The Overdue Watch_Dogs 2 Review Nobody Asked For

Capturing the zeitgeist of the mid 2010s is a tough prospect. The indy music revolution was dying, dubstep was a joke, EDM had finished merging with top 40 pop, the problems of the 2000s were almost far enough the past that you couldn't reasonably get angry about them anymore, and data was the biggest business there was. 

Computers were interwoven into everything so that everyone was finally using them, generating reams of data that could either save us from ourselves or sell us deeper into consumerist bondage, and moreover, the biggest developing narrative was how computer companies were controlling and selling user data.

That ongoing story, by now, sometimes seems so old as to be quaint. Occasionally the embers of resentment are fanned back into flame by documentaries or particular revelations, but the terms of service are often a trifling speedbump in using anything digital. The majority of us have welcomed the digital world with a weird blend of weary mistrust and gee-whiz enthusiasm.

We pay our personal data sacrifice so we can access the bonanza of the digital frontier, and mountains of e-waste are the new burgeoning concern. Each electric car that's saving the world's atmosphere has other steep environmental and social costs which it's profitable to downplay... and all those chips put into disposable products end up in landfills.

2016 was a busy year, with many alarming events, during which I still posted on this blog (but with a decreasing semi-regularity), but it also brought the world the underappreciated open world hacking game Watch_Dogs 2, which was almost immediately (and if you consider No Man's Sky, unfairly) overshadowed by pretty much every other title from 2016.

It was the sequel to a much-maligned game I never played. In 2020, I got a free copy from the Epic Games Store, which wouldn't install through that launcher, so I had to delete the package from my pitifully overcrowded SSD, then install it through Ubisoft Connect. I wasn't off to a good start, but I was in the mood for some open-world hacking excitement. 

Watch_Dogs 2 mostly delivered on the excitement and the hacking, with some interesting and welcome surprises, and some expected shortcomings. Want to read a big ass review that nobody asked for about one of the least-talked-about games of 2016? Then you've come to the right blog!

From the moment I started playing as Marcus Holloway, and nearly got killed trying to sneak around and then tase the guards in the game's first area, I was begrudgingly hooked. I got Marcus killed for the first time (of many) in the very next room of the game, learning that hackers are not particularly suited to surviving gunfights. This isn't exactly a power fantasy type of game, at least not that kind of power fantasy.

It's clear that the intent of the game design is to make gunfights so unfair that the player thinks about creative ways to avoid them. Great: you have two drones, one that's wheeled and one that's a quadcopter, to scout, hack, distract enemies, and generally raise havoc. You can call the cops on your enemies, control cameras, cause phones to short out and grenades to explode all from a nondescript car parked in the middle of a field outside your mission objective.

Skills include anything from hacking a vehicle to hacking the entire electrical grid of whatever city block you're on. You can mess with traffic lights, take control of cranes and forklifts, manipulate accidents, call hitmen and police on random people, make robots mad with lust, and generally mess around to your heart's content with a handful of hacking abilities. Other skills make you better with guns and give you more hacker juice to wreak havoc upon the unsuspecting and undeserving, or just even the odds when the game dumps a dozen heavily armed enemies on you.

It's a fairly interesting system, and though the potential for weird solutions and emergent gameplay is limited, there is room for experimentation. The missions range from mildly exciting to purely chore-like, but none stood out as particularly egregious—save the one where the player has to graffiti a bunch of things. It's a big open world and the missions span it well, though the emphasis on avoiding or subverting combat can make standoffs and showdowns very annoying. 

Watch Dog 2 features a fairly vivid story that follows the exploits of Dedsec as they try to fight the titan that is Silicon Valley and its stranglehold on the region of S.F. The other main characters are fairly well-drawn in a plausible 'hey we're fun millennial hactivists, let's fight the p0w4r!!!' kind of way (but they also talk about branding, gentrification, and pop culture), and the conclusion is somewhat satisfying in that you get the villain, but chunky in that you don't beat the system, even though you're shown a lot of the ways it's flawed, unjust, or downright oppressive.

TAZE THE WORLD. TAKE NO PRISONERS.

I have some fond memories of the missions, riding construction cranes through the mist to get the drop on unsuspecting targets, sneaking around using drones to create a cloak of chaos or simply to blow up crowds of enemies I'd have no hope of tackling one on one. The level of difficulty is more or less what you make it. If you try to shoot your way through, the game is punishingly difficult, and if you do things less directly (but not always less violently) it becomes a bit of a breeze.

There are a bunch of collectables, but they're either skill points you will want to get, special research that unlocks choice skills and abilities, cash you probably won't care about, or cosmetic upgrades that you can ignore. The game offers a lot of visual customizability for your avatar and deserves praise for the effort, in my opinion.

My version of Marcus was swagged-up with an out-of-this-world fit that attempted to pack as many colors and textures together as possible, making him easily the best dressed avatar I've ever played. There's a handful of stores in the game where you can buy more stuff to wear, though once I had the fundamental style I was set, personally. You can also customize cars if you like seeing money burn, and you can customize weapon skins as well to look like an absolute psycho. Great stuff!

Graphically, Watch Dogs 2 is a good looking game. It's bright and colorful, the textures and models aren't always great especially if you're playing it on a cobbled-together bargain bin system like mine, but they're still passable and some of the visual effects (water and sky, plus the San Francisco Fog option) are very pretty in a last-gen last-hurrah kind of way. The incidental dialogue and voice acting are pretty good. I felt positive about most of the music or ambivalent, which is about as good as I had hoped. 

Did you know you can buy a sailboat and do sailing races in this game? I forgot until just now.

The game world is a bowlderized version of S.F., but they packed a lot into the world map, so that it's not monotonous to traverse unless you're driving across a bridge. You should always use a fast boat to get from zone to zone unless you like to hold boost and avoid the odd car on featureless bridges. It must be stated that the driving mechanics in this game are generally unpleasant, a mixture of floaty arcade with weird on-rails steering that never feels right.

If you're coming from something like GTA4, as I did, the vehicle handling seems terrible. By the time I had finished the missions and played for hours, it still felt bad to drive in this game, but there's a few cars and motorcycles that handle decently enough for fancy driving plus a few good crashes every now and again. The vehicle damage system is also not impressive, but the whole driving aspect seems kind of obligatory in these kinds of games. The in-game side activities are pretty unremarkable (and the ATV handling is so horrendously bad it's funny), but I really enjoyed the drone racing and don't think I've ever seen that in any other game, so there's something worth doing. Kinda.

Probably what impressed me most about this game was the seamless multiplayer. The first time some smoking junked-up car crashed into me and someone started to hack me, I belatedly tried to taze them as I wondered what kind of NPC they were, then they ran off, starting a 5 minute chase that resulted in police being called in, but I got my target. I then realized it was a real, living person on the interet! Wow! The next time I hacked someone and they found and killed me 30 seconds later. Another player hacked me from behind a tombstone, another from inside a parking garage in a busy part of the city. Other players can join your game at any time without you knowing and initiate hacks on you, which is very exciting especially if they're good at hiding and you like hunting. 

When you get a maximum wanted level with the police, other players can join the hunt to get you, or sometimes you join in the hunt to get them. It's all remarkably seamless, fun, and actually adds a lot of playability to the game. If I wasn't limited by SSD capacity the heap of other free games I need to play, I could see myself easily getting another 20-30 hours out of the Watch Dogs 2 multiplayer scene. It's annoying when you keep getting hacked as you try to get to a mission, and the system can be broken (one player hacked me from inside inaccessible level geometry), but it works well and it's ridiculously more entertaining than I expected.

In many unexpected ways, Watch_Dogs 2 is simply good fun and balling out in swag fits.

If you have a friend who will play with you (as I forced a friend to do), or find a likeminded random player, the co-op missions are pretty boring but it's always a blast to start some chaos together or try to finesse the more outrageously cocked-up missions by having one of you lead every infinitely respawning enemy away while the other finishes objectives. Even just going around and tazing people, meleeing every NPC on Alcatraz, or generally messing around causing trouble, is still very fun and between the glitches, the chaos, and the company I was certainly very amused, and laughed pretty hard at some of our exploits.

Watch_Dogs 2 is a solid 7/10 game with the potential to be much better, that was overlooked probably because of all the other big games that came out in 2016, and being the sequel to a not-too-popular title. These factors didn't help it, but on its own it works quite well as an interesting take on the open world genre by way of its hacking, right to privacy vs. corporate surveillance, and big data vs. everyone themes. It often overreaches, but it does so with a certain verve that's simultanously cheesy and alright and it discusses and explores a lot of still-pressing issues. If you bring a friend or two, or even if you don't, the multiplayer scene is still fairly lively and can occasionally become delightful. 

If you got a copy of WD_2 for free, I would highly recommend you check it out.