Watch Dogs

Chicago in Watch Dogs is a city with the lights off. Load a new save and the map shows you a handful of story markers and a great deal of grey, and none of the things people actually play this game for, the bodies in plastic, the briefcases, the eyes, the painted codes, are anywhere on it. They are all there, and every one of our activity pages says the same thing about how to make them appear: take the mast in that district and the district tells you what it is holding.

That is why this hub is ordered the way it is rather than by mission number. Get the game running, take the towers, then decide which of the lists you actually want, because Aiden's best weapons and cars are all priced in repetitions and some of those prices are much steeper than others.

Before Chicago: make the PC build behave

This was a rough port on release and it is still worth twenty minutes of setup before you drive anywhere. Our roundup of crashes, stutters and start-up errors collects fifteen separate problems, and a striking number of them come back to the same suspect: turning the Uplay overlay off fixes the crash after the Ubisoft logo, the random desktop drops and the black screen with no audio. The others worth knowing before they happen are the blue screen tied to old AMD drivers, the missing DirectX file behind a 0xc000007b failure, and the frame skipping that only shows up while you are driving, which medium textures clear.

Once it is stable, our graphics and performance tweaks cover both halves of the settings: the in-game sliders and the GamerProfile.xml file sitting in your documents folder that the menu never shows you. Two things there are worth reading twice. Textures are effectively a yes or no question, since Ultra wants 3GB of video memory and there is no graceful middle, while Level of Detail is the setting quietly costing you around nine frames between High and Ultra for a difference you will struggle to see. Five separate config variables hang off that one slider if you want to tune it by hand.

Take the thirteen masts before anything else

The ctOS Towers are on your map from the first hour and none of them can be missed, which makes them easy to leave for later and a mistake to leave for later. Each one you climb switches on a fast travel point and, more importantly, fills in that part of the city with everything it had been keeping quiet. Aside from Blume's people trying to stop you, the towers are the game teaching you its actual grammar: find the switch box, find a camera that can see it, and if no camera can see it, find a camera that can see a camera that can. Finishing all thirteen signs over Clear Signals, an Amargosa Turbo and the SMG-11.

The investigations Aiden takes personally

Four of our most read Watch Dogs pages are the investigations, and they are the closest thing here to side stories. The Weapons Trade has nine crates padlocked into garages around the city, each one opened by a switch on a roof you cannot reach on foot, and it finishes with Tobias telling you to restock before the Tidis Warehouse, which is three waves deep in Veterans, Marksmen and Enforcers. The Human Trafficking investigation opens after the auction about halfway through the campaign and asks you to hack ten bidders, follow each phone to the briefcase it points at, then run down Quinn's business manager Joseph DeMarco as he tries to leave town.

Those two are grim in an ordinary criminal way. Missing Persons is not. Six bodies wrapped in plastic, each with a numbered blood mark and an audio log beside it, lead to a man in glasses and a red jacket in a public square, and the stakeout fails the moment he notices you looking. The reward for finishing it is the Wildfire and the Darkness Looms trophy, though by that point most people are doing it to hear the rest of the logs.

Two more trails sit alongside those but work differently enough to have their own guide. The QR Codes that Giggles left on walls can only be read down a hacked camera, sometimes after chaining to a second one, and the eight Burner Phones Maurice Vega threw away are ordinary objects you pick up in person. Our guide to Chicago's two collectible trails maps both and explains why the reach each one demands changes how you route the city.

The lists you clear for weapons, cars and skills

Everything else on the map is volume, and volume is where a plan pays. There are 16 ctOS Breaches, each a countdown between a handful of hack boxes for 250 XP and an audio log, ending in System Mangler once all sixteen are down. There are 30 Privacy Invasions behind the little eye icons, each opened with the line-joining puzzle, and each one letting you sit in a stranger's apartment listening to their evening and occasionally helping yourself to their bank account.

Crime Detection is the only entry you cannot plan around, because it simply turns up, gives you a few seconds to say yes before the prompt clears itself, and then asks you to profile a crowd without being noticed. Save the victim as well as stopping the criminal and it pays properly. Fixer Contracts are the largest commitment in the game outside the story, four job types deep, running from checkpoint races through police escapes to tailing a courier and taking his data. Our guide to every activity in Chicago lines all eight of these up by how many repeats each demands before it hands anything over, which is the fastest way to decide what to skip.

When you want out of Chicago for an hour

Two of the side systems ask nothing of the map at all. Digital Trips are bought from Defalt's vendors and drop you into five rewritten versions of the same skyline, one held by robots, one by cyborgs with detonators, one by demons you flatten with an indestructible car, one made of flowers you bounce between, and one where you are a spider tank standing on Mad Mile. Each has its own upgrade tree that stays behind when you leave. The Chess Puzzles are the opposite deal: dull, entirely optional looking, and the only way to buy the top rank of Focus, which is the skill you will miss most in the campaign.

When somebody else is in your Chicago

The multiplayer here is not a separate mode list so much as an intrusion. Online Hacking and Tailing put a real player into your save as a pedestrian, and the strange thing about being on the receiving end is how little you are told: a camera that will not respond, someone sitting in a parked car, a driver behaving slightly wrong. Online Decryption is the straightforward one, a race to hold a file long enough to finish reading it across eleven arenas. Both are covered, along with what each of them lets you keep, in our minigames and multiplayer guide.