Watch Dogs 2

 

I had finished Watch Dogs 1 a few years ago, and most of all I liked the concept of a Grand Theft Auto style game with a twist: being a covert hacker using gadgets and smartphones in the modern age messing with people. The first game is a fairly standard open world GTA clone, you played as this sort of edgy guy that wears baseball caps and trenchcoats, using your phone to hack almost anything electronic. I didn't think it was like an amazing game, but it was tolerable enough and had fun moments and a good premise. I had no idea what to expect with Watch Dogs 2, I just had my eye on it for a few years, and waited until the price was right to pick it up for cheap.

Watch Dogs 2 has you playing the part of Marcus a young, hipstery college type black man who soon meets up with the rest of the jolly band of hacktivists in the game. Before long you'll be watching these corny, forced wholesome cutscenes of this band of friends drinking beers on the beach and hanging out, talking about their plans to take down the big bad government tech overlords. And frankly none of the characters are appealing or resepctable, the whole tone of the game has this air of overbearing friendliness and almost like toxic niceness. The narrative also feels like its trying hard to push some political agenda, trying its damndest to send this message about how great diversity is, which sure can be fine, but its so forced here it feels like the only purpose the characters and dialogue serves is to further this agenda.
Though, I must admit, the cutscenes and dialogue is sort of entertaining to watch, in a like bad B-movie kind of way, it is almost 'comfy' to keep going back to your hacker base and seeing all your friends standing around hanging out and watching the cutscenes of whats new that day, its a predicable yet entertaining setup. The games progressive politics are just cringe inducing at many turns, though. Frequently you'll have these narratives how the black guys need to band together because "blacks are brothers" , and even at one point saying "Cracker" as a racial slur, I thought that was odd, like why are racial slurs suddenly acceptable when its against a specific race? The game plasters pride flags all over the place, the game has the narrative of government evil, capitalism evil, etc. I wouldn't care about any of this if it was weaved well into a unique story, but instead it feels like everything in the game is first and foremost to serve Ubisofts political agenda, rather than making a game with its own in-universe politics. I'm not really a big politics person, or do I care, but its clear to see when a games developers forcefully inserts their own values into the entire narrative, and its embarrasing that thats most of what the plot is here.

The narrative cutscenes and visual style of the game also has its own distinct hacker artstyle, with all these graffiti, internet memes, and programmer symbols all over the place, which helps to give the game more identity. Cutscenes and narrative feels like its trying to be the 4Chan "We are anonymous. We do not forget. We do not forgive" kind of thing. With these psuedo threatening messages and hacker propaganda cutscenes that play. Its fun to watch, but it is really lame, but its fun in a more way of wondering what kinds of things the developers will steal from current day social media to put into their game.

The game, like the first one, is a standard open world GTA clone, the twist is that you also use your cellphone and hacker abilities to interfere with anything electronic. You hold a button to ready for phone, and theres an icon on anything interatable which lets you then popup a phone menu to pick an option to mess with the object in various ways. Usually this is stuff like open door, hack to obtain a password or key, disable alarm, steal money from someones phone, or more entertaining stuff like place a fake police bounty on someone,  blow up water pumps around town, stop traffic lights, take control of cameras and remote vehicles, read peoples text messages, and so on. Though, frankly, I never found many of these hacker abilties useful or even fun. More than anything I was annoyed by the menu for them and how it only shows a tiny icon , but no text saying what it does. So it took awhile to even figure out what all the icons corresponded to, and additionally the controls for it is just clunky as hell and not fun to interact with. Its sad how the whole game is centered around the hacker abilities but I just didnt really use them that much, outside of mandatory mission moments. Even the multiple skill trees I found completely unappealing and boring. None of the skills looked fun or interesting to me. Theres like 8 skill trees and its just stuff like ,Vehicle hacking, Remote control RC toys, Botnet power (basically energy), Weapon skilltree, Social control abilities, and a few others. Even the weapon tree seems like it would be useful, but theres barely anything in it, just a few upgrades for reloading assault rifles faster, stungun abilities, and not much else. Even then half of your skilltrees are locked behind optional pickups that you have to pickup around the world, so I just didnt even bother that much. I did upgrade all the stuff I could, but at a certain point all of it was so boring to me I just blinded upgrade whatever to spend my points and didnt even care to look at what I was getting.

The basic mission structure of the game is actually kinda confusing at first. You have this phone menu, where it pulls up a little miniture phone screen on the bottom right of your screen, and you have to navigate around this shitty little phone interface of a bunch of different apps to find what might help you progress. Theres an app which I guess is dedicated to main story progress called DedSec app, but I never used it much. Instead, theres an additional menu for the map screen. So you look at the map screen, and just find "Main Operation" and try to do all those. On the map theres all sorts of other icons, Side Activities, Online Activities, random little coffee shops and clothing stores, but I didn't care for any of the optional stuff, as (spoiler) I wasn't really enjoying the main game that much, why would I do the optional stuff? I did go into a few clothing stores to buy some clothes to make my character look as stupid as possible, to aptly suit the stupid narrative of the game, I couldnt seriously immerse myself as this main character, so instead I made him look as dumb as possible. Once I selected "Main operation" from the map screen, you cant fast travel to the mission directly. You can however, fast travel to shops and locations nearby, for whatever reason, even without ever going there first. So I just select a Main operation, then find the closest fast travel point, then start the mission. This usually is a fast process thankfully, so going mission to mission is quite seamless unlike other open world games that force you to drive around for minutes at a time until you get to then next mission.

Well how are the main operations then?  sadly, not very fun. Almost every mission in the game is basically a stealth mission. I mean the intended, main route is to sneak around, use your hacker abilities to usually hack cameras and float around in these camera views for 5 minutes hacking things to get passwords and open doors, which is extremely boring and just visually annoying to deal with. Then once you get the passwords or open doors from the camera views, you need to sneak around past all the enemies, usually going inside some facility or base , find the main target, usually some computer or device, and plant a hack on it or pick something up, then leave. Thats the basic structure for most of the missions in the game. If you get detected or caught, the mission is usually fucked, because the enemies have this abiltiy where they can infinitely call in reinforcements and spawn waves at you, plus the cops show up which is more infinite respawning enemies. Ontop of this, the game loves to use this shitty puzzle mechanic where you have a grid of these lines and you have to turn these pipes to match the lines up. Its like a bad iPhone minigame you would play on the toilet or something , but no, in Watch Dogs 2 its one of the main mechanics. This is the best kind of hacker mini-game they could come up with? This thing is so boring, so tedious, so annoying, every single time they made me do it, I let out a sigh or groaned in annoyance. Sometimes they even make it a timer to add to the boredom and frustration. This minigame just sucked, most of the gameplay honestly just sucks. And you know what? I was so bored most of the time doing the almost mandatory stealth route that I just said fuck it, and frequently I would just go in guns blazing shooting everything. This did work most of the time, for multiple reasons: One, you have an ability where you click a button and your screen turns into this See-through walls hackerview. Its ugly as sin, it makes the game an eyesore, but you get to see enemies through walls easily. So for most of the damn gameplay I would be in this shitty view, making the game look awful. The combat uses a generic cover based system, where you press a button to snap to cover. Sadly the control are terrible and more often than not I would snap to some random object nearby rathr than the piece of cover I was intending to go behind. You also cant blindfire, so its a very limited cover system. You die in like 3 bullets, and sometimes checkpoints arent very forgiving making you replay the whole mission from the start. To further add to annoyance, later on in the game you start coming across enemies that wear hulking suits of body armor that are just massive bullet sponges that are near impossible to kill, further emphesizing that they do not want you to play non-stealth routes. Still, the majority of the time I carried on doing non-stealth, just because Its a style of gameplay I prefer, and the stealth in this game is stupid and boring. For one thing, even if you try to be quiet and do the melee takedowns to put down the enemies, you usually get punished for it because AI almost instantly hears you or spots you, or spots the dead body. Secondly, if you use the stun gun, same thing. So you dont even have any option to really stealth takedown the enemies, its futile, you'll get spotted. You need to just painstakingly sneak past everyone and after 10 mins of sneaking around you get caught, and you might as well just let them kill you and start over. So yeah I usally said fuck the stealth and just tried to kill them as soon as possible before they call reinforcements, using that stupid see through walls hackervision ability.

The shooting is standard fare. Theres all sorts of different guns you can obtain, even at the main hacker base headquarters theres a 3d Gun printer where you can get specific DedSec guns, but they're all super expensive so I never bothered to get one. I just used the basic 'Goblin' Assault rifle the entire game. No joke. I tried using other guns, Shotguns, snipers, random guns off the ground. They were all terrible. This assault rifle did the job and took down all the enemies easily wherever I was, why bother with anything else. So it made the combat even more boring and trivial. Basically my whole strategy for every mission is to just hide behind some piece of cover where they cant get behind me, and bait them all to me one by one, then once they're all dead progess to the objective. The missions arent that varied in scope and location, at least half of them are just what I described. Infiltrate some building, plant a hack or pickup some object, then leave, usually on the way out alarms are going off and reinforcements are called in. Some notable locations include infiltrating the Nudle headquarters, a clear Google joke, infiltrating the Invite headquarters, a clear Facebook joke, infiltrating some government buildings, infiltrating the FBI, and I can't really remember more off the top of my head.

The controls in this game are basically just awful. Nothing feels good or fluid. The movement is janky and weird, you can hold a button do to this sort of psuedo parkour movement where you instantly jump over anything almost like Assassin's Creed style, but this thing is shitty too. Sometimes he'll be doing backflips over boxes when you want to just climb up on it. The phone controls suck and are clunky to use, frequently I'll accidentally use my phone on some random thing in the enviornment instead of what I wanted to use it on. The combat control are terrible, you have to hold Dpad UP to open the weapon wheel, and if you dare press Dpad left or right you're totally fucked, you throw some RC toy instead of switching guns like you would probably expect. This screwed me over multiple times. The driving even sucks, some of the weirdest driving I've seen in an open world game. The cars all have this floaty, slippery feeling to them that feels worse than silly arcade racing it just feels broken sometimes. Like driving offroad your car bounces around like its in a bouncy castle, its just awful. The physics are crap. The cars radio stations arent much to talk about either, no really standout songs or stations, maybe one song here and there is mildly familliar or entertaining but it has no heavy hitters like other open world game radio's have. Even basic controls like picking up some object off a table is clunky as hell, he takes ages to pick it up, like that time when you have to retrieve the mask, I guess because the devs dont want you to just run in and grab the object instantly and leave, but it feels artificial and terrible the way they've done it. Just frustrating gameplay and controls all around.

The whole game feels like a bad stealth puzzle game. Trial and error bullshit, like having to fail the first few times to see what the intended stealth route is supposed to be. Theres hardly any racing missions, and the few that are here are basically just escape from the cops, which also has its annoyances. Overuse of helicoptors making it a tedious chore to get away from the cops, it uses the modern GTA 4 police system where you have to get outside the cops bubble on the radar and hide for long enough to "Vanish". The over reliance on these shitty little puzzle 'hacking' minigames, the bad controls, the cringy characters, dialogue, forced identity politics narrative, doesn't make for a very appealing package. Towards the end of the game I was honestly pretty pained trying to reach the end. Lots of times I would be failing checkpoints over and over because of the shitty stealth or dying almost instantly because you have such low health engaging in headon combat is almost not-viable, but still it was more fun than slogging through another dull 20 minute stealth section going through all these awful remote control camera segments. Towards the end of the game you go on these missions to take down this big bad evil corporate guy in a manbun, you break into his main headquarters and blow up his mainframes or something, another terrible, big stealth section, tons of guards with bulletsponge body armor, then end cutscene he gets arrested and everyone rejoices and drinks beer together (again) and everyone is happy hacker wholesome frienderinos. I was really expecting someone on your team to betray you or be working for the enemy, but nope, no plot twist. Just pretty much dull the whole way.

I remember liking the first game a fair bit, I don't think it has many of the problems that this game has, though its been awhile so its not super clear to me. But I really didn't enjoy my time with Wactch Dogs 2, and was just relieved when the end credits rolled

4/10