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://Lock up your data. Jen Simpkins hacks Watch Dogs 2’ s sandbox and discovers a smarter, slicker, sillier 2.0_//
Just between us hackers, let’s talk about the real untapped potential in the room. It’s Watch Dogs – an ambitious open-world action shooter that promised to define the PS4 generation back in 2014. But it didn’t quite deliver. The hacking mechanic was trivial, average gunplay was over-emphasised, the world was bland… and anti-hero Aiden Pearce? Grey as Chicago smog. Fortunately, this sequel provides one hell of an attitude adjustment.
Watch Dogs 2 abandons paranoid Chicago for easy-breezy San Francisco. As we trot young DedSec hacker Marcus Holloway towards a
park in our latest playtest, every detail of the city screams Californian style. Coffee shops on graffiti-tagged corners; stylistas fussing tiny dogs. “The inspiration for the game’s tone came from San Fran itself,” creative director Jonathan Morin notes. “When we went to California and started to really dig into the place, it was obvious there’s this ‘everything is possible’ type of culture going on.” Everything, you say? Let’s test that theory out…
HACK TO THE FUTURE
Marcus’ phone makes Aiden’s look like a Nokia brick circa 1999. We align our reticule over a mohawked passer-by and tap o to infiltrate his mobile, revealing name, current mood, income and a nugget of info – he’s part of a knitting club. Holding o down reveals new options. Do we want to siphon off money from his bank account with q? Distract him with a mobile alert on w? Call the cops with r, or set a gang on him with e? The answer:
“WE CAN JUMP ON TOP OF OUR CAR AND SURF IT DOWN THE STREET.”
none of the above. The man’s just trying to get his needlepoint on.
Instead, we flick our Generation X-ray vision over to a plainlydressed lady. She runs a puppy mill. This, we decide, is not on. As such, we take immediate action, hacking her phone then hitting r to alert the authorities like the heroes we are. We press 2 and choose the ‘Insult’ emote to flip the bird at our oblivious mark. Immediately, her green emoji status turns red. She shoves us… and the overzealous cop bodyslams Millicent McHatespuppies into the sidewalk out of nowhere. Job done – time for us to open our Camera app for an obligatory selfie with the yelling detainee. Heroes.
Pedestrians gawp. We foolishly jack a Mini (messing with a nearby snitch’s phone to stop them calling 911), and nitro-boosting with q gives it welly. Our phone’s a second steering wheel. Tapping o at cars auto-swerves them out the way, parting the heaving San Fran traffic like the Red Sea.
In a grungy garage, we find emojigoggled, spike-studded sidekick Wrench. Our mission, he announces with a pixelated wink, is to hack into HAUM 2.0 – a private home security system sold by a shady company bragging that it’s “bulletproof” to our hacking group, DedSec. Sounds like a challenge. Wrench gives us the task of half-inching a shipment of their tech, so we hop to it. This takes longer than expected, for one brilliant reason: we discover we can jump on top of our car, then remote-drive/surf it down the street. (We make it one block before we eat tarmac.)
WATCH AND LEARN
The facility we arrive at is crawling with guards. Pressing 6 tosses a quadcopter drone into the air to have a remote squizz about the place. Result: van spotted. Our attempt at sneaking to it, tapping q to pop in and out of cover, gets Marcus nabbed. Then, we
discover the ultimate hack: getting in the sea. Avoiding combat, Marcus swims around the docks and shimmies up a ladder.
A single guard seems lax, we think, zapping him with a nonlethal taser gun and hopping into the van… until we realise the facility gates need an access key. Uh-oh. Activating Nethack smothers San Fran in grey static, highlighting what we need. 4 deploys our two-wheeled jumper drone, which we drive through vents towards the access key’s bearer. As he turns his back, we instinctively squeeze i for a stealthy speed-boost. This manifests, instead, as colourful language when a tinnyvoiced taunt erupts from our jumper. The guard turns, enraged – but we quickly hack his phone to distract him, buying us time to nab the key.
The next few minutes are sublime. One, two, three gates slide open smoothly under the quadcopter with a tap of o as we trundle off in the van. In our heads, Lakmé’s operatic Flower Duet plays mockingly, guards falling over themselves to stop us getting away. We’ve hit the jackpot: a HAUM security robot. Wrench gives Wrench Jr a cuddle (heart-eye emojis and
“WE DISCOVER THE ULTIMATE HACK: GETTING IN THE SEA.”
all) and we’re off to show the gang.
Nestled in the basement of a board game shop, DedSec HQ is littered with spray paint cans, plastered with meme stickers (we spy the ‘Y U NO?’ face) and housing some nifty Metal Gear figurines. Hacking tablets reveals DedSec members’ backstories. What about their phones? We try – but they’re prepared, obviously. Josh’s profile lists his
“WE’RE STRUCK BY HOW MUCH WD2 HAS LEARNED FROM ITS PREDECESSOR.”
name and bio as ‘Nope, nope’ and ‘Nopenopenope’, while Wrench prefers the classier ‘YOUR FUTURE BOYFRIEND’ with a bio suggesting that we do something wholly inappropriate to our mother.
We forego the progenitorporking for the next mission: breaking into a HAUM-protected house. We’ve found a collectable song for our Media Player app, so it’s earbuds in, and San Fran punk band The Dead Kennedys’‘Soup Is Good Food’ soundtracking our mission. Good vibes dispel quickly: the mansion is 70% red laser fences and 30% hostile cousins of Wrench Jr. Gulp. We swagger over nonetheless to twangy guitar, holding o on the fences in Nethack view to follow ‘data flow’ lines to a hackable terminal.
We can briefly power down the fences, guard robots and security cameras – but they’re on timers, making quick work essential. We can’t
resist reprogramming a robot on e to find out what its heart symbol does. Hilariously, it zooms down the driveway to fling its loved-up self at pedestrians while screaming “HOLD ME!” and we’re laughing – until it comes after us, burbling sweet nothings and bashing us to near-death. It’s safer as a jukebox, we decide, hastily re-hacking it with r to blare custom tunes.
DOGGIN’ AROUND
Sashaying into the swanky pad and up to the bedroom (where a gorgeous supercar’s sitting behind a glass divider), a rogue robot triggers the alarm. We crouch behind the sofa, slamming 8 for a shotgun as security guards appear. An EMP grenade on a robot remotely detonated takes out one… then we remember the car. We hack the parking lift, hop in, glide
“GUNPLAY DOESN’T FEEL GREAT, BUT WE’VE HARDLY TOUCHED WEAPONS.”
to ground-level, and purr the silverblue beauty off into the night.
Theoretically, that is. In actuality, we don’t see the hackable parking lift. Instead, we drive the car off the platform, into the upholstery and two guards. When we can’t crash it through the bay windows, we bail out, falling backwards over the balcony and rolling into the bushes. Master hacker Marcus Holloway, everybody.
Once we’ve stopped giggling, we’re struck by how much Watch Dogs 2 has learned from its predecessor. Hacking’s meaningful, with San Fran’s systems reacting brilliantly to our shenangians. While gunplay still doesn’t feel great, we’ve hardly touched dangerous weapons: the nonlethal pranking possibilities have kept us too busy. “Our level design director just finished a game without even aiming at anything!” Morin reveals.
SECOND TIME LUCKY
But why should PS4 gamers trust the hack-’em-up series after the disappointment of the first game? Morin answers: “Watch Dogs was created in an era where we had to forecast what the next-generation would be. We forecasted the best we could. Then we had the benefit of having millions of comments about the new game… Watch Dogs 2 delivers a lot more into this concept of taking a controller and expressing yourself with the tools you have. Not just following a line, but instead looking at a problem in the game and saying, ‘What if I deal with it this way? What if I break this concept and do it this way?’ Getting surprised by the reaction of the game, and feeling like a real hacker, in a sense.”
This time around, it’s not the Aiden Pearce Show, or even Marcus’ – it feels like we’re finally the ones hacking a perfectly-pitched playground in our own personal style. Set your status to AFK once it arrives – we can guarantee this sequel will hijack all your time come release.