14 DAY TRIAL // The only thing better than playing video games is watching the live-action videos inspired by them. At least the good ones. Okay, the actual games are still better, but some of the videos are also pretty nice.
Especially this Watch Dogs inspired one, featuring a lot of parkour action and some of the key elements in Ubisoft’s upcoming open-world action adventure video game, such as hacking stuff and… hacking more stuff that shouldn’t even be hackable.
The video cast two parkour runners, Robert Bennett and Chris Romrell, as Watch Dogs’ protagonist Aiden Pearce and some mobster dude that’s about to get it, following them during a stunt-filled chase around the streets of Chicago.
The video is coming from YouTube channel devinsupertramp, directed by Devin Graham, who is known for having also created some Assassin’s Creed parkour videos in the past. Also pretty good. Also making people wonder whether Watch Dogs isn’t just Assassin’s Creed with cellphones.
Ubisoft itself enlisted the young director, who confessed to being stoked to film in the same location where a spectacular scene from the Dark Knight movie by Christopher Nolan was shot.
And in case you’re wondering why the cop so blatantly ignored basic gun safety procedures and opened fire into a crowd of innocent bystanders in the beginning, then you haven’t been paying attention to the game.
Your goal in Watch Dogs is to take down “the man,” who in this iteration of every conspiracy nut, libertarian and free market advocate’s fantasy is a corrupt city operating system that just wouldn’t take care of those blasted criminals once and for all.
Well, sort of. You play the role of a hacker thug, a new breed of computer savvy gang banger stemming from classic cyberpunk literature who seeks to bring his own type of justice to the people responsible for his niece’s death. Thing is, one of them is himself, as he was the target and his niece simply collateral.
As the morally-ambiguous vigilante that he is, he makes use of the city-wide surveillance system in order to track down criminals, but also to get away from law enforcement officers, through a series of clever hacking sessions interspersed with stealth, parkour and cover-based shooting sections.
Watch Dogs is coming to the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on May 27. The game is also currently in the works for the Nintendo Wii U system, but the release date has not yet been announced.
