he thought revealed "the city's true beauty"), and called the combat and hacking "satisfying". Dan Stapleton of IGN praised the game's visuals and the open world's "intricately detailed" map. He also enjoyed the combat: "The cover-based gunplay feels good". PC Gamers Christopher Livingston called the hacking the game's most positive feature; although he liked the stealth, his favorite approach to battle was gunplay. For Polygon, Arthur Gies praised the combat's gunplay feature and wrote that it was "aided by a good, functional third-person cover system, which helps with more than just shooting — it also allows for effective stealth". Steven Burns of VideoGamer.com called the game "undoubtedly enjoyable, but it won't linger long in the memory". Carter was dissatisfied with the story, citing "lifeless" characters and calling the plot's events "fairly predictable and clichéd"; the graphics were thought inferior to the game's marketing footage. Whitehead criticized the hacking for resorting to "tired old PipeMania-style" puzzles and saw the story and main character as the game's weakest aspects, saying that the script avoided the moral dilemmas offered by its set-up. Marchiafava agreed with Carter that the graphics were less impressive than they were in early videos, criticizing poor character design and the story for not living up to its gameplay. Like Whitehead, VanOrd said that the predicament surrounding technology "rarely reaches any conclusions or digs very deeply". Hartup criticized the main character, calling him "a bit of a dullard", and faulted the story for its reliance on "unimaginative stereotypes". Jeff Gerstmann of Giant Bomb criticized the story and characters for a lack of organization, which he said made it difficult to care about the game. Stapleton disliked the main character's lack of personality, and found the supporting cast more interesting. Livingston saw little to like in the story, and also preferred another character to Aiden. Gies wrote, "After a promising (albeit well-trod) start, Watch Dogs plot struggles to remain coherent", and likened the characters to caricatures. Tom Watson wrote in New Statesman that the game "has so many complex side missions and obligatory tasks that it becomes dull; it's humourlessly derivative of the open world of Grand Theft Auto V". Sales Watch Dogs was Ubisoft's most pre-ordered new intellectual property (IP), their second-highest pre-ordered title, the most pre-ordered game of the year (more than 800,000 copies), and the most pre-ordered game for the eighth generation of video game consoles. The company's