Watch Dogs 2 Guide

As 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. 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? The objectives you tackle in Watch Dogs 2 are about as varied and goofy as the cast of characters. 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. You're rarely asked to revisit an area twice, and the game leaves little room for repetition in its campaign.Marcus' toolset to explore and interact with that world has evolved from Aiden's, and mostly for the better. 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. 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. Need a bigger distraction? Tap into a nearby car's computer equipment and send it barreling forward into some explosives. With some digging, you can uncover dozens of routes through any one encounter, and it's extremely satisfying when a smart strategy comes together.Watch Dogs 2 also turns into a more literal puzzle in a frequently used hacking minigame. To take control of more advanced servers, Marcus must connect circuits to each other, flipping around "joints" to ensure that the power flows in the right direction.

These are straightforward but serve as a nice change of pace between the tenser sneaking around of the core game. The game occasionally tries to add some difficulty by making these minigames timed, but I was never really challenged by them. Hacking in general is more flexible than in the first Watch Dogs - you usually have more than one option on every hackable item. For example, you can open a door with a hack, or you can choose to lock it so that no one can follow you for a few seconds. You can detonate an electrical box to stun someone nearby, make it go haywire to attract attention, or turn it into a mine that will detonate when someone gets close. If anything, there may be too many hackable items scattered around, to the point where I often have trouble selecting the right one in situations where timing matters.

Watch Dogs 2 tells the story of Marcus Holloway, a cocky young hacker from Oakland who’s got a bone to pick with the system. At the start of the game, Marcus is recruited into DedSec, a fun-loving San Francisco-based hacker collective that operates more or less like how your dad imagines Anonymous. They wear edgy clothes, plan high-profile pranks to stick it to the man, and work out of a hackerspace off Dolores Park. They hate the likes of Facebook, Google, and all other major tech companies, which they see as betraying the public trust by repackaging their users’ data for nefarious ends. Marcus sums up DedSec’s mission statement pretty well: “Big data is invasive and shitty.” Thus begins an open-world saga that has Marcus and his crew driving around an immense digital re-creation of the San Francisco Bay Area engaging in cyber espionage, car chases, data heists, and the occasional shootout. The story takes cues from 90s flicks like Sneakers and Hackers and, for the most part, stays true to those influences. This is Ubisoft’s first foray into Grand Theft Auto-like satire and away from the more straight-laced trappings of Assassin’s Creed and the first Watch Dogs.

The villain is a man-bunned yogabro whose first name is basically “douche,” and companies like !NVITE and Nudle stand in for Facebook and Google. The satire is low-key and obvious, but given how good the real Bay Area has become at satirizing itself, it works well enough. The tone is all japes and jokes, as the cast of talented misfits argue about Star Trek and Aliens vs. Predator while exposing corrupt politicians and outwitting the FBI. DedSec’s members dress in fashionable threads and have arguments about their #brand. Their lair is covered in stickers and neon paint. Their goal, like many a scrappy SF upstart before them, is to attract more followers on social media and to get people to download their app. That the game moves toward missions of obligatory carnage is a shame because the challenge and the pleasure is in use of hacks and gadgets to infiltrate rather than in use of brute force, but the escalation of violence highlights an issue that is there from the game’s opening minutes. Simply put, for all that they have done well, Ubisoft Montreal haven’t found a way to move far enough from the GTA formula. The themes, characters and tools of Watch Dogs 2 aren’t a natural fit for mass murder and consequence-free killings, but for all that the game captures something of the essence of San Francisco (and its beauty; it’s a wonderful place just to spend time in, seeing sights and taking photos), the city is like an Etch-a-Sketch. You cover it with tiremarks, bullet holes and bodies, and then, once you’re a couple of blocks away, the streets are wiped clean ready to be written again. The hacking skills and basic manipulation of NPCs and environment aren’t enough to fill the toolset or the gaps between the more inventive missions. And where there is a gap, random acts of violence tend to fill it. That’s my choice, as a player, but it’s a choice I make because the alternatives don’t hold up. Yes, I can make my drone harass dogs in the park and that’s a laugh for a while, as is picking on members of the public because I decide they’re pricks based on one intercepted text conversation, but the world isn’t reactive enough to make those pursuits worthwhile. The game’s best missions are its most open, using your hacking abilities environmental manipulation being the main one  as well as your two most useful tools; an RC hopper car that’s capable of remote hacking and sneaking through vents, and a quadcopter drone, useful for scouting environments from above. Missions don’t feel as open-ended as Hitman, for example.

Neither do they have that game’s longevity  some can take a couple of minutes once you’re up to speed with your various technological tools  but they’re more dynamic than anything in previous Ubisoft games. You’re also always open to switch it up and go in guns blazing, killing everyone you see in order to break into a secure facility or celeb home. However, this feels entirely at odds with the game’s tone. It’s here that Watch Dogs 2 falters; in its early hours, stealth is absolutely the hardest way to play, thanks mostly to the game’s unpredictable AI, which flits between unfairly astute and completely stupid. You’re not even given the option to hide bodies that you incapacitate, which means you’re almost always discovered, sending the AI into a more alert state. It’s frustrating, and it means that the guns almost always eventually come out. When Marcus is such a reasoned, morally stable guy a man who never even acknowledges the death he can leave in his wake in post-mission cutscenes it’s jarring. This disconnect is prevalent in other parts of the game’s world. Playing around with your hacking abilities and upgrading them to get access to even more impressive powers such as the ability to force a complete shutdown of a facility’s security, or sending an entire block of traffic into disarray is super fun, but the game’s civilian AI is always a bit sporadic. They’ll call the cops on you for one crime, but completely ignore another. It’s also frustrating that, before you earn the ability to hack car alarms, almost every vehicle you hijack or steal results in the cops being called. Grand Theft Auto, by contrast, has always known exactly how much freedom to give the player before turning on the heat. However, as time went on, that wasn’t enough. It’s telling that the skills you acquire as you level up are all designed to cause chaos and pain. Sure, you might be able to save a life by taking control of a car whose driver is behaving recklessly, but that’s extremely unlikely. The more powerful you become, the more capable of tearing up the city you are. While Marcus might do what’s right, or try to, during the scripted missions, it’s possible to idly steal from peoples’ bank accounts as you drive around the city. And then you can steer onto the pavement and plough through pedestrians.

Even the mission design seems stronger. Sure, there’s a lot of slow infiltration, camera-hopping and, that old chestnut, car or freight-truck theft, but with San Francisco and Silicon Valley tech culture in the foreground, there’s more variety in the locations, more opportunity to explore the coast and back-country and some more interesting objectives too. Vehicles seem to handle better this time around, making any missions with driving in a lot more enjoyable. It’s even funny, throwing in skits on Knight Rider, eighties movie stars, smug high-tech corporations and intrusive IoT pioneers and social media companies, both parodied here more effectively than in GTA V. The result is a game that doesn’t grow boring all too quickly and where there’s a sense of excitement every time a mission starts.On the other hand, and for all the good stuff mentioned above, there’s a lot of other stuff that still isn’t perfect. Enemy AI, for a start, is pretty lacklustre. Guards patrolling predictable routes is a staple of the genre, but those here seem spectacularly dumb, and even more so when engaged in combat, where they’ll happily flood towards a room to be gunned down as they come through a doorway, the corpses literally piling up.  And while it’s good to have a less aggressive police force and fewer chases, some of the original’s sense of fugitive paranoia has gone with it. You can literally slaughter every guard in a building then stroll out of the front door, hop on a moped and ride to freedom, unbothered. It’s only later in the game that you feel the forces of justice really closing in. Shootouts ensue, using the same cover-based shooting that’s all but ubiquitous with open-world crime games. Watch Dogs 2 feels a little different than most because even on normal difficulty you’re not very durable, and the AI is reasonably good at using cover and aggressively flanking. (Also, a lot more of San Francisco gangs have hand grenades than I’d have thought.) But you have enough means of indirect attack to feel capable in a fight, and some of them are great fun. Explosive-carrying enemies can be hacked to detonate their bombs, some can be stunned by overloading their headset communications gear, and anyone who happens to be standing near a hackable piece of equipment in the environment can be shocked or blown up at the push of a button.