WATCH DOGS 2
Heroic hackers hound corporate bullies
A GAME IN WHICH you spend 30 hours conspiring to bring about a giant DDoS attack by getting people who like you to backdoor their own PCs and phones may seem like it’s casting you as the bad guy, as would the beatings you hand out to security guards. But as you’re sticking it to a large corporation that keeps records of people’s private lives, you get some rebellious cool points that elevate you to hero status.
WatchDogs2 takes a trip through the headlines of today’s and tomorrow’s news sites, having you hack emails and take on corporate interests for the presumed benefit of San Francisco’s grateful citizens. It’s presented as an open-world stealth game, as you use your hacking powers to move unseen through the environment by taking over cameras and opening electronic locks from afar. It undoes this by requiring your physical presence at keyboards and terminals, meaning you must make your way there past the NPC guards you could circumvent by piloting one of your drones.
Despite three-word backstories for you to read while you drain their bank accounts, most NPCs are a bit robotic. Remote-controlling a forklift truck to run over and kill the director of a really bad movie alerts the security guards just fine, but they’re more interested in the guy in the hoodie watching them from afar than they perhaps should be. Leave your car blocking the road, and they patiently queue for hours like they’re British or something, or loiter in the doorway of a shop watching the fallout from an explosion you set off earlier (we have questions about how you hack pipes, but given that you re-route power supplies by playing PipeMania, perhaps it shouldn’t come as such a surprise) until you get frustrated and drive a motorcycle through them. Then, someone round the corner dials 911, and the police kill you.
If some of this is starting to sound a bit like a GTA game, that’s because Rockstar’s series is the obvious point of comparison, as you steal cars to get around and carry out phoned-in missions. While your aims are more altruistic than Franklin and Trevor’s, you can still go blasting your way through, thanks to a monstrous 3D printer at your home base, capable of churning out as many shotguns as you can afford.
Being a Ubisoft open world, there are innumerable side missions to distract you along the way, and these help drag out the running time. It’s a long game by modern standards, and you’ll have seen all it has to offer long before the end—although being able to fake a criminal record or shady past so your target is arrested or rubbed out by the mafia rarely fails to amuse. The game’s systems, however, are just a little too shallow to keep sustained interest for the entire running time.