Watch Dogs 2 Review

…Three Steps Back:

Sometimes it feels like I was the only one who liked the original Watch Dogs. Obviously that’s not the case, as we now have Watch dogs 2, but in the years since its release any mention of the original seemed to elicit a groan. Having loved my time messing around in Watch Dogs, I was very excited to hear a sequel was on its way.

Eager to get back to the series’ unique brand of hacking-based stealth and fresh open world mayhem, I charged into Watch Dogs 2 with a huge grin on my face.

Story:

From my overenthusiastic introduction, you probably know how this story ends: I left disappointed. As critics and consumers saw Watch Dogs as a failed experiment, the dev team at Ubisoft have come to its sequel with an overhaul in mind. This redesign starts with the world and its characters.

Whilst Watchdogs definitely took home a prize for the most unlikeable lead in any videogame I care to remember, that didn’t make Aiden Pearce a ‘bad’ character. In fact, Watch dogs’ Chicago was full of horribly flawed yet interestingly human characters. In Watch Dogs 2, we’re presented instead with peppy caricatures that constantly squawk in your face excitedly to let you know they’re zany, wacky tech-loving nerds just like you, right? Right?

Our lead, Marcus Holloway, begins the game during his initiation into the 1337 H4CKERZZZ group DedSec – an underground resistance of sorts that sounded way cooler and menacing when spoken of in hushed tones during the original. It was jarring, then, to find this group instead peopled by a very small band of misfits that feel like a patchwork amalgamation of what FOX News ‘experts’ believe real-world Anonymous to be. Unfortunately, this means that most of the cast are nothing more than aging memes cobbled together into some semblance of a person – it’s an incredibly cringeworthy production to plod your way through, and makes Life is Strange’s awkward, try-hard script look eloquent and Shakespearian in comparison.

Whilst Watch Dogs 1 was definitely immature in its grimdark representation of humanity, with edgy characters brooding endlessly, Watch Dogs 2 overcorrects in the most painful way possible. The game is literally covered in nihilist slogans, dated internet-culture graffiti and copious amounts of middle fingers covering most of Marcus’ wardrobe choices. It wore on me instantly, and I imagine anyone who isn’t a fourteen year old with a ‘U MAD BRO’ t-shirt will agree.

Gameplay:

Watch Dogs 2 share’s enough DNA with its forebear – and innovates on those solid foundations – enough to be a fun game for the most part. Anyone who sunk a decent amount of time into the original will feel immediately at home with the game’s insistent hacking threads, constantly shooting out of your main character and highlighting interactive, hackable devices in the distance.

Watch Dogs unique hook is that you can control cameras, electric wall panels, traffic lights, vehicles, or anything with an electrical pulse to give you control over the city in ways other open-world games do not. When you’re infiltrating a building you can do all your recon work from a car parked outside, jumping from camera to camera to set up traps, steal access codes and thin out the guards’ numbers remotely with a variety of tools. It’s all pretty neat, and forms the basis for almost every mission Watch Dogs has you partake in.

Sadly, Watch Dogs 2 often falls apart in its execution. All the prep in the world can go down the drain by an over-alert guard or, more often than not, a completely inexplicable twist of fate. I’m somewhat of a stealth-game aficionado, and love to complete missions, when possible, with zero alerts and zero kills. In Watch Dogs 2, however, I can count on one hand the amount of missions I completed to my own standards. Usually I’d zap a remote guard with my silenced stun gun only to have the entire complex instantly racing towards me, guns drawn. Even on my most patient runs, where every guard was called away from his post and dispatched quietly, the empty map would suddenly alert me that reinforcements had been called anyway and that security was advancing on my position.

I’m a firm believer that AI in stealth-em-ups need to be short sighted, slow to react and – well – stupid for the game to be fun. The original Watch Dogs understood this, and allowed you to cleave your way through a compound with a silenced pistol, proximity electrical charges and a few well-placed hacks. It was fast paced, punchy and hugely satisfying. About five hours in with Watch Dogs 2 I gave up my modus operandi – which had successfully seen me through a hugely enjoyable campaign in the original title – and took up a new tactic: sprinting from enemy to enemy, performing melee takedowns whilst the entire base buzzed with alarms. I’d get some objectives completed, and then take out the reinforcements in exactly the same way. I didn’t need to use the excellent, fun drones I had at my disposal, or the interesting new traps I’d just unlocked, or even bother with hacking. I’d wait for goons to open locked doors, run through them, grab the mission-critical data and leave. This ridiculous, brute-force approach worked time and time again, but was the only way I could engage in the missions without feeling incredibly frustrated. Why bother with smart planning and inventive execution when it would almost always get me killed and lose me twenty minutes of progress anyway.