Just like with Wolfenstein, I was not able to get a review copy of Watch Dogs ahead of the release date, so my review won’t arrive until this weekend or early next week.  However, I did pick up a copy last night and began my playthrough of it.  Keep in mind, this is not an official review because I have only played the first four hours.  So here are my first impressions!

How is the story?

This one is hard to answer.  Since it is an open world game, it is easy to get distracted.  And as I am easily distracted to begin with, it was inevitable that I got distracted.  So in my first four hours I really only played 3 or 4 story missions it feels like.  From that I can say that it has a great beginning, but I honestly don’t know if it will hold on to the intensity as it moves forward yet.

How is the gameplay?

Complicated.  That is the easiest way for me to explain it.  Although, I imagine it will get much easier over time as I get acclimated to everything.  What I mean by complicated is that they make it so damn easy for you to hack everything that I often found myself screwing stuff up.  I would be racing to get away from police cars while trying to hack something to get them off my tail and accidentally put something in my way making me crash and eventually die or fail the mission.

The other main issue I have is that I can’t seem to get the buttons memorized for some reason.  Maybe they are different from other games like this?  For whatever reason, I keep clicking the get out of car button instead of the hack button as I am speeding down the road.  As you can imagine, this sends me rolling down the road getting hurt, ran over, killed, etc..  This didn’t happen just once or twice, it happened probably 10-15 times in the few hours I played.  Again, I think I may eventually just get it memorized and it’ll be easier, but right now I sure feel like I suck at this game.

 I asked around for questions people wanted to know about Watch Dogs, so here are my answers to those:

Have you seen any dogs in it yet?

Funny story. No.

Does the game appropriately use the controller touch pad for in-game use?

Through four hours of the game, I have only used the touchpad as a “button” to get to a menu.  However it may have several more uses that I am unaware of at this time.  So, as of now, no it does not use it appropriately.  Hopefully it will though.

Is the profiling tedious and repetitive or fun and enjoyable? Do you see the same profiles over and over?

So far it is not very tedious.  Profiling is a little repetitive and sometimes seems like it is just glossed over as you don’t really have time to read it all.  But it is a cool feature in the game.  And no, so far I haven’t seen the same profiles repeated over and over.

Courtney Osborn is MONG’s Founder and Editor in Chief.  You can follow him on Twitter, Twitch, and IGN.