Shack Reels: Watch Dogs' tour guide to Chicago

This week, Shack Reels offers a tourist's guide to Chicago, as imagined by Watch Dogs.

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Those that have been playing Watch Dogs have likely noticed Ubisoft's careful depiction of Chicago. But what exactly can you see in their interpretation of the Windy City? And more importantly, what can you do? The answer to the latter question involves a whole lot of explosions, if our latest Shack Reels video is any indication.

Travel along with us to the scenic city of Chicago with this tourist's guide, which you can see below.

For more on Watch Dogs' take on Chicago, check out this comaprison to the real world Windy City, as well as our interview with the game's developers.

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?

From The Chatty
  • reply
    May 31, 2014 11:00 AM

    Ozzie Mejia posted a new article, Shack Reels: Watch Dogs' tour guide to Chicago.

    This week, Shack Reels offers a tourist's guide to Chicago, as imagined by Watch Dogs.

    • reply
      May 31, 2014 1:31 PM

      Being a person that's lived in and around the city of Chicago most of my entire life,I can say that a lot of the architecture is spot on,and really feels like the city,but other things,not so much.I understand that for gaming purposed there has to be massive scaling back of the city,but for the most part,there shouldn't be any curved residential streets in the game being that the inner city is very much gridded out in straight blocks,with straight diagonal streets going through many of them.

      The fact that there is no Halsted St,Western,nor Ashland Avenues,which all three of those streets pretty much run the length of the entire city from north to south,I find quite disappointing.

      Alas,I can overlook those things because many off the neighborhoods feel genuine for a game.Downtown is very well done as well(with far less traffic,thank god!),along with the The L trains.

      The one thing that I noticed that the devs absolutely did not get right are the NPC's names.Chicago has the second largest concentration of Polish people in the world,only next to Warsaw,yet I haven't see a single character who's last name ends in "ski". We also have a very large Irish population,yet I don't feel like the devs captured that either.

      Now this might now seem like a big deal to people that aren't from here,but for us that have,or at least for myself,it's a big part of the city's identity that is completely missing from the game.And while it doesn't take away from the gameplay at all,I feel like if it were there,it would give the game an extra level of immersion and detail unlike anything else.

      All that said,it's a great game so far.

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