day of hand-waving, obvious sequel revealing and Usher. Watch Dogs is confirmed for release on PC, 360 and PS3. And for our money, that trailer was definitely running on a PC.
(To save you the trouble:that waiter with the QR code for a face? It links to this Watch Dogs teaser site.)
