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Power mad: 10 ways to ruin lives in Watch Dogs
With great power comes great responsibility – and great potential for digital mischief.
10 ways to ruin lives in Watch Dogs
© Ubisoft
How evil would you rate yourself, on a scale of one to 10? Unlike most open-world sandbox games, Watch Dogs gives each and every one of its virtual inhabitants a name, a job and a mini personality, which means that doing them wrong should tug at your heart strings more than usual. Still, if you’re feeling sociopathic there are a myriad ways to dampen their virtual days. Here are our 10 favourite life ruining Watch Dogs hacks.
Bankrupt Chicago’s citizens
As uber-hacker Aiden Pearce, your smartphone’s Profiler is your key to Chicago’s CTOS (Central Operating System), gifting access to private, personal info on everyone you pass. And if that info happens to include their bank account details, it’s their loss, right? It’s not as if they might need that money for rent, or bills, or anything like that. Simply copy their digits and head to the nearest ATM. Just a tip: as with real life, the richest people are prone to frequent the more expensive parts of town – try the poshest hotels for the big spenders.
Ruin a commute
Joe’s boss says he can’t be late again. That’ll be his third strike and he’ll be out on the street. Still, you’re more important than Joe – you’ve got a niece to avenge – and you need to get places. Fast. To help you along your journey, you can switch every junction’s stop signs in your favour with your smartphone, especially handy when you’ve got a swarm of cop cars on the approach. Just hack the lights and all manner of chaos will break loose in your wake. Spare a thought for poor old Joe though, whose commute – and life – is now in turmoil.
End a career
As well as tinkering with the street lights, Aiden can also choose to lift and drop drawbridges as he pleases. Speed towards one and start to let it raise and you’ll sail clean over over it. But time it right and it’s likely that everyone in pursuit won’t be quite so lucky. It’s ridiculously satisfying stuff, even if you did just send squad car #97 to a watery grave. That car had one week left ‘til retirement, too. It had just bought a boat and everything.
Railroad a journey home
Catching the train? Whether he’s inside the carriage or riding on top of it, Aiden can start and stop the whole thing with one button press, as if it were nothing but a glorified kids’ railway set. You’ll need to upgrade your hacking Profiler to acquire the skill, but it’s a godsend when it comes to evading your would be captors. Jump on, slam the doors and get out of there before anyone else can get on. It might speed up Aiden’s journey home, but your selfishness just gave everyone on the platform a massive, unfair delay.
Shorten someone’s life
There’s a hidden arsenal of things on every street corner to make go ‘bang’ in Watch Dogs, each of which can provide a nicely timed distraction. Nearby fuse boxes? Boom. Headsets? Exploded. Pipes? Ruptured. Your Profiler can make short work of all these and more, overloading them to the point of combustion. And whenever you do, the NPCs nearby will all react in varying, often hilarious, states of shock. It’s all fun and games until you detonate the box next to a senior citizen with a pacemaker.
Kill the lights
One of the most effective stealth tools in the Watch Dogs armory is the ability to cause blackouts in the local district. Triggering a blackout will plunge the city into darkness for around 30 seconds, giving you chance to creep in and around target locations like a ninja. The only thing left to worry about? How many people in Chicago just fell down a flight of stairs while you were busy sneaking about. And how many blackouts before society crumbles? Isn’t this how the TV show Revolution starts?
Death from above
As you progress through the game your hacking improves, allowing you to inflict more lasting damage on the city’s electronic adversaries. Helicopter spotlights are a great example. At first you can use your phone’s Profiler to stall them for a moment, but later on that expands to 30 long seconds, giving you time to either escape or whip out your gun. You don’t need to be an aviation expert to know what 30 seconds without lights means for an airborne helicopter in the dark. It’s probably not good news for those on board.
Cripple the mugging trade
Watch Dogs is packed to the gills with side quests, and uncovering them is just a case of keeping your ear to the ground. At times, Aiden will be able to hack in and overhear phone calls and text conversations that reveal info about upcoming crimes and drug deals. Got a moment to spare? Why not embark in a spot of vigilantism? Bust up a mugging and you’ll be doing the city a favour, but what if the crims in question were just trying to put their daughters through medical school? What if somebody had murdered his or her niece and they were just looking to scrape together the cash for a Profiler of their own? Yep, that’s another life ruined.
Destroy everything in sight
One of the best side missions in Watch Dogs, by a long, long way, is the one with the Spider Tank, which is a vehicle that looks and acts exactly as its name suggests. The pill-shaped markers around the city denote a series of missions that all unfold as the result of hallucinatory drug trips, and the Spider Tank mission puts you in the help of a walking death machine. Enjoy the power – it won’t last all that long.
Go analogue
If all else fails, you can always make Aiden put the smartphone back in his pocket and go about things in a more vintage style. This is, after all, an open world game about revenge. The hacking is the meat and veg, but you can always resort to the classics: steal cars with brute force, shoot people where it hurts and punch enemies right in the jaw. Sometimes the physical touch works wonders.
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What’s the most evil hack you’ve pulled off in Watch Dogs? Tell us in the comments below...
