Watch Dogs 2

We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

Watch Dogs was a game announced to much fanfare and burdened with lofty expectations, some of which were attainable and others not so much. Regardless of what many thought of the finished product Watch Dogs had a clear and comprehensive idea behind it, that while it may have stumbled here and there in executing, was an everpresent foundation that everything else traced back to. Watch Dogs 2 almost apologetically scrubs away nearly everything that the first game built up, replacing it with a vibrant and inviting new paint job that ultimately is all style but has very little substance.

Watch Dogs 2 is in itself a rather stark contrast to the first game. Ubisoft has clearly taken a hint from what the internet has been saying (and most of it has been almost hatefully negative) and they’ve apparently decided to do a hard 180 on the franchise. The much maligned Aiden Pearce has been set aside, and instead we are introduced to Marcus Holloway, a youth from Oakland that has it out for the “system” which wrongfully branded him a criminal based on projected risk. Armed with a laptop and wide array of pop culture knowledge, our young hacker sets out to join the ranks of DedSec - an Anonymous hacker group stand in - and expose the big-data giant for the manipulative and invasive villain that it is.

The problem with the story is that everything you do in Watch Dogs 2 is incredibly trite and largely on the juvenile-delinquent side, ultimately leading up to a flat ending where at any moment I wouldn’t have been too surprised to hear someone say “wake up sheeple” in dead-pan full earnest. The story being told here isn’t particularly serious or involved, it’s not trying to be a moving tale of justice or a brand of social commentary - the narrative of Watch Dogs 2 can be summed up as a series of loosely connected cheeky jabs at pop culture, social media - the here and now of world events. While the first game might have been too serious for it’s own good, it had a very well defined path with appropriate character motivations. Aiden Pearce (the most disdained protagonist of the past few years in gaming) was a man that basically goofed up and as a result of said goof his young niece dies in an accident that was meant to scare him off from digging deeper. Enraged and consumed by grief, Pearce gets completely lost in a rather typical tale of one-half vengeance one-half redemption, that ends up takim him straight through the heart of Chicago’s corrupt criminal underground. Marcus on the other hand is a young kid that had to do some community service because a computer program flagged him as a risk based on pattern algorithms. As such he sets out to bring this system down in various ways that all feel petty at worst and trite at their best. Tagging billboards, messing with celebrities, persons of authority and generally being a nuisance to anyone involved with the system is your main means of retribution. The ends here very rarely seem to justify the means, which more often than not go to quite the extremes as the collateral damage inadvertently piles up higher and higher. I can see how Aiden might for example hack a street light causing a massive car pile-up while on the way to getting one step closer to finding the people responsible for his nieces death, while the same can’t be really said for Marcus. Stealing a car from a movie set only to go on a wild police chase through the entire city, smashing into civilian left and right, just so that DedSec gets mentioned on the news and gets them more followers? I don’t know..

So how do you take down the evil Blume corporation? The gang at DedSec, composed of colorful and diverse personalities, need to accumulate “followers” through their mobile app, who in turn through their fandom provide them with the computing power needed to crack the corporate nut of the central servers. The gathering of followers is your arbitrary gating from being able to simply do the final mission right away, although in all honesty I don’t remember why as the final few segments of the game make no mention of reaching any sort of computing power milestone - things just naturally progress to a finish. Your gang is basically the hacker versions of the ninja turtles - Wrench is good with machines, Sitara has an attitude, Marcus leads..and Josh is ..autistic? Just like the real ninja turtles. Throughout the campaign each of these twenty-something year olds with a burning passion to open the eyes of the people will send you out to do the dirty work necessary to impress your fan base and earn you those likes, follows and subscribes.

Each mission has you going to a certain location and “hacking” something or other in order to accomplish your goal. Marcus has a wide arsenal of weapons and gadgets to help him along, but the main two you will become quite familiar with are a remote flying drone and a land based robot that has the ability to hop up on boxes or over lower fences. A good 90% of the entire game is spent crouched behind a wall, or even sitting cross legged in the middle of the street, while you navigate either robot through ventilation shafts, fences and around guards in order to reach a power box that needs to be interacted with physically. On top of this you will also be constantly using “hacker vision” which largely mutes out all sound and shows you the world in a sort of wireframe mode, with all links between doors and key-panels highlighted for easy navigation. Hacker vision carries with it the same criticism as detective vision in the Batman games. There were plenty of times when I was shocked to find out what an area even looked like after I turned off the hacker vision, as it disables textures, and seeing that the blue room full of rectangular boxes was actually an office, or a machine room or a warehouse. I feel like I was missing out on this intricately designed world because playing the game effectively meant I needed to be stuck in wireframe mode all the time. The first game relied a lot more on jumping from stationary camera to camera, but you did so while seeing your surroundings. Ultimately you will spend very little time actually doing anything as Marcus himself, usually entering his body only after your drones have done all the dirty work for you. The reliance on these bots is something that the game should have scaled back I think. Hacking boxes to open doors to open more boxes is basically the crux of the entire game.

When the going does get tough you can always fall back on the trusty left trigger, right trigger action. Despite being a bunch of white hat hackers (the good kind) you can 3D print guns, rifles, shotguns and even grenade launchers back at homebase and rain down murder indiscriminately. There is an option to go non-lethal as Marcus always carries a taser with him, but ultimately you’re not rewarded for doing so and in fact the game becomes a lot more punishing when you do. Tazed guards will get back up over time, meaning that 20 minutes of careful sneaking and non lethal takedowns will lead to you being blocked off from the exit by guards that have now gotten back up and are on alert calling in backup. Seeing as the game doesn’t always do the greatest job of checkpointing in the middle of these hacker escapades I actually began to systematically walk over to each and every guard I had taken down non-lethally and popping them once in the head just to make sure I had a clean getaway. The fear of having to repeat an entire segment all over again wiped away any suspension of disbelief that I was just an innocent hacker kid trying to sneak in for some hacks. And I didn’t even mention how extremely aggressive the AI is in Watch Dogs 2. Without all the upgrades for blowing up manholes and general city-takedowns it’s nearly impossible to outrun even the most basic cop levels as AI will constantly spawn around you and track you down like rabid dogs. Getting caught was almost preferable to wasting time hiding in alleyways or trying to shake off pursuits.

Overall there is very little diversity in what you will be doing throughout the main missions. The first game had less gadgets but did more with them. There were car chases, a particularly clever section where you infiltrate a gang hideout by jumping from camera to camera all over the building and a weird wave based horde mode where you’d utilize mechanical booby traps to take down the opposing forces. You could definitely tell they tried to get creative with what they had. The biggest change of pace in Watch Dogs 2 is that once in a while, and especially towards the latter half of the story, you will have to solve a pipe-dreams-esque puzzles of rotating nodes in order to create data pathways from point A to B. This puzzle that was present in the first game, but now instead of a simple grid for you to solve it’s needlessly superimposed over the actual gameworld forcing you to run up and down rooms, following the “pipe lines” around corners in order to connect the dots. This is a Ubisoft joint after all so there are of course a ton of side activities like playing the role of an Uber driver or throwing up graffiti on buildings around the city. These are progressively unlocked as specific tasks your team throws your way in case you want to take a break from chasing down Blume, but they are all rather shallow and forgettable experiences that take a few minutes each to complete.

Despite all these criticisms Watch Dogs 2 isn’t a bad game. It’s absolutely fine, it plays alright even if the movement is strangely stiff coming from the people that brought you Assassins Creed. There is a lot to do and even after the credits roll you’ll be able to go back and chase down whatever it is that you might have missed. The problem is that I never really got invested in anything I was doing. At one point the mean bad guy, who you encounter several times, sneers that you’re fighting for something that most people don’t even care about..and weirdly enough I kind of agreed. All the hacking, shooting and general mayhem ensues so that you can prove to people that Google is actually collecting your data and using it in various ways. Well uhh yah. Maybe I’ve just aged out of that rebellious age group but I couldn’t get behind these wild hacker kids despite thinking they were generally OK characters. There was a lot of attitude and color infused into this sequel but all that cool style didn't translate into deeper or more meaningful gameplay - I would even go as far as to say that the team behind this installment lost a lot of focus trying to please the general public. The first game while not perfect was a very coherent package from start to finish with a lot of really clever ideas. Watch Dogs 2 does very little to expand on those ideas and simply splatters everything with a hearty dose of neon skull graffiti and techno jokes. As an open world game Watch Dogs 2 does a decent job of presenting the player with a twist on the formula and giving them a whole lot of content to chew through. As a story meant to engage you on any sort of level it honestly doesn’t really go anywhere all that interesting, nor does it take the franchise into an interesting new direction. If you have a hankering for some open world shenanigans then I’d say give it a shot, just don’t expect a wild tale of twists and turns to keep you playing.