The original Watch Dogs was a grimly serious conspiracy thriller starring a grim white guy in a trenchcoat as he grimly made his way through grim, grimy Chicago. It’s a fun game, but it’s not a cheerful one. Luckily, Watch Dogs 2 ditches that tone completely in favor of a cheerful, colorful trip to San Francisco with a bunch of multicultural merry pranksters, and it turns out a dose of wackiness is just what this nascent franchise needed.
Watch Dogs 2 (PS4, Xbox One, PC)
Artistic Accomplishment
It’s fairly impressive to drive your way through Watch Dogs 2‘s near-perfect scale replica of San Francisco. In fact the game takes pains to show it off, having players drive across the Golden Gate on your way to the secret hacker lair and its colorful young denizens. Graphically it’s about on par with what you’d expect from an AAA open-world game, with a solid sound mix and largely excellent voice acting.
Innovation
Watch Dogs 2 more or less dumps any pretense of not being an off-year Grand Theft Auto, and it’s all here: The first thing you do is buy clothes, and yes, there’s plenty of stuff for you to buy. The original game’s hacking mechanic makes a return, with more depth and more thoughtful puzzles. They even riff on GTA‘s taxi missions with a parody of Uber in a string of side missions. And really, it’s kind of welcome, not least because while it’s not terribly original, it’s extremely well-executed.
Execution
To give you a rough idea of the tone of this game, just watch the above side mission, the game’s first, where you troll a pharmaceutical executive with a penchant for hoarding records with a “hot new track.” That’s pretty much the game: It’s the original, only with tighter mechanics and a better sense of humor.
While the gameplay, which is really just sneaking around and occasionally getting into gun fights and car chases, hasn’t changed that much, Ubisoft Montreal spent quite a bit of time fine-tuning the controls and mechanics, and it shows. Actions like driving, which was kind of a pain in the first game, are much easier and smoother, and taking down enemies through stealth is a lot easier with the level design. It does take a bit of getting used to in the sense that the controls want you to either click or hold, and the use of these commands is inconsistent: Why am I holding a button to hack a camera, but tapping another one to hack a device when I’m controlling that camera? Still, it’s not a dealbreaker, and the smoother mechanics make it a lot more fun, although there are also some extremely poorly considered decisions.
It’s really the attitude, though, that puts this game over the top. Despite touching on some very real issues, Watch Dogs 2 encourages you to have fun with the toy box a lot more as well, with its prank-like missions and sunny atmosphere. You really want to poke around and see what the game has to offer, and to look for sight gags hidden in the environment. Everywhere you turn there’s a funny conversation to overhear, a silly joke sitting on a billboard, or something to take a selfie (and get photobombed) with. It’s like you’re a tourist on a wacky adventure, except you’re heavily armed!
Staying Power
If you stick around and complete every drone race, taxi mission, prank, hack, and gag, you’ll probably spend 50 hours on this game. The main campaign, though, took us roughly 12 hours to complete.
Bullsh*t Factor
Unfortunately, the usual DLC routine is in play here: There’s a DLC pass, preorder DLC, and an exclusivity clause on top of it where PS4 players will get all the toys first and hold them for 30 days. That said, the game has so much to do and screw around with that you won’t miss it if you don’t buy it.
Final Thoughts
Watch Dogs 2 isn’t going to win any most original game awards. But there’s a lot to be said for a smart, well-executed open world game that gives you a lot of fun and makes you laugh. Spending time with this bunch of merry techno-pranksters might just be the best time you have this fall.