For those who don't know, in late January Ubisoft made the bold decision to let PS4 and XBox One owners play three full hours of their holiday season tentpole for free. I finally got around to using my three hours, and while I can't say I had a bad time with the game, I'm also not sure giving players a three hour window to digest Watch Dogs 2's opening moments is an effective way to juice sales of the game. In those three hours I met most but I presume not all of the main characters, bought several clothing items, took some selfies at some landmarks, lived out my secret fantasy of being an Uber driver, completed a few story missions, attempted to start a co-op mission and read a lot of civilian profiles while gawking at the San Francisco skyline. But what did I really learn about Watch Dogs 2, and did the demo sell me on the game or confirm worries that kept me from purchasing the game in the first place?

First of all, I can tell Watch Dogs 2 is a huge game. During the opening cinematic they reference the "Internet of Things"; Watch Dogs 2 appears to have been designed with the goal of being the "Video Game of Things". This is really detrimental to a timed demo because you'll spend it intermittently aware of and not aware of the timer in the background. I probably spent 20 cumulative minutes looking at clothes for Marcus, for example. I also spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to get to a hackable thing on top of a pair of buildings, both times only to realize I likely didn't have the hacking skills necessary to get myself up there. This was an issue that came up again and again over in my three hours with the game - I was given very little direction and often found myself without the tools to complete tasks I came across other than buying clothes or shooting security officers.

Which brings me to maybe the biggest flaw of the Watch Dogs 2 trial period and how they introduce you to the game in general: it just sort of happens. Marcus goes from newbie recruit to just one of the guys in the frame of a 12-pack, and DedSec goes from building followers by creating viral videos to killing a dozen security guards and stealing a car in about a half hour (including Wrench's odd line about being a Merchant of Death). The vibe of the game takes several wild tonal swings in that three hour period that you're left both appreciating the far lighter tone compared to the first game and wondering whether the game's too silly for its own good. The cutscenes I saw in that three hour window were also pretty uniformly terrible; several long pauses that would have worked with Naughty Dog facial capture but came off as...almost PS2-ish in Ubisoft's hands. The whole beach scene was a real disaster to me, retreading the prologue sizzle reel with the dialogue and also pretty confusingly directed behind the camera. The three hour time limit only exasperated this; I deeply wanted the scenes to end so I could continue finding out if I could wrangle the weird vehicle mechanics, get over the impact-less gunplay and figure out the advantages of the RC Jumper.

It also leaves the player, especially once they get the warning they have 30 minutes left, uninterested in trying the stealth gameplay at all. There's no real tutorial for the tools at your disposal, and most of the fun stuff that I seem to recall being basic functionality in the original Watch Dogs (but maybe wasn't) like operating forklifts and what not is behind reward points so you really just get forced to have gunfights in the few enemy encounters you wind up in. So aside from one attempt to rescue a prisoner in a co-op mission and a couple Cyberdriver missions, I wound up just hunting down selfie locations and doing the stunt driver Uber rides so I could see more of San Francisco. I oddly enjoyed the Uber stuff even if I continued hating the dialogue, it helped me appreciate that I really enjoy just how overly "techie" this whole world is even if it leaves the adults often sounding like teens written by adults imagining the interactions of teens and I couldn't name a single character other than Wrench because his name is shoved down your throat.

All this is to say that the Watch Dogs 2 demo is something I really appreciate Ubisoft doing philosophically because I'd have never touched the game otherwise, but it was a supreme failure as a sales pitch. I do appreciate the ways in which it tries to completely wash the bitter taste of the original game out of your mouth. Unlike that game it feels like a world that could be, and while its main character is doing backflips from impossibly low distances at impossibly slow speeds and all of his partners seem like they really suck, they all have flair and suck in ways that at least give the game heart and a basic root in humanity, however misguided I personally found it to be in my brief time with them. If I ever come across this game for super cheap I'd love to explore San Francisco as a professional ride sharer and landmark spotter, but for now I'm satisfied with what little I've seen of Watch Dogs 2.