Crucially, you never actually feel like you're hacking anything. A lot of the time you're just pressing a button to make something happen, which at a functional level is no different to any action game. When you do get to actually hack into things at a system level, it's via a tired old PipeMania-style puzzle where you rotate pieces to guide a blue power line to a goal. If anything underscores how little interest the game has in using "hacking" as anything other than a marketable context for "making cool s*** happen", it's this.
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As much as the game tries to position him as a high-tech combination of Robin Hood and The Punisher, his actions never reflect this. Take your smartphone out of your pocket and the world is overlaid with hacking opportunities. Details of every person on the street are at your fingertips - this woman has cancer, that man likes porn - and you can also hack deeper to eavesdrop on phone conversations or text messages. It's empowering, but also creepy.
This is a game where you can empty the bank accounts of strangers on the street simply by holding down a button, yet cannot interact with the numerous homeless people begging for change. Aiden tuts at the invasions of privacy he discovers while digging inside the city's systems, yet is privy to far more personal data every time he scans the pedestrians around him looking for useful info to swipe.
This peculiar lack of empathy for the avatars around you extends into the physical world. You can chase down a petty thief and beat him to a pulp, but can only pocket the money he stole for yourself. Even GTA 5 - that high watermark of amoral sociopathy - gave you the option of returning stolen purses to their owners for a small measure of redemption. You can only ever take, never give back, and Aiden's world is a stiflingly unpleasant and selfish place as a result.
It also leads to a fundamentally broken economy where there's no limit to how much money you can take and no downside to stealing from everyone you see. You can easily amass a small fortune, but there's nothing to spend it on beyond guns and vehicles - almost all of which are freely available in the game world already.
I kept waiting for the game to offer some shift in perspective, some commentary, that made Aiden's insufferable nature more palatable or interesting, but it never came. By the end, he is all but positioned as a superhero. Nor does Watch Dogs have anything to say about the surveillance state, or about questions of privacy and identity in a data-driven world, despite using these topics to drive so much of its gameplay and story.
