Watch Dogs 2 review: Hacking hell it's good

N.B: All of the seamless multiplayer modes for Watch Dogs 2, where players dynamically appear in your game, are offline at present due to major performance issues. Ubisoft is actively working to fix the problems, but we currently don't have a date for these fixes. For now, we've reviewed the full story, side quests and co-op components, and will update this review when the seamless multiplayer comes back online.

It feels like Watch Dogs 2 has been a long time coming. And that's probably because, technically, it has.

Although we had the original Watch Dogs, it failed to live up to that expectations Ubisoft built. We were promised greatness, but delivered a lacklustre game with a sad city and wet-fish protagonist.

Even from its first announcement, however, Watch Dogs 2 looked to be a far better game on all fronts. And now, after over 30 hours of play, we're pleased to say that Watch Dogs finally lives up to its potential.

For one, Ubisoft immediately addresses the fact its previous protagonist, Aiden Pearce, was a bit of a bore, and is actually classed as one of the worst gaming heroes of all time. But Watch Dogs 2 is peppered with a fantastic cast. You play as Marcus Holloway, who might just be the coolest hacker we've ever seen, oozing effortless cool, no matter what ridiculous clothing you dress him in, backflipping off buildings and parkouring over parked cars like they're nothing at all.

Dedsec wouldn't be a hacking group without Marcus' teammates, who actually brought him on board. First, there's Sitara, the only female in the group, but she's a kickass hacker and talented artist who's behind all the visuals of Dedsec. Then there's Horatio, one of the quieter members of the group, but he and Marcus seem to have a special connection.

Josh has Aspergers and is a fantastically brilliant hacker and engineer with a very, very dry sense of humour. He contrasts perfectly with Wrench, the masked hacker who rounds out the group. He's particularly brilliant at building things and bringing some hilarity to often very serious situations.

With Watch Dogs 2, Ubisoft has managed to create a crew that really balance each other and then make you care about them and their cause – to take down the evil Blume Corporation, which seems to have its fingers in every pie in San Francisco.

And speaking of San Francisco, what a difference a city makes. The grey and flat Chicago presented in the first Watch Dogs is a million miles away from the gloriously stunning San Francisco of Watch Dogs 2. Yes, we know they're too different cities, but San Francisco feels so much more alive than Chicago did in the original game.

There are tons of NPCs wandering around, living their own lives that you can easily dip into by listening to phone calls, pinching a bit from their bank accounts, or even giving them the zombie (tech) virus. BRAAAAAAINS.

The city is vast, and you're not limited to the centre either. Watch Dogs 2's playable area extends to the beach areas and the surrounding boroughs too, meaning this is a vast world full of variety, colour and activities to engage in.

Although there's the seamless multiplayer and co-op escapades to consider, Watch Dogs 2 is really about the story. And this is a story about a small team of hackers going against the big leagues to take down Blume and Dušan Nemec, who's the Chief Technology Officer of the company and controls ctOS 2.0, which in turn controls the entire city and beyond.

As you progress through the story, you'll discover that Blume's tendrils extend way beyond what they appear to, and Dušan becomes enemy number one – although that's pretty clear from the outset.

In today's world, it's interesting that this feels like a story of taking on "the man", being young, angry and misunderstood, and also feeling entirely powerless but trying to change that. With everything that's happened over the past couple of years, including Trump, Brexit, the Paris attacks and more, this is a powerful narrative, even if it does try to do too much at times.

There are issues with tone – Marcus gets angry about Blume and co misleading people, but the fact you've spent the last few hours murdering people never gets mentioned.

Despite the very serious topics that Watch Dogs 2 tackles, there's also a strong focus on you, the player, and making sure that you have fun, no matter what you're up to.

The basic hacking available in Watch Dogs has been totally revamped, so that you can pretty much tackle each mission any way you want. It all starts out fairly basic of course, but as you gain Dedsec followers, you'll quickly start unlocking Marcus' skill tree and plenty of hacking options.

You can tailor these upgrades to your particular play style, but don't worry too much because you will be able to unlock them all by the end of the story campaign, plus there are more side quests to play through to get yourself more followers and thus research points to ramp up Marcus' abilities.

Eventually you'll be able to do crazy stuff like loading up a van with C4, then hacking that van to remotely drive it into an enemy camp, make it attract enemies using silly bleeps and bloops and then detonate all the C4 for quite the deadly fireworks display.

Basically, everything is there to have fun with and there's always more than one option for a hackable object – proximity sensors, explosions, non-lethal knockouts, distractions and more. It's just up to you how you handle each situation.

You could argue that you sometimes feel limited by the hacking options you have available, and Ubisoft could have gone further, but at the same time it feels realistic. You don't want everything to be at your fingertips, there should be a difficulty curve and hurdles to overcome. It feels like there's a good balance here and plenty of silliness to be had. Although, we really don't like having to melee the attack dogs, it makes us sad.

Of course, you don't even have to hack at all if you don't want to. You have grenades, your little robo-pal and the drone, and a plethora of weapons to unlock and 3D-print yourself at Hacker HQ including a pretty spectacular grenade launcher and powerful shotgun with hilarious names that we won't spoil, and even more hilarious paint jobs you can deck them out with. Bright pink sniper rifle anyone?

And there's plenty of variety in the missions too. Sometimes stealth is your only option, particularly in latter levels where you're faced with guards wearing enough armour to make a tank jealous, but at other times you'll be coming in from above in a crane, or flying overhead on a motorbike, or even controlling a little robot drone.

There's even a ton of puzzling solving involved in Watch Dogs 2, whether it's working out how to reach a particularly inaccessible spot, or getting the flow right in the hacking puzzle, there's plenty to stretch your grey matter.

From start to finish, it's all about freedom and player choice, and it's something that needs to be applauded. It's what makes Watch Dogs 2 on a par with a series like Grand Theft Auto, and also makes it contain as much fun as Saints Row 2, but without the constant innuendos.

The only issue we had with the story is the end mission. Although we won't spoil what happens or what you'll be doing, it feels like you've been thrust straight into a firefight you're not prepared for – no matter what or who you hack. It's so frustrating that it almost ruined the experience we'd had with the game up until that point, so it's a shame that developer Ubisoft Montreal thought that this was the way to go for the game's final moments.

However, even if you didn't enjoy the final mission like us, after that you can still go back and explore all the other content Watch Dogs 2 has to offer, if you didn't partake mid-campaign. And there are more side quests in Watch Dogs 2 than you can fathom. The main storyline is over 20 hours long, but then you've got all the additional side content to discover, and more to find if you speak to other citizens littered across the entire map.

Again, the variety is absolutely staggering. One moment you're adding some graffiti to a billboard, the next you're busting a secret drug ring run by undercover cops, and the very next you're hacking ATM machines dealing out dosh to unsuspecting users, often with unexpected results.

And as we've mentioned, the more you explore, the more you'll notice that certain NPCs are highlighted across the map. All of these unlock even more side quests for you to delve into, giving you EVEN MORE content than you expected.

What's more, you can pick up these side missions and tackle them whenever you want. Your Dedsec app on your phone tracks all of the missions, including those for the main campaign, concurrently, so you can dip in and out whenever and wherever you fancy.

It's quite the feat of gaming content.

The only thing that lets all this down continues to be the driving. Although it's been vastly improved over what was in the original Watch Dogs, it still lacks personality and some realism, especially as you move across different vehicles.

There's a particular problem with the motorcycles. You seem to have superglue on your trousers when you ride them as you can career into the back of cars and stay upright, but do some serious damage to the cars you ram.

Thankfully, you can now shoot as you drive, but the vehicle hacking available is much more valuable as you move than attempting to shoot out the window during a high speed chase.

Now, we haven't yet mentioned the seamless multiplayer of Watch Dogs 2 and that's because although we started testing it over the weekend, it has since been taken offline due to serious issues with sporadic crashes and lag. Even though we weren't connected, the issues became so bad for us it rendered one mission unplayable due to lag that we were forced to turn off all online options in-game.

However, Ubisoft is working hard on a fix and we'll update this review as soon as the we can properly test the online functionality of the game.

Verdict

Watch Dogs 2 is the game we wanted to play the first time around. It's bold, beautiful and tells a story filled with people you care about and missions that are well built, exciting and sometimes hilarious.

The hacking options are extensive and enable you to have a lot of fun and be creative with the missions, despite the often serious tone of the story itself. The player choice is immense too, fully putting the player in the driving seat.

If the driving itself just had more personality, Watch Dogs 2 would be perfect.

Watch Dogs 2 release date: November 15, 2016

Available on: PS4 (tested), Xbox One and PC

Developer: Ubisoft Montreal

Publisher: Ubisoft