SINGAPORE — The recent NSA situation in the United States has shown that government surveillance, once the domain of conspiracy theorists, is now reality, and social media has easily shown that nothing is truly private anymore. In Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs, it’s now your turn to make full use of technology to control your fate.

In the game you play Aiden Pearce, a hacker who gets embroiled in something bigger when a hacking job to goes awry. His niece gets killed and his sister threatened — and it’s up to you to find out how to stop all this from happening.

Watch Dogs is a huge open-world game that takes place in Chicago. Think of it like Grand Theft Auto and you won’t be far from the truth, but there’s a key difference: This time you’re a hacker armed with a smartphone which is plugged into the city’s network, the Central Operating OS (ctOS).

Think of ctOS as a system that stores your data in the cloud: Easy for official agencies to retrieve your data, but that also means hackers like Aiden can discover almost anything about you. This comes to life as you roam the city, where your smartphone highlights the identities and key details about each passerby, and even allows you to hack into some of them.

You can also hack other things, such as doors, surveillance cameras and helicopters, making the smartphone the most important weapon in the game. Whether you’re in a car chase or surrounded by assailants, figuring out how to get past them without resorting to your gun is a thrill, and sometimes I wanted even more than what each mission offered. Between the hacking minigames and various missions, Ubisoft did manage to make hacking fun.

But that means that it’s a pity when there are situations where you can’t resort to your smartphone at all, and the game forces you into a gunfight. Ubisoft had previously said that you can solve missions the way you want to, but sadly for stealth gamers like me it doesn’t always apply, especially if you’ve reached a mission without unlocking skills you might need. Still, these moments are few and far between, and don’t really detract from the game.

The game’s real flaw is in the driving missions — car control is best described as jelly-like and I ended up restarting such missions more often than most. Many of these missions have a timer in which you have to either catch up with or escape from someone, and it can be unforgiving, where one massive crash will ruin all progress you’ve made. Such missions easily devolve into frustration, but I found that some chases just involve you keeping up till the race has run its course, so that’s something worth considering.

The story in Watch Dogs takes a while to get going, and it’s not exactly novel or groundbreaking, so it’s a good thing that there are tons of side missions if you ever get bored of the main story (even while your family is in danger). 

There are also fun multiplayer distractions, where you can invade another player’s game and attempt to hack into his phone while staying undetected. There’s also a free Android and iOS ctOS app that allows you to play as the police and try to prevent the opponent from escaping — it’s pretty fun for a while, and you don’t even need the actual game to play this smartphone diversion.

Graphics-wise, the game is pretty solid, but not astounding, even on the PlayStation 4. Some character models lack detail compared to others, and sometimes when you restart missions the car you’ll be driving will change in colour. Loading the game takes a while too — so try not to die too often — but once you’re in the game there’s no observable loading at all.

Ubisoft’s take on a modern open-world game almost deserves all the hype it got before the launch — hacking is great fun especially when you level up your skills, and the open world feels truly alive. But it’s a pity that the story and the driving just isn’t polished enough — the rest of the world is alive with hacking opportunities.

Rating: 4/5

Watch Dogs goes on sale today for the PlayStation 4 (S$88.90), PlayStation 3 (S$79.90), PC (S$66.90) and the Xbox360 (S$74.90). The Watch Dogs PlayStation 4 Bundle Pack retails at S$709, and the Watch Dogs PlayStation 4 Aiden Figurine Collector’s Pack at S$149. Both bundle packs come with 60min of extra gameplay for the PlayStation version, and extra missions and bonus packs.