The good news is, Watch_Dogs is by far the best AAA game I've played in a while.
I will not be touching on multiplayer as it is not something I am interested in, though from what I've heard from friends it quite good and innovative.
I'm very much a story person, and though this game has a good storyline it could have been a lot better. Few and far between where the moments when I cared about the main character or any side characters, but this is not a major complaint as with time they grew on me, and I did find that I cared for the punky rock chick, or the nagging blonde one. The biggest problem I had on this front was with the "bad guy" the one who's actions set the story in motion. Though he managed to illicit some emotions on my part, when Aiden took his revenge on him I was utterly underwhelmed. The final "boss fight" if you can call it that, though a lot harder, and a bit more cinematic in my opinion, left me with the same feeling.
On the other hand the game has a few gems of writing talent which shine in the world. Hacking in to phone conversations or video logs can surprise you with a great variety of ideas and emotions conferred.
Moving on, when reviewing and open world game one thing that needs a thorough look is the world it's self. In the recent past we had quite a few open world games, and most of those worlds where good. I cannot say that the world of Watch_Dogs was vastly superior, but it was certainly better than most.From a technical standpoint the world was quite impressive, as after the initial load of the game it features absolutely no loading screens (with the exception of story missions which transport you from a point on the map to another, or indoors).The size of the world is not it's greatest strength, it's not small, but it isn't large either. This is understandable and acceptable though because you have an unprecedented amount of control over it. From traffic lights that you can turn green for all sides, to exploding generators, spike traps etc.The city also feels very much alive, as you hear a street rapper rap, play a game with a street hustler, go in to a guys basement and play a fully integrated game of poker (where of course you can cheat using cameras to see your opponent's hand), hear a conversation about somebody cheating on their spouse.The control and lifelikeness of the city makes for great fun, for example when you are walking around being a douche bag and hacking peoples bank accounts. Another thing to mention is the fact that the city has some variety, being super dense in places, suburbian in others, there's even a forest.The world also features quite a few side activities that you can do at your leisure, though other than one particular mini game which was fun in it's stupidity(kind of like Saints Row 4) these side activities get very repetitive very fast.
Moving on to the mechanics of the game:
The progression in the game is pretty much fun and fair, most skills seem and feel relevant to playing, and it never really feels like a grind, even though the cost of some skills may seem high, obtaining skill points is by far not the hardest task.The combat and the shooting are both excellent, the sheer amount of options you are presented with 99% of time is grate, and the number of options never feels overwhelming. I dare say that this game has struck the golden line between freedom and hand holding. The stealth aspect of the game is grate, and what makes stealth even more fun is the fact that using cameras and hacking one can cause quite some havoc for the enemies before even stepping on to the proverbial battleground.The driving felt good in this game, and cars where neither too fragile neither to strong, once again staying well within the middle line between the two. I spent most of my time on bikes (unless I knew I was going to be a vehicle take down mission), One thing they could have greatly improved on would have been water vehicles, from what I've seen there are only 3 types in the whole game.The place where most of my dissatisfaction comes from is game play and optimization.First of all, mouse control is infinitely bad in menus, and even worse it's not really general/ Navigating your smartphone, which has some useful functions like the skill tree, or requesting vehicles is annoying to say the least as there is no pointer, you move your mouse around hoping you will select the right tile from the metro like interface.When shopping for materials, guns or ammo, the shop screen is once again a nightmare to navigate, witch brings us to my next point, though materials are not hard to find, you can carry only a limited amount of them, which also goes for the items created from said materials(grenades for ex), though this system sounds reasonable I feel it could have been more balanced as many times I found myself hiding in the corner while in a fight trying to craft a certain item, which of course is a complete pain as it requires the use of the weapon/item wheel. One might ask, well why dose the use of the weapon wheel cause such a headache? It sounds simple enough. True, it should be simple but once again the weapon wheel is navigated by mouse, without a pointer and a crazy and inconsistent sensibility, so often times it can take 20 seconds to select one item from a wheel that only contains about 8 things, surely we can all agree that agility of the player in a game should not be tested trough random mouse sensitivity...Cops in the game aren't exactly badly written, the AI in general is pretty good, on hilarious exception though. The AI doesn't seem to comprehend the concept of water, Need to get away from the police or a gang? Simple! Get in to the water/boat, and swim/drive, under a bridge(if a helicopter is after you), or to the open ocean, and thats it, your done, the AI is bumfuzzled, if hiding under a bridge you can even hear them shouting something to the affect that you disappeared in to thin air.And that brings me to my final point, I am a PC gamer, I run 2 nVidia GTX 760 OC with 2GB of GDDR5 each in SLI, with an octo-core processor and 8GB of DDR3, with that kind of horsepower I expected grate performance, and a grate looking game(the looks i mostly expected because of the prelaunch game footage, but I wont get in to that as it was discussed to death), instead what I got was a mediocre experience, My framerate did dip from time to time, and SLI did cause some problems at times. I do understand the need for games to run on multiple platforms (PC and consoles), but for once I would like to see an AAA title developed and optimized for PC and then downgraded for consoles, especially when the developers promises this exact thing. Because if its not developed for the PC what happens is when the time for porting comes, nobody is going to redraw textures to be higher resolution, nobody will increase the vertex count for a model to make it look better for PC, they will use the same assets, possibly with some minor upscaling and give a platform that is capable of much much more, a sub par experience. Excuse the segway but it was to get me to the following point: Ubisoft has claimed that the primary platform for this game will be the PC, and even if one ignores the performance issues, and the reduction of graphics quality from what we have seen in trailers, the clunkiness of mouse controls in in game menus proves that this was a blatant misrepresentation of the product.In conclusion: This is a very good game, well worth your time and money, though just to stick it to Ubisoft I would wait until the price drops.