STAR WARS: OUTLAWS announced

Ubisoft has formally announced a new Star Wars video game. Star Wars: Outlaws is the franchise's first open-world action game. It is set between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, and a cinematic shows Han Solo, frozen in carbonite, being delivered to Jabba the Hutt.

In the game, the player takes on the role of scoundrel and pirate Kay Vess. Vess gets in over her head with several crime syndicates - including possibly Jabba's - and has to live on the edge to regain her freedom.

Developed by Massive Entertainment for Ubisoft and Lucasfilm Games, the game is scheduled for release in 2024.

Far Cry 6

The island of Yara in the Caribbean has been an isolated nation for decades. But the discovery of a new miracle cancer treatment on the island has brought it immense wealth, most of it funnelled into the coffers of President Antón Castillo and his elite servants. This fuels the start of a brutal civil war, with multiple factions fighting for supremacy. Dani Rojas, a talented fighter, is convinced to fight for the main opposition, Libertad, but also has to unite three other factions under one banner to stand a chance of bringing down Castillo.

Far Cry 6 - actually the ninth game in the series because who's counting? - is perhaps the most quintessential game in the Far Cry franchise to date. Once again, an unjust-but-charismatic villain needs to be taken down and once again a rebel movement that can't find it's arse with both hands is totally hapless until a single figure shows up and does 95% of the gruntwork in the war for it, single-handedly. Along the way there are some fairly superficial musings on the futility of violence (just before you get to commit lots of it) and bloodshed, and the corrupting influence of power on the soul etc etc. If you've played any Far Cry game before - particularly the last three numbered games and their spinoffs - you'll not so much know what to expect, but be able to play this in your sleep before you even install it.

The appeal of the series has always been presenting an open world environment and presenting you with objectives that you can achieve through several means: front assault, stealth, using vehicles, employing allies or some mixture thereof. That element of the series is present and correct in Far Cry 6, with a nice back-to-basics feel to the action. The previous full game in the series - 2018's questionably-designed Far Cry 5 - interrupted its freeform action with an obnoxious narrative that constantly snatched control away from the player for ludicrous cutscenes featuring the most banal cast of villains ever to grace a video game. Far Cry 6 thankfully jettisons this approach. You have your charismatic villain, this time around played by Breaking Bad and The Mandalorian star Giancarlo Esposito, but he shows up relatively rarely, and the game thankfully gets out of its own way to let you undertake missions how you see fit.

The return to a tropical island map also adds to the game's retro feel, recalling the setting of both the original 2004 Far Cry and 2012's breakout game for the series, Far Cry 3. Whilst the first game had you fighting mercenaries and genetically-engineered monsters (don't ask) in an archipelago, the third had you fighting pirates and petty criminals. This one has you fighting a full-blown insurgency against a fascist, corrupt government, which definitely ups the ante.

The map is divided into three regions, each one inhabited by a different rebel faction. As Dani, you have to convince each faction to work with Libertad and, as usual for this sort of game, you have to win their loyalty by, er, fighting every battle of the war for them. Dani is a walking avatar of death at the start of the game and this only intensifies through the story, as they (you can choose their gender) are proficient with every weapon you can think of and also get a ludicrous backpack-mounted superweapon that can do everything from poisoning entire platoons of enemy soldiers to shooting down helicopters to disabling tanks with a massive EMP pulse. You can also take one of a series of slightly ridiculous animal companions into battle with you, who can cause havoc, spot resources for you and sniff out enemies from around corners.

The old levelling system has been jettisoned, with you now customising Dani through the use of cosmetic items, types of armour and weapon mods, which can impact everything from how much ammo you can carry to how you recharge your back-mounted personal WMD. This customisation system is both decent and a little unnecessary: you can play the whole game through with your starting weapons without too much difficulty. In this sense, Far Cry 6 represents a step back from the increasing RPG-like direction of the last few Far Cry  games (and Ubisoft open-world games in general) and something of a return to the hardcore FPS focus of the earlier titles, which I found quite welcome. However, you are definitely a tougher character from the off then I think was the case in any of the previous games, meaning on standard difficulty the game can be a little too easy. I found switching up the difficulty or making self-imposed restrictions, like trying to stealth my way through every mission, a reasonable way of keeping things fresh.

As usual, you progress the game by taking over bases, eliminating checkpoints and performing a large battery of side-missions, many of them adding detail or colour to the large supporting cast of characters, or allowing you to recruit more crazy animal companions. It's all pretty traditional by now and those seeking fresh ideas may be disappointed by the lack of them here; then again, playing the ninth game in the series expecting it to maybe pull off some shocking kind of slide into originality may be a doomed endeavour from the start.

What Far Cry 6 does very well indeed is serving up chunky first-person, single-player (with some co-op modes) action, with a nice side-line in stealth. The graphics are solid if unspectacular, the Cuban-influenced soundtrack is excellent, and the action is frantic and mostly satisfying, even if enemy AI even on the hardest difficulty level is limited, at best. The map is large but not too large, and the game tries to play fair but also logically, with you able to use a variety of vehicles but having some reasonable limitations on doing so (i.e. you can't fly helicopters or airplanes around willy-nilly without degrading the enemy anti-aircraft network first, and driving a tank soon attracts tons of attention from enemy airpower, tanks and AT units). After Far Cry 5 falling flat on its face in a lot of what it was trying to do, Far Cry 6 refreshingly makes sense and doesn't cheap out on the player.

What the game does poorly is narrative. It's been the case that every game in the series since Far Cry 2 has to have lengthy moralising cutscenes on the self-destructive nature of violence, which I'd have more truck with if the games didn't then unleash absolute tons of violence in every single mission. It's a first-person shooter, so that's kind of its thing. It feels like the series wants to tell a more nuanced kind of story about revolutions, how hard it is to create and maintain a democracy and so on, but it can't overcome the limitations of the FPS genre, at least not within the very tight development timelines these games have. A Far Cry game that goes full RPG and offers non-violent solutions to situations might be interesting, but then I'm not sure if it would be a Far Cry game any more.

In that sense Far Cry 6's biggest problem is the competition: more than any other game in the series, it feels like a Wish version of the epic, massive Just Cause 3, which has a larger playing space, a less in-your-face narrative and much more fully embraces manic fun whilst also making you feel more like you're fighting in an actual war with shifting fronts. Just Cause 3 also wipes the floor with Far Cry 6's vehicles, mainly because of FC6's refusal to allow you to use a third-person camera mode when using helicopters or tanks, which makes them borderline unusable in a lot of situations. The influence is even more obvious in that Far Cry 6 borrows both the wingsuit and grapple from Just Cause 3 but fails to implement either in a way that's interesting or fun.

Still, the core gameplay loop of the Far Cry series is still enjoyable in Far Cry 6 (***½). Scouting out an enemy base, marking troop positions (with a smartphone this time, which at least makes more sense than the previous magic binoculars) and then devising an attack strategy is still as much fun now as it was way back in 2004. The on-foot FSP action is excellent and, at a reasonable 35 hours for the single-player story (a lot more if you want to explore every corner of the map, find every collectible and do every side-quest, obviously), it doesn't outstay its welcome as some recent open-world games have. Those looking for something new and fresh should look elsewhere, but Far Cry 6 is as solid an entry as the series has had for some time.

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Watch_Dogs: Legion

International hacker collectivist DedSec has been blamed for a series of terrorist bombings that have ripped through London, killing hundreds. The British government has called on private security company Albion to replace the Metropolitan Police and stop further attacks, but the capital is now a morass of security checkpoints, heavily-armed guards with no accountability and constant drone surveillance. DedSec is regrouping with a new mission: to clear its name and expose those responsible for the bombings. But it needs new recruits...

Watch_Dogs: Legion is the third game in the Watch Underscore Dogs series from Ubisoft. The series has, to date, made an entertaining fist of its premise, which is basically being a Tesco own-brand version of Grand Theft Auto with worse driving, combat and storytelling, but the entertaining ability to hack the world around you. This gives the player some control over the environment, allowing you to remotely open gates, take over turrets, seize control of drones and wrestle control over passing cars and send them flying into a river, if you want.

Legion is the third game in the series and introduces a potentially very interesting and powerful idea: the game does not have a set cast of major characters as such. Instead, it allows DedSec to recruit literally any passing character off the street. Using the traditional Watch_Dogs device of scanning each passer-by's mobile phone, you can quickly discover their political leanings, sports team affiliations and medical or criminal history, working out if they'd be a good recruit for DedSec or not. Sometimes the recruitment systems is as easy as asking, "Wanna join DedSec, bruv?" and sometimes it triggers a mission where you have to do them a favour, like rescuing a family member who's being intimidated by thugs or deleting evidence about their criminal behaviour from a server. The only constants are Sabine, the sole survivor of the original London DedSec cell from before the bombings, and Bagley, a powerful AI that has been subverted to DedSec's cause and serves as your omnipresent "man in a van" assistant.

This initially sounds amazing, and for the first hour or so of the game it was as I had to undertake a series of missions with an elderly pensioner, which lent things a rather different vibe to the usual well-trained, young protagonists who feature in video games. After a while I'd built up a small team of what felt like everyday people, but I found myself defaulting to Myrtle, a late-twenties Irish construction worker who could legitimately enter many of the city's no-go security areas thanks to her job ID, and was impressive in hand-to-hand combat thanks to an unfeasibly massive wrench that was her signature weapon. Most impressively, she could at any time summon a cargo drone which she could use to get around the city and reach the tops of buildings, which a non-drone-equipped operative might have to go through a laborious infiltration mission to achieve. Myrtle became my default protagonist as I set about liberating London's boroughs early on, a surprisingly easy task which you can knock out in a couple of hours and unlocks a whole set of new, more powerful recruits. I did find myself swapping in Rosalind, a spy with a silenced armour-piercing pistol and a mildly ridiculous car with a built-in missile launcher and cloaking device, for missions that required heavy combat. When she got arrested on a mission, I instead deployed Ayodele, a formidable ex-hitman with a varied weapons arsenal. However, even Myrtle remained a viable character through to the endgame.

This signature feature of the game therefore ended up being both impressive but then undercooked: you'll probably find yourself defaulting to a small pool of 3-4 hyper-capable characters and ignoring everyone else. The game does offer up an ironman mode, so if a character dies, they die for good (and Legion's save game system is pretty much limited to saving on shutdown, so there's no easy way to do over missions if things go south), but it's easy to replace even hardcore combat agents with 1:1 replacements even if they fall on a mission. The game is also rather straightforward even on the hardest difficulty, so that's not a major obstacle.

Combat and stealth are functional rather than attractive. As usual for the series, setting traps and luring bad guys into them is a great way of thinning out the ranks from afar before you engage personally; many missions actually allow you to complete them by just using your spiderbot, a remote access drone which can merrily scurry through tiny vents to reach areas humans can't reach. The spiderbot is ridiculously capable, and after you've upgraded it, it can switch on a short-burn cloaking device and knock out enemies with an electrical discharge. I'd estimate I completed around 50% of the missions in the game using the spiderbot alone whilst the operator sat well outside of the mission area, almost impervious to detection. The game does try to make things a bit more challenging than Watch_Dogs 2 by only giving you a spiderbot and not an aerial drone as well, but there's so many passing aerial drones you can take over at any second, this really ends up not being a limitation at all.

However, the lengthy time spent carefully infiltrating enemy locations or hacking your way steadily to victory with a low body count feels a bit redundant when you can often shoot your way to victory in a fifth of the time. The first two games in the series encouraged you not to murder every security guard and police offer in sight, pointing out these were often ordinary people doing their day job. However, in Legion almost all areas are defended by either Albion security guards - whom you see punching pensioners on the street and arresting innocent people for no reason on a regular basis - or by the enforcers of Clan Kelly, a criminal gang engaged in people trafficking, slavery, gun-running and drug-dealing. This removes a lot of the moral nuance of the earlier games and gives you the green light to wade into areas with all guns blazing, especially as your characters in this game are hardier than Marcus in Watch_Dogs 2.

Legion's portrayal of London is excellent. The city itself is well-depicted, with major landmarks all present and correct but also many individual buildings, pubs and even flower stands. There is some compression - where there are five parallel residential streets in a row in reality, there might be one here, and Liverpool Street Station is bizarrely missing when the surrounding tube stations are correctly present - but overall Legion effortlessly becomes the single finest realisation of London in a video game to date.

More of a mixed bag is voice acting and writing. Not having a central protagonist or even a cast of protagonists is a major handicap. Procedurally-generated missions where you have to save one of your recruits who's been kidnapped have your character awkwardly saying, "We have to save our friend!" rather than their name, which sounds okay once but not five or six times through a mission. It's hard to see how this could be overcome, with apparently tens of thousands of name combinations and around twenty different voice actors with several versions of the script for each mission and cut scene, but it does add an artificial air to proceedings. The acting is mostly fine from the actual named, recurring characters, but many of the protagonists feel off, with extremely generic lines delivered in ways that don't always make sense. It turns out having an effectively infinite pool of characters with potentially infinite personalities makes voicing and writing for them in a reasonable timeframe impossible.

The game is pretty solid, but it does feel a little wanting in content compared to Watch_Dogs 2. That game gave you an absolutely massive list of optional activities to take part in, including car, kart and drone racing, and Uber-driving. None of these are present in Legion. Watch_Dogs 2 also had a more interactable environment, allowing you to blow up gas mains under the street to deter pursuit, change traffic lights to create chaos and frame people, even police and security, so they get carted off by the law and thin out enemy ranks before you engage them. None of this is present in Legion, either. Watch_Dogs 2 also had a fairly well-developed mobile phone you could interact with, playing with apps and watching news channels. Mobiles are still in Legion but are extremely limited in their use.

Watch_Dogs: Legion (***½) is a mixed bag, but ultimately enjoyable and worth playing, especially for its excellent depiction of London. The significantly reduced amount of content compared to its immediate forebear is disappointing, and the "play anyone" idea is an absolutely brilliant one which falters somewhat in the execution, but this kind of experimentation in the AAA space is rare and should be applauded, even if ultimately it doesn't entirely deliver on its promise. The game is available now.

Far Cry: New Dawn

Seventeen years ago, the world was devastated in an unexpected nuclear war. People are attempting to rebuild, but they are at the mercy of raiders and pirates. One remote community in Hope County, Montana are under siege by a group of thugs known as the Highwaymen. To survive, they call for support from a group determined to rebuild civilisation. Forming an alliance, they reluctantly conclude to stop the Highwaymen they need the help of a third faction...the surviving members of the cult known as Eden's Gate. An alliance of convenience needs to be formed to drive out the lawlessness, and put right what went wrong a long time ago.

Far Cry: New Dawn is the latest game in the Far Cry series (at least until the release of Far Cry 6 later this year) and is the third stand-alone expansion in the series. Ubisoft are determined to get the maximum worth of their development money from this series, so for the last three titles in the franchise they've re-used the previous game's map and set about creating new story from the same source material. Blood Dragon drew on Far Cry 3's map and design, though in a different genre, whilst Primal re-used Far Cry 4's map in a visit to the Stone Age of tens of thousands of years earlier. New Dawn similarly repurposes the map and many of the assets, flora and fauna of 2018's Far Cry 5, but this time in a direct sequel, if not a continuation, of the former game.

Far Cry 5 had a rough reception, with fans and critics praising its graphics, stealth and combat but criticising its bitty, poorly-characterised story, incomprehensible pacing decisions designed to make playing the game as obnoxious as possible and its utterly surreal, non-sequitur ending. Having played New Dawn at least some of the problems are now much clearer: Far Cry 5 is a narratively incomplete game that punts its proper finale off to this sequel, which oddly was not mentioned anywhere in the marketing on release and one feels it perhaps should have been.

New Dawn at least acknowledges some of the criticisms of its forebear. You'll be happy to know that at exactly no point in this game are you inexplicably kidnapped from a helicopter a thousand feet in the air, surrounded by allies, by the bad guys who then inexplicably let you live to murder all of them later on. If you don't want to follow the main story and just want to dick around in the open world shooting rabbits, you are free to do that with no penalty. The game, belatedly, understands that an open-world game means giving the player the choice to do what they want to do, when they want to, and backs off from ramming its narrative down your throat.

That said, the story is somewhat more coherent and interesting this time around, though not exactly original. You are called in to help build the town of Prosperity up and defend it from attack. You can upgrade its walls and services, such as a helipad, herb-growing garden and medical facilities. These not only make the town more defensible, but also impact on yourself: in a nice touch, upgrading Prosperity upgrades your own stats, so updating the medical facility means you enlarge your own health bar. At various points you can take on a main story objective to push the story forwards, although be warned that the storyline is quite short and pushing forwards with it too decisively will make the experience end relatively quickly.

The moment-to-moment gameplay is very similar to Far Cry 5. You'll be attacking outposts and capturing them for the resistance, seizing their supplies to improve your own war machine. In a nice touch, you can now abandon outposts and let them be re-taken by the enemy, so you can attack them again and get even more supplies (including the very rare ethanol, which is needed to upgrade Prosperity's facilities). Every time you do this, the outpost is refortified even more heavily than before, creating an escalating sense of challenge. There are also plenty of much smaller sites of interest you can investigate and ransack for supplies, often with some stories to discover along the way via notes and audio logs.

Although the game uses the Far Cry 5 map, it's a now a post-apocalyptic setting (with some surface similarities to the Fallout series). Some parts of the map are no longer accessible, having taken direct hits from nukes at the end of the first game and now covered in radiation, whilst the wildlife has been mildly mutated. Some areas are now flooded. The most striking change are flowers, which are now coloured purple and give the landscape a dramatically different look and feel, even though the topography is identical. Newer buildings have been erected in areas where in Far Cry 5 there was only grassland or forest, whilst older buildings from the previous game are now overgrown or partially collapsed. The new feel to the game is quite well-done, and exploration feels more rewarding.

Stealth and combat is still the cornerstone of the Far Cry experience and both are reasonably well-handled, with satisfying gunplay and the relative scarcity of supplies making some old tactics a bit harder to implement; there is no silenced sniper rifle in the first weapons tier, meaning it'll be a while before you get your hands on one, which encourages a change in tactics. NPC allies are also less overpowered than they were in Far Cry 5, meaning no more calling in tactical air strikes to wipe out an outpost before you wander in and take it over. However, I did encounter more problems with hitboxes in New Dawn than any prior game in the series; several times sniper bullets went straight through enemies without harming them, which is a very strange problem, one not present in earlier games in the series (including the near-identical Far Cry 5).

To pump out its otherwise short playing time, the game has the usual roster of activities (including hunting and combat challenges, a small number of treasure hunts, stealing enemy fuel tankers, freeing prisoners etc) enhanced by a new idea: Expeditions. These are short, focused missions taking place in completely new locations off the main map. These include objectives like assaulting a beached aircraft carrier captured by the enemy; salvaging the crashed International Space Station; and ejecting enemies from a flooded amusement park in Louisiana (which I was not aware was in comfortable helicopter range of Montana, but okay). These are fun missions, but surprisingly easy and with very few enemies to fight off. In fact, it's completely doable to just rush to the objective, then to the evac zone without even engaging the enemy (perhaps only to fend them off whilst waiting for the chopper to arrive). I discovered later on that this is because the missions are supposed to be repeated like the outposts, with each mission getting a lot harder each time. This way they get 21 Expeditions out of just 7 locations (the same as getting 30 outpost missions out of just 10 outpost locations). I kind of respect the idea - getting the most out of limited and expensive assets is sensible - but in practice it means that you're not seeing these locations at their best the first time you visit them, which doesn't give much reason to return. You can also satisfyingly finish the game by visiting each Expedition location only once and doing the Outpost cycle maybe twice at best.

Eventually, once you've upgraded Prosperity, retaken the outposts a couple of times and completed all the Expeditions, you can press on with the story. As with most Far Cry games, the writers have tried to create iconic villains, this time around a duo of dastardly sisters, Lou and Mickey. They're better adversaries than Far Cry 5's godawful Seed family but still not that particularly interesting. Even worse, the game brings back the aforementioned godawful Seed family in its closing chapters, which I could have done without. Still, at least New Dawn rounds off this most tedious of storylines for good.

New Dawn is not a long game - seeing everything of interest in the game will take you south of 25 hours - but it does pack a more condensed and focused version of the Far Cry experience into an accessible package. It's not as obnoxious as Far Cry 5, and its combat and core gameplay loop is fairly enjoyable. However, it is straining at the limitations of obvious budgetary and time limitations, forcing you to repeat mission tasks and locations rather than just giving you more mission and locations of interest. I'm also not a huge fan of the developers using New Dawn to fix problems from Far Cry 5 instead of fixing the mothership game itself, although I suppose this is better than the problems going resolutely unignored.

Far Cry: New Dawn (***½) is a solid, medium-sized entry to the series and provides a good few hours of enjoyable action gameplay. However, the format that the series has employed through no less than six games since Far Cry 3 is starting to creak from overfamiliarity, and it'll be interesting to see if the forthcoming Far Cry 6 can freshen things up at all. The game is available now on PC, X-Box One and PlayStation 4.

Watch_Dogs 2

More than two years have passed since Aidan Pearce and the hacker group DedSec exposed the flaws in the ctOS computer network that had been given oversight over Chicago, creating the world's first "smart city." Unfortunately, the supercorporation that owns ctOS, Blume, was able to spin the defeat as a test run and has since gone global, with more cities joining the network. The San Francisco branch of DedSec uncovers unusual activity in Blume's local office and recruits a new member to help them expose the company's latest malfeasance.

The original Watch_Dogs (2014) was an interesting but heavily flawed game, taking the Grand Theft Auto model - an open world city which you can run around in, completing missions and side-activities to your heart's content - and adding elements to it derived from the Deus Ex series of cyberpunk video games, such hacking, stealth and multiple solutions to any given problem. It had a few distinguishing features of its own - such as using a real city rather than a fictional one and the idea of manipulating the open world itself to help you - but ended up feeling a bit over-familiar and under-ambitious, weighed down by a cliched, grim main story and unsympathetic characters.

Watch_Dogs 2 is very similar to the first game, but it feels like Ubisoft have carefully made note of the criticisms of the first game and carefully thought them through in developing this sequel. The game is Watch_Dogs with most of the rough edges smoothed off, new and interesting ideas added and an altogether lighter air adopted that makes the moment-to-moment gameplay far more enjoyable than the preceding game. The game is still flawed but it is a much slicker, more compelling package this time around.

The first good thing is that the game just drops you straight into the action. No introductory cutscenes laboriously establishing your character and his motivations, instead you find yourself standing outside a data centre belonging to Blume as unseen allies talk you through the process of infiltrating. You quickly discover that your name is Marcus and you're a hacker trying to join DedSec. Within a few minutes you're trying out your abilities, learning how to deal with guards and completing your first mission before being thrust out into the world, ready to proceed with the story or just cruise around doing side-activities. The game refreshingly puts few barriers between you and actually playing it, which feels joyously rare for a AAA open-world game these days.

The game also improves on the original by giving Marcus a discernible personality. He's a hacker and a geek but also a chilled out dude. Aidan Pearce's moany whinings are nowhere to be seen and it's fun to roam around the virtual San Francisco with Marcus. He also has a fellow bunch of DedSec members helping him out and they're also enjoyable to work with (DedSec is more front-and-centre in the game, unlike the previous one where Aidan was more an ally of theirs rather than working for them directly): confident street-artist Sitara, deranged punk Wrench, tech worker Horatio and the gifted, on-the-spectrum Josh. They're a great bunch of characters with discernible personalities and some reasonably solid writing backing them up which manages to overcome the "hacktivist" clichés. A couple of Watch_Dogs characters do transition over later on to provide a bit more connective tissue to the first game, but foreknowledge of the original game is not required.

The game's real star is San Francisco and the (somewhat condensed) version of the city in the game is a triumph. Roaring around the Bay Area by car, bike or boat is a genuine pleasure, much moreso than the somewhat morose Chicago of the original game, and Ubisoft have been unexpectedly generous in how much stuff there is to do in the game. You can race eKarts, bikes and drones; you can act as a non-copyright-infringing Uber driver, with some of your random passengers unexpectedly sparking off side-quests of their own; you can meet up with supporters of DedSec with intel on what's going on, which can also transform into elaborate sequences of missions; you can also go hunting for an enormous number of collectables, ranging from the trivial (new car paintjobs and outfits) to the extremely useful (cash drops, new abilities and upgrade points). You could happily spend a couple of dozen hours just doing this stuff rather than following the main story.

The main story, though, is surprisingly fun. Blume has joined forces with a bunch of Valley tech companies (and not quite as on-the-nose 1:1 versions of Facebook and Twitter as you might expect) to use the information from ctOS as a way of making money from the government, military and law-enforcement agencies by essentially breaching international law and the US Constitution. The primary antagonist is Dusan Nemec, a Blume executive with a truly offensive man-bun hairstyle. Dusan is initially a tough opponent, constantly one step ahead of DedSec, but as the hackers expose and halt his plans and build up a picture of his allies and resources, it becomes a more evenly-matched battle. Watch_Dogs 2 improves over its predecessor by established the stakes and the abilities of everyone involved and (mostly) plays fair in how it advances the story. Refreshingly, at no point are you taken prisoner, inexplicably allowed to live and have to escape, which is a Ubisoft cliché by this point.

Missions usually involve Marcus being sent to a location, which he has to hack into or gain information. Some missions do require Marcus to be physically present, but a surprising number are wide open and you can approach them by several means: direct combat which is usually the hardest option (Marcus is nowhere near as tough as Aidan was in the first game and can die from a couple of bullets), stealth or remote hacking using radio-controlled vehicles. Marcus gets an RC car early on which can pick things up and hack things through a hardline, as well as later one a quadcopter drone which can only hack things remotely but can fly and reach high places much more easily. Missions get tougher as the game proceeds, but Marcus also unlocks powerful new abilities. Particularly enjoyable is the ability to frame enemies for crimes on the spot or put out a contract on them, effectively calling in police (for the former) or gang members (for the latter) to attack your opponents on your behalf. An impregnable fortress becomes rather more pregnable if you send in police and SWAT forces first to apprehend half the security force on trumped-up murder charges (or, more disturbingly, real crimes that you expose).

This kind of ability raises some ethical questions about DedSec's power: you can also get the police to arrest any random passer-by on trumped-up charges, for example. You assume that they'll be released once the police realise they've been hacked but it raises some questions about the group's honesty that the story itself also touches on, but never really answers. Your group's fury at discovering the extent of Blume's violation of privacy feels a bit rich when you've just had the living statue in the park arrested purely for being annoying.

The darker side of this is something the game doesn't even attempt to address in the story. Nothing is stopping you, as Marcus, from strapping up with some heavy machine guns and wading into each mission and massacring everyone in sight: security guards, police, even civilian workers and passers-by. You can remote-detonate gas mains in roads, blowing up cars and killing innocent people. You can drop explosives from your drone into crowded shopping areas, arrange drive-by shootings of random office workers and trigger a full-scale gang war which can escalate into total mayhem with dozens killed in the crossfire. But the story will never, ever acknowledge that you've done these things. DedSec remain the plucky underdog searching for the truth and protecting the public and Marcus is the chipper fighter for freedom, no matter how many people he's killed that day. This disconnect between potential gameplay and story (especially given Blume's desperation to discredit DedSec) is fairly nonsensical and the only way I could resolve it was by adopting a non-lethal playthrough using a stun gun (and, later, stun shotgun) and using takedowns to knock enemies out rather than kill them. Unfortunately, the game doesn't really acknowledge this approach either. Even worse, the game seems to reach to stun shots the same way it does to machine guns, with SWAT teams responding with excessive force in trying to murder you despite you not having actually hurt anyone.

This is where the game's weaker elements kick in. Combat is generally poor. Cover is far too sticky, resulting in more deaths from fighting the cumbersome interface than from actual enemy tactics (trying to get the game to detach Marcus from cover when a grenade lands at his feet is a challenge in itself). Stealth is also poor: enemies can spot you hiding from very unlikely positions and enemies are telepathic, so if one spots you, all of the bad guys in the area know where you are with laser-like precision instantly. With combat and stealth being underwhelming, the game seems to be pushing you to using hacking for almost every mission and it's by far the most rewarding (not to mention amusing) option, but it does feel like Ubisoft missed a trick by not removing the head-on combat option altogether and forcing you to rely on your wits instead.

There are other gameplay elements which are odd. The ubiquitous Ubisoft Tower of Knowledge, which you have to unlock to detect all the available activities in a given area (a common element in their Assassin's Creed, Far Cry and Watch_Dogs franchises), is oddly missing, but feels like it should be present. Not only are radio towers and satellite dishes frequently present in the game (now occasionally serving as download points for collectible information), but there is no way of flagging this information on the map. You have to physically drive or walk around and hope you pass close enough to an icon for it to appear on your map. I get why they did this - they wanted to avoid the maps covered in points of interest you then tick off like a robot in their previous games - but with no alternative method in place of finding this information, it just makes the task of locating all these items more laborious. I finished the game with numerous collectibles left incomplete just because there is no way of identifying them, which is weird.

These negatives are annoying, but certainly not a deal-breaker. The story is solid, the characters likeable, the actual game world is overwhelmingly impressive (and will bring back pleasant memories of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, something that Watch_Dogs 2 seems to lean into on occasion), the side-activities are hugely fun and the power the game gives you to impact on the game world and manipulate the factions and infrastructure to your advantage is genuinely original and interesting. Open-world games are becoming a bit of a tired genre these days, but Watch_Dogs 2 avoids most of the negatives and delivers a very enjoyable experience.

Watch_Dogs 2 (****) is a sequel which takes the original game and improves on it in every single way, as well as bringing more humour and fun to the franchise. Stodgy combat and weak stealth let down the choices somewhat, but the remarkably fun and engaging hacking mechanics do make up for this. The game is available now on PC, X-Box One and PlayStation 4. A sequel, Watch_Dogs: Legion, was recently released.

Chris Wooding confirmed to be a writer on ASSASSIN'S CREED: VALHALLA

British science fiction and fantasy author Chris Wooding today confirmed that he's been working on the latest Assassin's Creed video game, Valhalla, as a writer.

Ubisoft lifted the veil on the game, the 23rd in the series, today with a cinematic trailer. The game is set in both Norway and England and sees you playing a Viking raider who settles down to colonise the new land. The game features settlement-building mechanics as well as the familiar combat and stealth gameplay from previous titles in the series.

Chris Wooding is the author of numerous acclaimed works, including The Fade, The Braided Path trilogy, the four-volume Tales of the Ketty Jay diseselpunk series and his latest novel, The Ember Blade. Wooding is also working on a sequel to The Ember Blade, expected for publication in late 2021.

Assassin's Creed: Valhalla will be released in late 2020 on PlayStation 4, X-Box, Stadia and PC.

Far Cry 6, Dragon Age 4 and Obsidian's "Project X" all to be unveiled this month

It's a busy week for some of gaming's biggest franchises and most interesting developers.

First up, and most interestingly, is that Obsidian will finally unveil their mysterious "Project X" that they've been working on in the background for the past three or four years whilst releasing smaller games like Tyranny and Pillars of Eternity. This game is the brainchild and a labour of love for Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, the co-creators of the Fallout franchise and numerous other classic RPGs, including Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines and Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscure. Boyarsky was also a creative lead on Diablo III and its expansion Reaper of Souls for Blizzard, whilst Cain worked on games for Obsidian including Fallout: New Vegas.

The images revealed so far don't give much away, but hint at an SF RPG set in a retro-futuristic setting, possibly influenced by the likes of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. We'll find out for sure tomorrow when the game is fully unveiled.

Following that, on Friday, Ubisoft will unveil the future of the Far Cry franchise. The previous five games in the series have been - more or less - contemporary open world games with a very light dusting of science fiction and fantasy ideas, along with a couple of spin-offs (Blood Dragon and Primal) that had the licence to go much weirder. Far Cry 6 - assuming that's what the game will be called - sounds like it will be a full-on post-apocalyptic story, following on from the "good" ending to Far Cry 5 where the United States is (extremely randomly, as it had nothing to do with the plot of the game) devastated by a nuclear surprise attack launched by, er, North Korea. On the one hand, this may freshen up an increasingly bored franchise (Far Cry 5 was one of the weakest games in the series to date), or it may just be a case of the exact same game with a different paintjob. We will find out more on Friday.

Coming later this month, Electronic Arts and BioWare are poised to reveal some more information about the next Dragon Age game. BioWare's fantasy roleplaying series began back in 2009 with the solid Dragon Age: Origins and continued through the interesting-but-flawed Dragon Age II (2011) and the awful Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014). BioWare, once the great market leader for Western-style RPGs, has seen its thunder thoroughly stolen first by Bethesda and more recently by CD Projekt Red. Its last few games (Inquisition and last year's Mass Effect: Andromeda) have been underwhelming in the extreme, and there is little excitement for its next game, a generic multiplayer-focused, story-lite action-SF game called Anthem, due for release in March 2019. Dragon Age IV, or whatever is finally announced, has got its work cut out for it if it is to regain the stronger critical and commercial performance of earlier games in the series.

Far Cry 5

Reports of crimes being carried out in Hope County, Montana, by a religious group known as the Project at Eden's Gate has led to an investigation by the US Marshals. A group sets out to arrest the cult's leader, Joseph Seed, only to find themselves outgunned and forced to flee. The cult locks down Hope County, triggering a small-scale conflict between the religious fanatics and the local, well-armed populace. With the outside world curiously uninterested in the conflict, it falls to one of the US Marshals to organise the locals and take the fight to Joseph Seed and his followers.

The Far Cry series has, to date, delighted in taking players to far-flung corners of the globe. Far Cry and Far Cry 3 were set on remote islands, Far Cry 2 visited Africa and Far Cry 4 took place in the Himalayas. Far Cry: Primal was set in the Stone Age and Far Cry: Blood Dragon was a neon-drenched SF fantasy. Far Cry 5 differs from its forebears by bringing the game home (to many players), to the United States itself. This immediately adds an element of familiarity to the game: no longer are you an interloper, a visitor to strange lands (apart from the fourth game, where you played a native returning home after a long absence), but the people, the landscape and the culture are immediately more familiar.

Also familiar is the gameplay. The Far Cry apple has not fallen far from the tree at all. Once again, you have a large map which is covered in icons directing you to missions, side-quests, optional activities, enemy strongholds and various characters. There are multiple rebel factions - three in this case - and you can help them defeat the bad guys and eventually win the war. There are some changes to the formula, though. The increasingly silly towers you had to climb to open up each new region have disappeared and the game now tries to be more organic in how it presents you information: rebel soldiers will talk about a missing ally or rumours of another outpost which adds that information to the map; stealing maps from enemy strongholds will also open up more information about the world. Far Cry 5 tries to be a more dynamic game in how you find out information rather than following the same old Ubisoft formula yet again.

Still, these improvements are fairly minor and not entirely successful: it is far, far easier now than in previous games to simply miss stories, side-quests and characters, which is rather bizarre. More interesting is the decision to mix and match ideas from previous games. Unexpectedly, this game reaches back to tap the Far Cry 2 idea of "buddies", special characters you can recruit (usually by doing missions for them) at key moments in the game and then summon them to help you out later on. They can be injured in battle, but you can revive them and vice versa. The game can also be played co-op, with the two players taking on similar roles in helping each other out. It's a nice idea which is often hilarious - your potential buddy pool includes a dog, a diabetic bear and a puma - but is also overpowered. One of your buddies is a pilot and helps you out from the air, allowing you to simply ask him to bomb the living hell out of an enemy compound before waltzing in to claim it. The enemy AI is also often bewildered by attacks coming from different angles and can be divided and eliminated very easily even on the hardest difficulty settings. Helicopters are also monstrously powerful: you can take out and liberate an outpost in seconds using a chopper whilst going in on foot might result in a solid quarter of an hour of infiltration, combat, takedowns and dealing with reinforcements.

Gunplay and combat is pretty satisfying. The Far Cry series is the biggest-selling story-focused first-person shooter series of all time, with sales of well over 40 million. Shooting is solid, the new helicopter controls are excellent and combat is the usual mix of long-distance spying and recon followed by the rush of attacking outright, with perhaps the occasional stealthy infiltration thrown in to mix things up a bit.

Far Cry 5's trump card is its upgraded and severely enhanced graphics engine. The game is gorgeous, comfortably the best-looking game in existence right now. The forests are breathtakingly atmospheric, water and fire effects are incredible, and the game is often a joy to simply wander around on foot, on quad bike or by boat. Far Cry 5's map is not particularly large, but it does mix in a nice transition from the mountainous north to the flatter south, covered by vast farms, and the heavily forested east. The environments of this game are fantastic.

So good combat and nice environments to fight in, and this goes some way to making Far Cry 5 a very worthwhile purchase. But then the game not so much falters as falls over and bursts into flames.

Far Cry 5 is an open-world game, which means it's up to you where you go, what missions you tackle and what optional activities you partake in. If you want to get through the main story as fast as possible, you can do that in about 15 hours or so, but if you exhaustively want to do everything you can in the game you can comfortably triple that. But the problem is that the game seems to get antsy if you go more than five seconds without something happening. Enemies are spawned constantly, with cars and trucks materialising (sometimes quite literally a few feet away, which is disconcerting) on the road in front of you, cultists on quad bikes appearing on the dirt tracks and hostile wildlife such as bears roaming the woods. Far worse is when the game's story decide it's sat on the sidelines for too long and decides to railroad you into the next chapter of the game.

This is extraordinarily frustrating. Killing enemies, liberating outposts, and destroying cult shrines and vehicles all adds to a "freedom meter". At key points this meter will trigger the next part of the game's story. Unless you commit to not killing enemies when attacked and simply running away something interesting happens, there's no way to avoid filling up this meter and thus continue the story. Even worse, almost every major story event in the game requires you to be kidnapped, which is...ridiculous. You can be kidnapped at random, anywhere, any time, even from the cockpit of a helicopter 2,000 feet up with two buddies sitting right next to you. You wake up in an enemy base and have to escape. This happens nine times in the game. Why don't the cult just kill you outright? No idea. One of the game's three mini-bosses is kind of trying to use you for their own ends and it sort of makes sense they'd spare you, but the other two should have killed you without a nanosecond's hesitation. That Austin Powers scene with Scott offering to go get a gun comes to mind repeatedly.


It doesn't help that Far Cry 5 is badly written - the three mini-bosses and the main villain howl Biblical quotations and cliches at you in the most predictable manner possible, and your allies rarely say anything that sounds like a real human would remotely say - and largely lacking in memorable characters. Far Cry 3 and 4 had great villains in the form of Vaas and Pagan Min, but the Seed family are mind-numbingly tedious in comparison. The much-vaunted "topicality" of the game also never appears, and the game fails to say anything interesting or original about the US or the current political moment in history at all. This is probably for the best, but it does row back on some of the pre-release marketing.

A word must be reserved for Far Cry 5's ending, which is comfortably the most illogical, bizarre and incongruous conclusion* to a major game franchise since Mass Effect 3's. The ending relies on you listening to radio messages at key moments in the game, but if you aren't near a radio or if the radio is turned off, you won't hear the messages. Even worse, that excuse is undone by you having contact with a senior American intelligence agent who, you'd assume, would be in the know about what was going on but clearly isn't. Like Mass Effect 3 before it, the ending of Far Cry 5 makes you feel like everything you did in the preceding 15+ hours was utterly worthless and pointless, leaving a bad taste in the mouth and little urge to replay the game or even finish off the remaining side-quests (the game generates a save set before the ending so you can go back and address unfinished business if you want).

Another issue that Far Cry 5 has to deal with, and does so badly, is the increasing muddling of the series focus from game to game and the threat of the competition. The Far Cry franchise's "thing", the thing it does better than anything else, is first-person combat in a freeform setting far away from linear corridors, realised with cutting-edge graphics. However, feature creep has seen side-quests, animal-taming and hunting, buggy-racing and, in this game, helicopter gunships and even fighter planes added to the mix, to the point where the series feels like it wants, badly, to be Grand Theft Auto. This doesn't play to the series strengths and makes the game feel more generic. Another major problem, much moreso for Far Cry 5 than any previous game in the series, is the looming presence of the Just Cause series. Just Cause 3 does everything that Far Cry 5 does, including having aircraft, helicopters, rebel armies you lead into battle, chaos meters, base assaults, and does it better in a far larger and more varied world, with a much greater sense of fun and no story barging in and seizing control away from you once an hour or so. Far Cry 5 has better graphics and psychopathic bear companions, but that's about it. On every other front, you shouldn't even think about checking out Far Cry 5 without trying Avalanche's action-comedy epic first.

So, Far Cry 5 is a beautiful, stunning-looking game with very good and solid combat, and some great moments like rushing into battle with a friendly diabetic bear named Cheeseburger. It is also bizarrely at its best when it's at its quietest and most peaceful. But the story is garbage and doesn't make an iota of sense, which would be bearable if the plot doesn't continuously keep pushing itself in your face whilst you're playing whether you want it to or not. It's a game that plays bait and switch with you constantly and which takes control away from you and pushes you into doing things you don't want to. Never before have I played a game that's so good when it's good and so appallingly obnoxious when it's terrible, before rounding off things with an ending which is a giant, smirking middle finger to the player.

Far Cry 5 (***) is a deeply frustrating game which does so much right and then not so much shoots itself in the foot as blows both feet off with a rocket launcher. A very cautious try before you buy, or wait for the budget version (and hopefully a mod or patch that eventually mitigates the game's worst excesses).

The game is available now on PC, PlayStation 4 (UK, USA) and X-Box One (UK, USA). Three DLC expansions are due for release later this year, although like Blood Dragon they will be fantastical episodes set outside of series canon.


* Although a Far Cry 6 seems likely, based on Far Cry 5's early and impressive sales, the ending of 5 suggests it will be a very different kind of setting. I'll try to get a more thorough analysis of the game's bizarre ending in another post.

Get some free games! For free!

Two of the online video game stores are giving away free games this week to entice people to look at their December sales.

Ubiplay has put up Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag for free for this week. This nautical take on the Assassin's Creed franchise is often cited as the best game in the series and an easy one to start off with.

GoG also has Grim Fandango Remastered up for free for this week. Originally released in 1998 by LucasArts, Grim Fandango is comfortably one of the best video games and certainly one of the best adventure games of all time. The remastered edition adds a revamped and much-improved mouse control system and enhanced graphics.

Driver: San Francisco

Former racing driver-turned-undercover cop John Tanner has put his arch nemesis, Charles Jericho, behind bars. When Jericho is sprung from a police van on his way to trial, Tanner responds to the call but is severely wounded in a car crash. Tanners wakes to find himself suddenly blessed with the ability to 'possess' any driver in the city and take over their car. He sets out with his newly-acquired power to stop Jericho from carrying out his next masterplan: a terrorist attack on San Francisco.

The Driver series began back in 1999 on the original PlayStation. Clearly influenced by the original Grand Theft Auto but casting the player as a "good guy", the original Driver was a fun game that mixed racing and crime-solving. Driver 2 and 3 made ill-advised detours into aping the Grand Theft Auto model of letting the player get out of their car, something the series did not excel at. With this fifth entry in the series (a narratively unrelated spin-off, Parallel Lines, separated the games), the developers have made the wise decision to refocus on driving.

Along the way they developed quite a nifty idea: at almost any time, the player can "shift" into another driver in any other car anywhere else in the entire city. This gives players a lot of freedom in how to approach missions: you can defeat an enemy by shifting into another driver and total their car in a head-on crash.

It's a clever mechanic, constantly and cleverly developed as the game proceeds, but it's one that's quite hard to justify through exposition. So the game goes down the same route as the original, classic British TV series Life on Mars: Tanner is actually in a coma and (almost) the whole game unfolds in his head, the real-life search for Jericho filtering through to Tanner's consciousness via the TV news left on in his hospital room. It's stark-raving bonkers, to the point where you can't quite believe that Ubisoft went for it, but they did and it results in a game that almost gleefully engages with its own goofiness, all the more amusing for doing it in a very serious and well-known franchise.

The story is dumb as a box of frogs but told entertainingly, complete with TV-like "Previous, on Driver: San Francisco" segments between groups of mission and a cast of entertaining characters. The driving model is pretty decent, with the various cars having different strengths and weaknesses. Traditional video game conceits - upgrades, unlockable vehicles and collectibles - are justified as being the products of Tanner's warped and comatose mind.

The game also has fun with side-missions, some generated when Tanner jumps into particular vehicles in the city. Some of these are great, such as the two students who need to win a race to get money for college but Tanner's outstanding skills inadvertently see them recruited by a gang to race for them. Tanner only intermittently drops in on their story, and it's quite funny seeing what mayhem they've been up to inbetween his visits. Other activities include races where you have to switch between two cars and get them to not just win, but finish in a particular place which is fiendishly tough but satisfying when you accomplish it.

I wouldn't have recommended Driver: San Francisco (***½) at full price, but given that it came out six years ago you can now pick it up for pennies. It's a fun, undemanding and goofy game that is a fun, disposable and enjoyable way of filling up time between heavier and longer games. It's available now on PC, X-Box 360 (UK, USA) and PlayStation 3 (UK, USA).

Watch Dogs

Aidan Pearce is a hacker whose latest job attracts more attention than he'd like. His car is attacked, his niece is killed in the crossfire and he is left hungry for vengeance. His investigations reveal something dark lurking at the heart of the new computer system which is running the utilities and services of Chicago, and put Pearce on a collision course with both the corrupt administration of the city and some of its most dangerous criminals.

Watch Dogs (aka WATCH_DOGS) is what happens when you create a game not based on its own merits or a killer idea, but by borrowing elements from just about every single other AAA game franchise in existence and throw them all into the blender to see what happens. This is an open world game that borrows - a lot - from Grand Theft Auto V and Assassin's Creed, with a side-dose of Deus Ex: Human Revolution and a mild flavouring of Far Cry. It's a bit of an unholy mess, a game that tries to be a jack of all trades and ends up a master of none. It realises some of its ambitions efficiently (but never outstandingly), but it makes a total hash of others.

The game is a set in a fictional version of Chicago which has been put under the control of a new computer network which you can hack into at will. This allows you to change traffic lights (generating comical car crashes), burst water mains, blow up electrical junctions and detonate sewer mains with a few taps of your phone. You can do this just for a laugh, but you can also use these abilities whilst fleeing from pursuit or trying to infiltrate a building for secrets.

Watch Dogs it at its best during these infiltration missions, with Aidan hiding around the corner and hacking into the building's camera network to see what's going on instead. From the cameras you can lure enemies into traps, shut down communications, remote-detonate explosives carried by guards and so on. When these systems work, the game is absolutely great.

A lot of the time they don't work or are unnecessary. Hacking the cameras to defeat enemies works well, but it also takes time. A laborious thirty minute stealth infiltration can be resolved in two minutes by just having Aidan wade into the place with grenade launchers and machine guns. Aside from one or two missions, there is no penalty for simply wading into a situation and killing everyone in sight. One mission, which sees Aidan ascending a tenement block to hack a crime lord's data files, even has bad guys spawning in areas you've already cleared with the cameras (on occasion you can even spot them materialising out of nowhere, which is shockingly bad game design for a modern, big-budget video game), rendering the whole option pointless.

Combat is okay, if unremarkable, but the game's stealth systems are a dog. Cover is sticky and won't let go of you easily. I died far more often from a grenade landing at my feet and Aidan standing still as I hammered the controls to disengage from cover than I ever did from enemy action. Nonlethal takedowns are an option, but on more than one occasion Aidan pulled out his gun and blew away the bad guy rather than simply knocking him out, automatically failing one mission due to being discovered. There are also bad guys who use power armour (somewhat incongruously with the rest of the contemporary or very-near-future setting) who simply act as tiresome bullet sponges who can't be defeated with takedowns until you unlock a late-game skill at which point they become easily disposable.

The open world basics are a mixed bag. There are data towers in parts of the city which you can hack into to discover the locations of side-missions (just like Assassin's Creed and the more recent Far Cry titles) and there's a lot of nice urban detail to the game. One of the big selling points of the game is that you can tap into anyone's mobile phone nearby and learn more about them, perhaps being able to read their texts, listen in on their calls or hacking their bank accounts. Although clearly these elements are randomly assigned from a massive database of descriptions, it still gives the civilian population more character than in, say, a GTA title. Vehicle handling in the game is atrocious: apart from the very fastest sports cars, vehicles handle likes cement blocks on wheels. Bikes are a bit better but in the end I preferred travelling by speedboat (fortunately the map design means most objectives can be reached pretty easily from the river, canals or lake) simply because they had fast turning circles and I wouldn't kill passers-by whilst simply trying to stay on the road.

The storyline - the reason for doing all this running around - is unfortunately insipid, predictable and tiresome. Aidan Pearce is a complete non-entity as a character, a guy with a gravelly voice who wants to be Batman (but a Zach Snyder Batman who is happy murdering people as long as they are bad or it can be self-justified) and wants to avenge his niece's death, but seems rather ludicrously un-self-aware of the mayhem he continues to unleash on his family. Occasional moments when Pearce feels guilt over murdering everyone in sight to achieve an objective ring hollow, since nothing stops him doing the exact same thing on the next mission. Pearce builds up a network of allies and friends over the course of the game, from friendly gangster (and constant scene-stealer) Jordi Chin to French hacker Clara to legendary data ninja T-Bone, but we're never really given a good reason why any of these people want to help an uncharismatic, selfish bore with fluid morality like Aidan.

Despite these criticisms I had some fun with Watch Dogs. The environmental detail is quite impressive, the graphics are effective (if not outstanding) and the sense of place is unusual. The game gave me a bizarre sense of deja vu when travelling the freeways around Chicago from my own visit to the city. It can also be fun to cause havoc in the city, playing with traffic lights, shutting down trains and blowing up cars with sewer pipes. The typical open world problems remain - 99% of buildings cannot be entered and the police won't bother to investigate the two dozen murders you just committed as long as you stay out of their sight for two minutes - but the city feels a bit more alive than in most other open world games. The environmental puzzles can also be a lot of fun. But the game is also deeply flawed, especially in comparison to the competition: Grand Theft Auto V has much more interesting characters and is far better-realised open world with much better vehicles. The new Deus Ex games do hacking and cyberpunk far better. Far Cry 3 and 4 are a much better open-world combat games. And almost any modern action game has stealth and cover systems that make Watch Dogs look inept by comparison. If you're looking for an open-world city game that isn't a GTA title, I would recommend Sleeping Dogs much more strongly over Watch Dogs, as that game has a strong storyline and its unique selling point - martial arts - is handled much better than Watch Dogs' hacking elements.

Ultimately Watch Dogs (**½) feels like a game that needed a good six months more development to iron out the bugs and make the systems work more efficiently together. If Ubisoft can overcome these problems and employ better stealth and vehicles, than the forthcoming Watch Dogs 2 may be a much stronger game.