Watch Dogs 2
Despite a smooth transition to the PC, the stealth can’t quite hack it.
Hackers are often portrayed as computer savants hunched over a keyboard, writing script faster than the characters can appear on a dirty CRT. Watch Dogs 2, an openworld action adventure set in the San Francisco Bay Area, turns hacking into a full contact sport.
It’s the GTA template of a city, cars, guns and ragdoll physics, but you can also use a phone to remotely overload a circuit box and knock out security guards or hack underground pipes to blow up huge sections of the street. (Yes, you can hack pipes.) It rarely feels like you’re using technical expertise to give big, insidious tech companies the run around. Instead, you’re using brute force.
Even if you’re murdering people to steal data, Watch Dogs 2’ s loose take on pop culture hacktivism assumes a more bizarre, self-aware direction for the series than before. There’s a lot of goofy open-world fun to be had mostly as a byproduct of the chaos your abilities enable, and especially by combining abilities in the free roam co-op mode. But the game’s stealth systems are undermined by hacking and combat abilities that feel too unwieldy and passive to be reliable, and as slapstick as it can be, relying on the same powers throughout the 30-hour runtime turns the game’s best abilities boring far too soon.
The biggest lesson Watch Dogs 2 learned from its predecessor is that we’re a tired of mopey, edgy protagonists, of which Aiden Pearce was a case in point. This time around, Marcus and his support cast in the hacker collective DedSec are likeable, funny people, and it’s good to see a black lead in a big-budget game. Marcus and his friends are upbeat and know how to laugh.
The main missions typically task Marcus with extracting or sabotaging data from a heavily guarded building, often an obvious stand-in for the known Silicon Valley giants (Google is Nudle, for instance). Simple AI guards patrol the arenas, and using two new RC drones — one wheeled, the other airborne — you can scout out the area, marking enemies and interactive tech.
Because you have hacker smarts, you’re able to use drones, security cameras or Marcus to interface with CTOS, an operating system embedded into city infrastructure, which means you can remotely influence anything connected to the system, like traffic lights, robots and those handy explosive pipes, just by looking at them and pressing a button. For instance, if you’re trying to climb a building to get a clear vantage point, you can hack a massive construction crane, rotate it and lower the platform on the end to scale the tallest buildings in the city. Drive a motorcycle onto that thing, take it up to the highest point, and you can attempt to infiltrate a few outdoor enemy bases. It didn’t work for me, but I laughed a lot, and it was more interesting than shocking guards with circuit boxes or calling in mob hits to murder them.
To truly be stealthy, you’ll spend a lot of time controlling your drones. Snaking around most spaces are ventilation shafts just big enough for a small RC robot to roll through, but I never have a sense I’m being stealthy or subverting the enemy threat when using them. I’m infiltrating through the same obvious path that everyone else will, just going through the motions so I know where my objective is and where all the guards are. There’s no tension in mapping out an
arena with drones since everything is always in its designed place. It’s just busywork.
There were entire floors I’d scout with a drone, sneaking by unseen to download classified files or plant a virus, only to find that Marcus’ physical presence was required to tap some keys in the end. So I’d essentially replay the whole level, but as Marcus, who is easily spotted unless he’s “in cover”, meaning I’ve pushed him against a wall. I moved through the same rooms, the same guard paths and to the same objective only to die from getting caught by a guard whose red outline was barely visible against a visually busy scene. Then it’s back to square one, scouting and setting up with the drone again.
At your HQ, you can 3D print everything from a shotgun to a grenade launcher. It’s strange that lethal weapons are included at all, given the peaceful ends DedSec is firing for, and Marcus doesn’t seem the type to murder. Shooting your way out of a situation isn’t much fun, either. The cover system is serviceable, but with enemies that like to make a beeline for your position and with no dodge roll to dance around them, there isn’t much you can do once you’re flanked except run and shoot.
So the hacking abilities are too passive to be as playful as Saints Row 4’ s superhero sandbox and the shooting feels dated in comparison to GTA V, which is over three years old. Without many ways to stack abilities or exploit the world and enemy AI beyond bullets and electrocution,
Watch Dogs 2 is suspended somewhere in the middle, and gets tired after 30 hours of play.
The game has a massive list of side missions. In one, you hack Ubisoft’s office to leak a trailer for an unreleased game — but most want you to climb a building to tag a billboard or hack a CTOS service box for a quick scene that pokes fun at Silicon Valley bigwigs. There’s a whole series of mundane missions where you just hack ATM machines and mess with terrible people trying to withdraw money, which I’d be into if it wasn’t the same joke told six times via what amounts to a fetch quest. You can race your drones, drive San Franciscans around in a Crazy Taxiesque series of challenges and take selfies near famous landmarks to gain followers and upgrade your hacking skills.
As mundane as the main missions can feel, they at least take place in one of my favourite open worlds in recent memory — in a scaled-down version of the Bay Area, USA, including San Francisco, Oakland, Palo Alto and a small chunk of the Marin Headlands. San Francisco is the primary location, and it feels like a real place.
Huge sections of the city are missing, but as a big mashup of the wealthy and tourist-heavy bits, it works as a satirical backdrop for an endless stream of Silicon Valley jabs and dick jokes. But the parts it recreates are captured with eerie realism. I could intuit where famous landmarks might be located, and found them just based on my sense of direction. Most striking are the vistas. Head up a hill in the evening for a beautiful and fairly accurate skyline.
Furthermore, the user interface has been
completely retooled to work with a keyboard and mouse. It doesn’t make driving as precise as it is with a controller, however. If you have a controller plugged in, you can seamlessly switch back and forth, too. After the first game’s dodgy PC port, it’s clear Ubisoft didn’t want to repeat the same mistake.
Watch Dogs 2 never made me feel Hella Cyber, but when used to leverage as much chaos as possible, it can feel like playing GTA with a measured God mode enabled. Silly and strange things happen often, but only if you ignore the missions and mess around in the beautifully realised open world. That’s where the game’s true enjoyment lies — not in its Hot Topic hacktivism and frustrating, bland stealth scenarios, but in the nonsense you can pull off in a big sandbox with wacky toys and fast cars.