Freebie Feelers… Watch_Dogs

Freebie Feelers is a series where we download the free monthly console-specific or newly released free-to-play games to test their worth. This series will contain some useful information as well as plenty of personal opinion. While these articles may not be reviews, we hope that you will be able to use them to help decide whether that free download is worth it.

What is it?

Watch_Dogs is a primarily single-player game, focusing on the story of Aiden Pearce - a grey hat hacker who's managed to find himself on the wrong side of a hit job. It is set in Chicago after a company known as Blume created ctOS to monitor the lives of everyone within the city. There's a multiplayer facet to the game, but it's not the core of the game play. It's free on Xbox One from 16th June through to the 15th of July.

What did I think?

Watch_Dogs is quite good fun, and the storyline is pretty engaging. The on-foot sections are great fun, though car handling is clunky at the best of times, leading it to be slightly frustrating. If you can overlook that for the times it's required, the rest of the game is pretty solid.

It doesn’t look like it’d be too difficult to get a full completion if you’re an achievement hunter, but there may be a few achievements that will take some time more than anything to get through.

Is it worth it?

The base game is usually £23.99, which makes this quite a discount for Xbox owners, and comes to the program only a few months into the release of the sequel, Watch_Dogs 2, so could be construed as a cheap way to get people into playing the series, but that shouldn’t be a reason to not pick this up. There’s some additional DLC available, which adds more to the main game for £11.99 but has you playing a storyline the follows on from Aiden’s.

I’ll be continuing to play Watch_Dogs for the foreseeable future, at least to get through the main storyline, but coming back to it down the line to grab the rest of the achievements.