Watch Dogs (2014) PC

            In its opening scene, Watch Dogs refers to hackers as modern-day magicians. That’s a good analogy for the bag of powerful but mostly scripted tricks we get to use as we run amok in this huge and impressively detailed map of Chicago. With the push of a button, you can trigger environmental traps that smash pursuing cars, empty a citizen’s bank account, or even remotely activate a grenade in an enemy’s pocket. Hacking’s not as dynamic as it appears at first, but the illusion gives us a bit more to do than there is in most third-person action games, and it puts on a great show.

          Watch Dogs’ completely open map is another big strength: it’s huge, diverse, and intricately detailed. The rural area of Pawnee balances out Chicago’s urban sprawl, and it all looks great, especially at sunset or during a rainstorm. Everything runs at a smooth 30 frames per second, however, after playing for a few hours I did start to experience frequent slowdowns when new mission objectives were loading up. Fortunately they never happened when anything interesting was going on, but they’re definitely noticeable and get progressively worse as the story goes on.

            This techno-thriller fiction is all about the power of information in a super-connected city, and one of its cleverest and most distinctive tweaks to the open world genre is how much information it gives you. Scanning a pedestrian or thug pops up a brief, randomly generated personal history – some fact about their hobbies or lifestyle, plus their age, occupation, and income. It’s a small thing, but it’s surprisingly effective at humanizing them.

 I actually felt a pang of guilt when I accidentally ran someone down and then saw that they were on the waiting list for a liver transplant, and as a result this is one of the few open-world action games where I rarely went on a violent rampage. And that had very little to do with the meaningless reputation meter, which appears to have no consequences whatsoever.

Requirements

Minimum System 

Operating System Windows Vista (SP2)/Windows 7 (SP1)/Windows 8 and 8.1

Note that Watch Dogs only supports 64 bit OSs.

Processor (CPU) 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q8400/3.0 GHz AMD Phenom II X4 940

System Memory 6GB RAM

Video Card* (GPU) nVidia GeForce GTX460/AMD Radeon HD5850 

Hard Drive Space  25 GB

Sound Card DirectX 9.0c Compatible Sound Card/DirectX Version DirectX 11 

Internet  Broadband connection required for multiplayer mode

Recommended 

Operating System Windows Vista (SP2) Windows 7 (SP1) /Windows 8 and 8.1

Note that Watch Dogs only supports 64 bit OSs.

Processor (CPU)  3.5 GHz Intel Core i7 3700/4.0 GHz AMD FX-8350

System Memory  8GB RAM

Video Card* (GPU) nVidia GeForce GT600-series/AMD Radeon HD7000-series

Hard Drive Space  25 GB

Sound Card Surround Sound 5.1/DirectX Version DirectX 11

Internet  Broadband connection required for multiplayer mode

 Note

 Ubisoft's official system requirements do not specify a certain type or brand of graphics processor. The minimum GPU requirements are a card with "1,024 MB DirectX 11-compliant [and] Shader Model 5.0." The recommended requirement is a 2,048 MB card.