![]() ![]() Need to get past a guard who's patrolling a hallway? Hack a nearby electronics panel, have it make a noise that draws the guard's attention, and then make it explode and electrocute the guard until they pass out. The most important weapon in your fight against ctOS is your phone, which allows you to hack into anything connected to the city's infrastructure - which is to say, almost everything. ![]() Marcus' toolset to explore and interact with that world has evolved from Aiden's, and mostly for the better. Watch Dogs 2's virtual version of the city is condensed, no doubt, but it absolutely captures the flavor of a place I love. As someone who's lived in San Francisco for five years, I took a lot of joy in tracking down familiar sites. From Sausalito to Oakland to San Mateo, you can go anywhere in the Bay Area right away, and each location is full of recognizable landmarks and unlockables to uncover if you feel like messing around. Aside from one or two small upgrades that you'll unlock shortly into the game, you can drive anywhere on the map and access everything from the very start. But it's never overwhelming, and what's there largely involves working your way through cleverly designed spaces that feel less generic than almost everything in the first game.Īlongside its fresh approach to world and objective design, Watch Dogs 2 also opens its world up immediately. There's still plenty to do in the game, plenty of ways you can lose yourself exploring the world for hours. Importantly, Watch Dogs 2 pulls back just a teensy bit from the "fill the map with icons" approach to open-world gameplay that has come to define publisher Ubisoft's stable of open-world titles. You're rarely asked to revisit an area twice, and the game leaves little room for repetition in its campaign. From infiltrating the hilariously pretentious campus of an in-game Google clone to climbing the Golden Gate Bridge to leave your mark on the city, main quests and side missions cycle through setpiece moments at a breathless pace. The objectives you tackle in Watch Dogs 2 are about as varied and goofy as the cast of characters. Heck, I even learned to love Wrench, an initially cringe-worthy, loud-mouthed ball of energy who wears a Daft Punk-inspired face mask that flashes emoticons through its goggles. Characters like Sitara, a DJ and artist who provides DedSec's graphic design sensibilities, grew on me as naturally as a real-life group of new friends. Whole hours of the game are given over to building out these characters, to the point where I didn't even realize I was starting to genuinely appreciate them. When he's not working alongside his teammates directly, Marcus is at least in constant communication with them. They spend a lot of time equivocating about whether they're hipsters. He and his DedSec buddies are - forgive me - millennials they're obsessed with pop culture, they've got style, they make fun of each other. Where Watch Dogs protagonist Aiden Pearce was a gruff, lone-wolf vigilante out for revenge, Marcus is a more down-to-earth, infinitely more likable main character. Watch Dogs 2 is set in the Bay Area in California, where an Oakland-based hacker named Marcus Holloway joins up with the black hat collective DedSec to once again face off against ctOS and Blume. Marcus is a more down-to-earth, infinitely more likable main characterįollowing the events of the first Watch Dogs - in which a rogue hacker completely took down a private security system rooted in the infrastructure of Chicago - tech company Blume rebuilt its omniscient computer system, ctOS, and spread it to cities across the United States. This new tone feels like a more natural fit to both hacker culture and the open-world genre, and it leads to a sequel that's a lot more fun - even if it shares some of the original game's flaws. The first game's moody revenge tale has been replaced with a tongue firmly in cheek, skewering Silicon Valley and the tech industry at large. Unlike its predecessor, however, Watch Dogs 2 ditches the deadly seriousness, even as it struggles with a few heavy issues. And like the first game, Watch Dogs 2 collides headfirst with the same moral dilemmas faced by hackers in real life: Should you exploit a broken system just because you can? Who is it OK for you to go after? How far is too far? How much you like it may depend on how much you can relate to that state of affairs.Īs in the first game, Watch Dogs 2 places you in the role of an underground vigilante, a hacker abusing security flaws in phones and computer systems in a quest to expose corporate corruption. Above all else, Watch Dogs 2 is a game about being young, angry at the system and certain that you know what's best for the world. ![]()
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