Watch Dogs is what you get when you combine GTA open-world style violence and gameplay with The Matrix, and is probably the only game where your character spends more time standing on a corner staring at a smartphone screen than driving or shooting. The story is well put together and introduced in near psychedelic style dreams and flashbacks, and follows a master hacker trying to track down his families murderers after a massive hacking score. Gameplay is tight, and is a combination of Assassins creed parkour, splinter cell style distraction mechanics and close combat, and GTA third person shooting. Driving is the only part thats not well handled, as breathing on my PS4 controller causes even my beat up van to go to maximum acceleration, and the roads are apparently always wet as even a gentle turn can cause you to slide out. Side missions make this worthwhile, and you can spend an hour oing nothing but wandering around playing with the profiler app and collecting bank account data. Some of the click points are frustrating, as you might hack the wrong person or alert the wrong target, but theres such a wealth of side and back story that its contantly an adventure. Hacking will be your bread and butter obviously, but its just so much simple fun that even the nerdy ARG games they loaded in are worth dumping a few hours on. Audio is top notch, though the propensity to make your hero constantly sound like he's gargling marbles is getting out of hand. The graphics are simply sublime. While they couldn't do the whole loop to exacting scale, I could easily recognize certain streets and buildings and the feeling of scale and distance were nearly perfect. The only fault I've found is some of the smash cuts during the hacking between cameras can be almost nauseating on a large high end screen, and you can easily get turned around. Theres only a handful of nits. The cops are nigh unstoppable Terminator like automata, and I died about 4 times on the opening mission doing nothing but trying to escape a police search zone and running headlong into a roadblock that you always cant see until its too late. Driving is too hocky pucky most of the time, and the amount of time you have to intervene in certain crime side missions is way too short. Overall, this is great. Tight storyline, entertaining gameplay, gorgeous audio and graphics, and engaging characters. Literally the only reasons its not 5 stars is the difficulty of evading police in even low level pursuits, the handling of vehicles, and the graphical overlay during some of the hacknig mechanics. A definite buy and a 4.5 stars edging so close to 5. Update: After some more play I ahd to bump this up to 5 stars. There's some more mechanics of combat that I hadnt really uncovered, and they add not only a layer of realism but also keep the game from being near impossible. It takes a moment for a enemy to spot you, and doing so doesnt mean they instantly alert every other guard. You're still limited to mostly luring and dropping enemies one at a time, but just because you're a master hacker doesnt mean you're Batman.