Watch Dogs 2: the inverse Watch Dogs

I heard a rumour that Ubisoft has A Guy who’s brought in on sequels to games that didn’t quite land but still have promise as a concept. This Guy’s job is specifically to gussy up the sequels and make them way better than the first game. This rumour is unconfirmed, mostly because the basis of it would seem to be ‘Assassin’s Creed II is a thing’, but if this Guy does exist (and possibly his name is actually Guy, in order to throw us off the scent) then it looks like he’s done alright on Watch Dogs 2. I expected it to be better than the first Watch Dogs. I didn’t expect it to be funny.

I played from the start of the story, for around three hours. Like Aiden Pearce’s previous adventure it begins in medias res. Your player character Marcus Holloway is already a shit-hot hacker, but he and the rest of the San Francisco DedSec team are much more likeable than their predecessor. You’re compelled to care about why they’re doing the hacking. They’re fun and loud and have a bit of youthful exuberance to them, and while the trailers had an air of Steve Buscemi’s “How do you do, fellow kids?” (even though somebody on the team had probably seen that while putting together a research pack on ‘memes’) the game itself actually seems, dare I say it, self aware.

New DedSec, unlike DedSec classic, are a diverse bunch of nerds who like board games and gifs rather than being actual badasses. They’re also very socially aware, and sometimes explore things that affect them by being irreverent. Wrench jokes about facial recognition software failing to read lead character Marcus Holloway’s features. Some of the missions I played showed there was satire built into the bones of the game, with references to a pharmaceutical owner who’d raised the price of leukemia drugs trying to buy an exclusive rap album. I’m sure any comparisons you draw there are your own, and not intended by Ubisoft.

It is, as many have observed, the game a lot of us thought we were getting the first time around. The bay area is a big open world, and I didn’t see any towers to take control of the whole time. I was on holiday in San Francisco a few months ago so I can wave my hand and go “Oh yeah, it really feels like Pier 39,” in a way that an actual local probably wouldn’t. The real life San Francisco, however, did not exhibit any pop-in textures if you were driving too fast, although all things considered the game does look good.

I got to visit other areas in Watch Dogs 2: Marin County, Oakland, Silicon Valley. They all feel different, and the population is different as well, in a kind of wry way. In some places I felt like they were quicker to call the police than others.The mechanic whereby you can pull up an NPCs basic info by scanning their phone is back for Watch Dogs 2, with a little more detail added, so you can sort of profile an entire area by walking around for a bit, just like the lousy feds. I wandered around a Silicon Valley tech campus and have never seen so many white people allergic to soy in one place. You can also read people’s text messages and listen in to phone conversations. These range from mundanity (putting the bins out), to schadenfreude (bad breakups), to the gently irreverent (vagina yoga).

There’s more to the hacking than that, though. You can drop into network hacking, kind of a fuzzy blue Matrix view so you to see points of interest nearby and jump through security cameras. You can throw out your quadcopter or your drone, which, it turns out, can be upgraded to include taunts that basically tell people to get f***ed. You can modify or control almost anything you can think of that has electronics (and a few that you wouldn’t have thought of, like exploding steam pipes under the roads). As you gain more processing power you can affect more things at once with the mass hacking. You can create lethal or nonlethal shocks. You can do almost anything you want.

There are so many options, in fact, that I didn’t manage to memorise what all the symbols meant and actually make Marcus look like he knew what he was doing — or, to be more exact, make him look like he isn’t an idiot. Marcus knows exactly what he’s doing, so why has he chosen to randomly burnout a fuse box? We may never know. Hacking is easy to pick up, but hard to master. Like a cat. Likewise Marcus’ phone functions as your menu, and you can buy and download a bunch of fun apps that do different things (there’s both a Shazam and an Uber equivalent), but they can ping information at the same time and get a little crossed over. This is especially frustrating if it happens at the exact moment you were trying to open the map.

There’s obviously a lot to unpack in Watch Dogs 2, and the biggest test is going to be how long it stays feeling fresh for, or if it becomes a kind of cookie-cutter ‘take down the bad [businessman/gang member/surveillance system] with hacking’ process. I hope not, because the early missions I was allowed to play were stupid, brightly coloured messes of fun. It’s everything the first Watch Dogs was not. I laughed and laughed and laughed. I hope I was meant to.