Watch Dogs 2 REVIEW | Action Adventure Game | Paystation |Pc | Rack Nerve

 

Watch Dogs 2 impresses with open mission designs with multiple ways to reach your objective and some great toys to find them with by expanding on a lot of what the first game and its expansion got right and mixing action, stealth, and puzzle gameplay with handy remote-control drones. I'm torn about the tone of the story and the characters, but I had a great time exploring the Bay Area map. In nearly every way, this is a significant improvement over the original Watch Dogs.

One of the most common criticisms levelled at the original Watch Dogs was that its "fixer" hacker protagonist, Aiden Pearce, was uninteresting and unlikable. Ubisoft listened and left Pearce in Chicago, picking up in the Bay Area with the much more personable hacker vigilante Marcus Holloway, who is motivated by a philosophy rather than blind vengeance and doesn't always take himself seriously. Aside from a few cringe-inducing jokes, I prefer Marcus. Even if he and his vigilante hacker gang, Dedsec, are a little obnoxious and petty in their crusade against the Orwellian surveillance state that has become this version of America, they're generally relatable.

But, surprise, there's a problem: I don't believe Marcus is a serial killer who slaughters people by the dozen with gaudy, 3D-printed assault weapons. He's portrayed passionately in the cutscenes ranting against the misuse of people's personal information, and he appears to be a fundamentally good person. The mission then begins, and he may eliminate a group of private security guards, gang members, or worse, actual San Francisco Police, before returning to being relatively happy-go-lucky in the cutscenes, unfazed by all the murder and chaos. It's a strange disconnect that feels different than playing a violent criminal like Trevor Philips or Michael de Santa, and while it didn't affect the mechanics, it was something I was constantly noticing and feeling off about.

Watch Dogs 2 is as much a stealth game as it is an action game.

Marcus' personality is the only thing pushing us toward a non-lethal playstyle of stealth and silent takedowns because there is no morality system to punish (or reward) violent behaviour. While it isn't as detailed as, say, Hitman (you can't, for example, hide unconscious bodies to avoid detection), Watch Dogs 2 is as much a stealth game as it is an action game. Finding a silent path to an objective is a more interesting and challenging way to play because it requires you to use all of your tools, including drones that can drive through small spaces or fly to hack something you couldn't reach otherwise. They're great for scouting out a location before you charge in. It's a shame that efforts to reduce the body count aren't rewarded – even perfectly ghosting a mission earns you the same reward as turning everyone you meet into ghosts.

Even though I tried, non-lethal techniques aren't enough when you're caught in the middle of a high-tech heist. You can melee people and knock them out (or perhaps getting hit in the face by Marcus' improvised melee weapon kills them, I'm not sure), and you have an infinite-ammo stun gun that can incapacitate people at range, but it's slow to fire (even with an upgrade). It's no match for a swarm of guards armed with SMGs, so out come the big guns, which isn't always a good thing.

You have enough means of indirect attack to feel capable in a fight.

Shootouts erupt, with the same cover-based shooting that has become all too common in open-world crime games. Watch Dogs 2 feels a little different than most because you're not very durable even on normal difficulty, and the AI is reasonably good at using cover and aggressively flanking. (Also, far more San Francisco gangs have hand grenades than I would have expected.) But you have enough indirect attack options to feel competent in a fight, and some of them are a lot of fun. Explosive-carrying enemies can be hacked to detonate their bombs, some can be stunned by overloading their headset communications gear, and anyone in the environment who happens to be standing near a hackable piece of equipment can be shocked or blown up with the push of a button.

But my favourite feature is the ability to summon enraged gang members or police officers and direct them at whoever you want by fabricating evidence. It's not just a means of attack; it's also a great distraction: I love calling them in on the far side of an area and then running in to grab my objective while the guards are too preoccupied with them to notice me. This amusing ability can be used in a semi-game-breaking way: you can keep calling them in (after your power metre recharges) until every enemy is dead without lifting a finger.

You usually have more than one option on every hackable item.

Hacking is more flexible in general than it was in the first Watch Dogs game; you usually have more than one option on every hackable item. For example, you can use a hack to open a door or lock it so that no one can follow you for a few seconds. You can set an electrical box on fire to stun someone nearby, make it go haywire to attract attention, or turn it into a mine that will detonate when someone gets too close. If anything, there may be too many hackable items scattered about, to the point where I frequently struggle to choose the right one in situations where timing is critical.

Bay to Breakers

This is a fantastic open world map, and I don't just say that because I was born in the Bay Area and have lived here for nearly my entire life. The version in Watch Dogs 2 is extremely condensed, with entire neighbourhoods left on the cutting room floor, but it includes all of the major landmarks. (Thankfully, the perpetually congested traffic was left out.) It's a fun and diverse place to explore and have fun, and it's surreal to be in a car chase and look up and see something like the Moscone Center, the Palace of Fine Arts, the Painted Ladies, Fisherman's Wharf, or Stanford University. I'd recommend it for virtual tourism, especially if you've been here before and want to brush up on your knowledge.

There's also quite a bit of satire about the San Francisco area and its culture, but nothing approaching HBO’s Silicon Valley’s wit. A lot of its humor comes through in the random bios that pop up when you hack civilians, some of whom can give you jokey snippets of phone calls or text conversations, all the while humanizing the crowds and making me less enthusiastic about trying to run them over on purpose.