The big problem with Watch Dogs is not the bleak visual style. It’s not the dour protagonist. It’s not the hokey dialogue or occasionally awkward controls.

No. The big problem with Watch Dogs is that each magnificent leap of technology which allows modern game developers to simulate ever more detailed open world environments only serves to shine a spotlight all the brighter on a lack of true depth behind the wizard’s curtain.

In short, Watch Dogs suffers from the gameplay equivalent of uncanny valley.

Take the stealth driving mission as an example. During normal gameplay you can charge through blockades and wail past dozens of police cars with reckless, gleeful abandon. If the cops see you, you’re in the shit, but you can still try to blast your way out in a mad dash for liberty. You either lose the heat or get taken down in a blaze of glory.

But suddenly the plot flips into stealth mission and the rules of the universe flip with it. Now, if the police see you, you’re busted instantly. No chance to run, no option to gun it out. Not even a cool death scene or capture sequence. Just an anticlimactic black screen followed by a loading animation.

This arbitrary adjustment of rules to suit the story shatters the open world illusion over and over again. Jarring reminders that there’s not really a living, breathing city underneath all those pixels.

Contributing further to the problem is the game’s profiling mechanic. This much publicised aspect of Watch Dogs allows players to use their in-game mobile phone to glean insights into the inner lives of each person they pass on the street.

When your profiler is turned on, snippets of data hover in the air beside each NPC:

Barbara is a recovering addict.
Tony regularly downloads online porn.
Terence is a newlywed.

These little nuggets are supposed to imbue each digital citizen of Chicago with the hint of a rich backstory. You’re meant to feel like you’re sharing a city with thousands of unique human beings.

You don’t. Every single one of them behaves the same way when you interact with them. The little bit of backstory floating in the air beside them has absolutely no bearing on behaviour or gameplay, except for the relative handful of characters who are marks for missions or enemies to be dispatched.

The behaviour of the average citizen in Watch Dogs’ Chicago is shallow, repetitive and generic. It is totally disassociated from the personal insight that profiling offers. The very feature that tries to communicate their individuality serves only to remind you of just how nondescript they really are.

Here’s an example that bugs the shit out of me and crops up at least a half dozen times in any Watch Dogs gaming session so far. Every time I get on a motorbike, no matter how carefully I saddle up and how elegantly I ease into the traffic flow, at least one pedestrian on the footpath adjacent jumps like a startled rabbit and makes a totally unprovoked remark about reckless drivers. Why? It feels rote, unnecessary, and makes no sense in context to what’s actually happening.

The result is that the “personalities” feel like nothing more sophisticated then random clothing options, laid over the top of a bunch of dead pixels. Again, like missions that change the rules of the universe, the effect only serves to remind you of just how superficial this city and its residents really are.

It’s been 14 years since Electronic Arts first showed us a trick like this with the ground breaking Sims. The only new thing Watch Dogs brings over a decade later to this slight-of-hand magic trick is a larger sandbox.

The sense of superficiality is all the more striking when you compare Watch Dogs (as you inevitably must) against the genre’s gold standard — last year’s Grand Theft Auto V. In GTAV, the execution of open world was nothing short of miraculous. Where the Chicago of Watch Dogs feels scripted and mechanical, GTA’s Los Santos is vibrant, unpredictable and dynamic.

It’s almost as though by allowing players to reach underneath the hood of the city with hacking tools and gadgets, Watch Dogs has revealed just how bare the bones of its digital world really are. In every way that GTA brilliantly concealed its artifice, Watch Dogs seems to clumsily expose it.

Despite all this, there’s genuine thrills to be found while playing Watch Dogs. The hackable city offers some brilliant moments. I cackled with glee the first time I remotely stalked a victim, hopping from one one security camera to the next, before hacking his personal inventory to detonate a stash of explosives he was carrying. A kick of satisfaction had me whooping when I raised a bridge with perfect timing during a car chase, so that I went flying over its expanding gap while my pursuers plummeted to their doom in my wake. And I will probably never tire of creating massively destructive mayhem behind the wheel of a gigantic robot spider.

But there’s nothing here worthy of the label “next generation”. Precious few fresh approaches to gameplay, no startling new level of depth to the world you inhabit. Watch Dogs suffers badly from the conventions of open world games in general, and the fresh memory of GTAV’s brilliance in particular.

Better luck next time, Ubisoft.