I published my massive 3,600 word review of Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs late last night, but I thought it would be wise to write a separate, shorter post to ease new players into the game with tips and hints I learned in my 20+ hours of gameplay over the weekend. There are a few things I wish I knew from the start, and perhaps one or two of these will help you better acclimate to the game.
Here are ten points that will hopefully improve your experience with the game from the get-go. There are zero spoilers ahead.
1. Manage Your Expectations
Don’t go in expecting Watch Dogs to be world-changing. It’s a good game, but it isn’t revolutionary. Understand that it may feel closer to Grand Theft Auto than you’re comfortable with, but you can try to separate the two if you focus on stealth whenever possible. My personal view is that the game is much more fun (and much less like GTA) if you at leastattempt to be silent and sneaky when taking on different missions in the game. The machine gun is usually the easy answer to your problems, but it’s the dullest way to play.2. Upgrade Your Hacking Tree Early
There are a number of skill trees you can invest in, but far and away, Hacking is the must-have above Driving, Crafting and Combat. Specifically, invest early on in perks that allow you to control traffic-based hackable items, with bridges and steam pipes being the most useful. Know early on that you will NOT be able to out-ram or out-run the pursuing gangs or police, nor can you kill them with drive-bys, as the mechanic doesn’t exist in the game. Rather, these sections are usually only beatable through using the city to dispatch your foes, and they can be extremely hard early on if you have to rely solely on flipping traffic lights alone.
3. When Fleeing, Head to Water
This always felt like kind of a cheap trick whenever I used it, but I ran into several missions where the heat from gangs or cops was so intense that I literally couldn’t get away using traffic hacking tricks alone. More than once, I simply drove to the water, got in a boat and sped away for the escape. Sometimes, if there wasn’t a boat, I would just swim halfway across a massive river until I was just too far away from shore to be found. Unlike GTA, enemies don’t have boats, so this works when all else fails. Later in the game, you can combine this method with the “Disable Helicopter” perk to get away at nearly any wanted level.
4. Invest in the Money Hacking Perks as Early as You Can
After car hacking tricks, be sure to upgrade the ability to swipe more money from pedestrians, and also especially the perk that will automatically highlight big “whale” targets for you. This will get you very rich, very fast, as whales can bring you anywhere from $8,000 to $15,000 a hack. The earlier you do this, the more money you will have throughout the game.
5. Buy Guns, Not Cars
When you finally start having a little cash in your pocket, I would advise maybe buying one good bike, and one good car, and holding off on any others. While car delivery is cool in the open world, it doesn’t work at all in missions, which is where it would be the most useful. But in contrast, the best investment you can make with your money is to simply save until you can buy the best five star gun in your favorite class. As you will never, ever run out of ammo, it’s good to invest in one or two guns you will use a lot. I could beat any mission with just my silenced pistol and 5-star assault rifle, making me wonder why the game needed 30 different guns at all. Buying mid-tier guns just isn’t worth it as you will likely find most of those in the wild. And when you kill your first “heavy,” be sure to take his shotgun or LMG. The LMG specifically is in my eyes, the best weapon in the game with its 75-round magazine.
6. Audio Logs Will Enhance the Story
While most collectibles and side-missions have nothing to do with the main plot, audio logs flesh out the relatively sparse central story. You get to learn a lot more about all the characters (except yourself, ironically), and audio logs are what made Quinn and Iraq my favorite characters in the game. You should also find the map-highlighted audio logs of the assassin you capture in the opening in the game, who is held prisoner by Jordi for most of the story. Knowing his side of the story is important for the very end of the game.7. Don’t Forget About Secondary Items
While Watch Dogs Uses a weapon wheel like so many other games in the genre these days, it hides a lot of its secondary weapons within it. It’s a bit weird to me that IEDs, grenades, electronic distractions, blackouts, scans and pretty much every secondary thing you can craft is all assigned to the same slot, and often you’ll forget you even have these items. Explosives are often key to beating tough areas (including one boss fight which would literally be impossible without them), and hacking tools are a lot of fun when you actually remember to use them.
8. Utilize Bullet Time
It’s similarly easy to forget about the game’s slow-motion Focus mechanic. It seems rather out of place in Watch Dogs, but like, every single game must have one these days it seems, so here we are. This is key for lining up headshots (particularly with the silenced pistol) and timing takedowns while driving. I’m not sure the game needed this mechanic at all, but if you want to make things easier for yourself, use it.
9. Stay Incognito
Though the game is surprisingly focused around gunplay, more so than I anticipated, do not run around with a weapon drawn. The game is at least a level of realistic where it will freak out anyone and everyone around you. This is particularly bad to do in a store, as it will send everyone fleeing and you’ll no longer be able to buy anything. You can, however, then raid the cash register for money, but that will net you “evil karma.” I’m still working on figuring on what exactly the karma system does, but from what I can tell, higher karma means pedestrians will be less likely to call the cops on you for committing crimes, which seems a bit ironic.
10. AVOID THE POLICE
I really can’t stress this enough, as in Watch Dogs, the police are absolute psychopaths. I’ve had a simple carjacking turn into a twenty minute long chase sequence because when you use takedowns to get away from the cops, it onlyincreases your wanted level since you’re wrecking their cars. While fighting cops and SWAT teams and tanks may be fun in rampage-happy GTA, it’s far less enjoyable here. Chases will almost always just end with a bunch of armored troopers removing your head with auto-shotguns, or a helicopter sniping at your car until it’s completely disabled. Usually the only way to get away is to use my water method or simply die. In short, unless a mission is specifically throwing cops at you, never, ever provoke them if you don’t have to.