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Mini Review: Watch Dogs Bad Blood DLC |
T-Bone is a much more easy-going character to spend your game time with
This first major piece of Watch Dogs DLC take place after the main campaign is finished, which seems to be quite standard for most DLC now, and stars hacker/crafter T-Bone who was your associate in the main campaign instead of Aiden Pearce. T-Bone is a much more likeable character being very fun and jovial rather than Mr Sad Face, Aiden Pearce who may have had a hernia trying to crack a smile. T-Bone’s move set and unlockable skills are largely similar to Aiden’s only you begin the DLC campaign with a good portion of them unlocked for you already and you gain unlock points quicker allowing you to quite easily max out an entire branch of your choosing during the main story missions. These main story missions, of which there are 10, will take you roughly 4 hours to go through if you are doing them at a brisk enough pace and just like the main game, there are many other side missions and collectables to find. Some of the new side quests like cracking Blume Corporation’s tracking of Aiden Pearce or side jobs given to you by cop friends are interesting twists on what we have seen before in Watch Dogs and add variety.
Your remote control car, Eugene, gets you out of many sticky situations
As with most DLCs, this one assumes you have already finished the main campaign and sets the difficulty bar a little higher because of this with most missions featuring large numbers of tough enemies that will readily flank you from all sides. Personally I preferred this though as I much prefer the unsubtle approach of going in with a large machine gun and simply shooting everyone between me and my objective so it was good to have some challenging targets for a change. One well-advertised new gameplay element in Bad Blood is T-Bone’s remote controlled car, Eugene who gives you the ability to sneak into tiny tunnels, remote hack, stun, explode and much more. Because T-Bone is not only a master hacker, but also a master engineer, as demonstrated in his crazy booby trapped car lot when you met him in the main game, he is able to craft quickly and easily including any replacement Eugenes should he get destroyed. This remote control car adds an interesting twist to a lot of missions because its defences are limited but can go a lot of places T-Bone can’t so you must work together with Eugene to get into previously inaccessible locations. Sadly, most of the same graphical glitches that I witnessed during the main game are still present in the game engine such as wall colours flickering and lighting not behaving as it should. I was hoping they would use the opportunity of updates to fix some of these rather unsightly problems, but it does not appear to have happened
Large shoot outs with many enemies are commonplace. But I never choose the escape option
Summary
Bad Blood offers mostly more of the same Watch Dogs game-play but adds a much more likeable main character and some genuinely interesting new twists in to the mix. It seems to be becoming a common trend for Ubisoft to play a main game safe and then try different more interesting things in following DLC. It’s a trend I like and I’d say if you weren’t too fussed on Watch Dogs’ main campaign, this may help sway you the other direction.