Watch Dog : Bad Blood

As DLC typically goes, Watch Dogs: Bad Blood is a pretty substantial expansion. In what’s becoming an Ubisoft tradition (like in Assassin’s Creed IV: Freedom Cry), it takes a side character and takes him on his own lengthy adventure – in this case, Raymond “T-Bone” Kenney. But what’s interesting about it isn’t the story, as that’s fairly forgettable. The reason to play Bad Blood is the new Street Sweep missions, which bring out and highlight the freeform style of play that gives Watch Dogs its best moments.

Street Sweeps retool and reuse some of Watch Dogs’ existing open-world side missions as repeatable challenges that encourage stealth. They show me that someone at Ubisoft recognizes that Watch Dogs really works when it sends you into an open area with a goal, and leaves getting to it almost entirely up to you. These missions usually have secondary goals, like knocking out the target without being spotted, but they’re optional. There’s some freedom to get creative.

 

How quickly you get through the mission determines your rank on a leaderboard, giving bigger XP rewards for placing higher and unlocking a few unremarkable new weapons and skills. I’m

Watch Dogs: Bad Blood

The first major DLC add-on for Ubisoft's blockbuster action game, Watch Dogs: Bad Blood delivers a potent combination of action-adventure missions, seamless multiplayer modes and open world exploration.

As for the campaign missions, they’re just okay. His filthy-looking dreadlocks and sense of remorse make him a somewhat more distinctive character than the bland Aiden Pierce, but T-Bone isn’t a terribly likeable protagonist either. His banter with his neurotic sidekick, Tobias Frewer, got a bit annoying by the end of the five-hour story. And the ending of his conflict with another black-hat hacker (a returning character from the main campaign) does not make a ton of sense... but what can you expect from a game that revolves around magic hackers?

Watch Dog : Bad Blood Wallpaper

Level design in Bad Blood is a bit more puzzle-focused than standard Watch Dogs maps, with simple moving laser tripwire traps and occasional shifting walls taking the place of excessive use of hopping from camera to camera. Most of that was fairly unexciting - the stuff of uninspired platformers - but I do like how Watch Dogs’ flow-path hacking minigame is now often overlaid onto the world instead of against the blackness of a computer terminal. That cool touch made me feel more like I was hacking actual things.

The missions’ puzzle segments are broken up with unavoidable combat. Bad Blood brings in a few cool additions, like hackable security cameras wired to gun turrets, that make some of the wave-based combat sections feel unique to Watch Dogs. There’s also an RC car with an attached taser, but the ways it’s used in the campaign's puzzles aren’t terribly creative - it’s only good for going through vents that are specifically there to drive your RC car through. It's much more useful in the Street Sweep missions to knock out bad guys without being noticed.

Be advised that two of the three PCs I ran the latest version of Watch Dogs and Bad Blood on performed poorly, with significant hitching every few seconds especially while driving. It was nearly unplayable, even on a Core i7-990X with a GeForce GTX 780ti. However, the third PC – a Core i5-4670 and a GeForce GTX 780 performed well, easily hitting 60 frames per second on high settings. Since all three PCs have Nvidia GPUs and updated drivers, I’m at a loss as to what causes this problem, unless it has a distaste for high-end Core i7 CPUs. However, because Watch Dogs did run fine on one of those PCs, I can’t call it broken - I can only issue a warning that it may or may not have issues with your PC. If you're having trouble with Watch Dogs, Bad Blood probably won't be any better.

The Verdict

Don't get Watch Dogs: Bad Blood for T-Bone's mediocre adventure, get it for the much more interesting and free-form Street Sweeps. If only those were available separately, they'd be a no-brainer purchase for getting more out of what I loved about Watch Dogs, but with T-Bone and Tobias in tow, it's a little tougher to recommend as a full package.

Source : http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/10/10/watch-dogs-bad-blood-review