Watch Dogs 2’s new Silicon Valley setting is a shiny playground, which makes a distinctly zany stage for strong, satirical commentary with dystopian ideas about Big Data and rampant, roughshod capitalism. Where Watch Dogs was dour and self-serious, the sequel is bright, colorful, and snarky. Hackers, as they do, tend to react badly to these scenarios, and DedSec goes on a lengthy mission to dismantle Blume and anyone affiliated with them.Įven at its outset, Watch Dogs 2 feels markedly different from its predecessor.
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Marcus Holloway, a genius hacker from Oakland, joins and quickly comes to lead the small-time hacker collective DedSec after he’s wrongfully targeted as a criminal based on profiling data collected by ctOS, smart-city infrastructure software that runs everything from traffic lights to police dispatches, while also turning whole cities into surveillance states. It isn’t perfect, but many of these issues do not plague Watch Dogs 2. Plus, the original premise of the game as publisher Ubisoft described it - hacking the “Internet of Things” scattered throughout Chicago - still devolved into a lot of standard-issue gunfights. He was a bit of a jerk and not especially compelling. Its central protagonist, Aiden Pearce, was basically a drab, more teched-out version of Batman out for personal revenge after the death of his niece. Players had a lot of gripes with the original Watch Dogs. When it lets you be a hacker genius messing with the gun-toting minions of the corrupt, it shines. When Watch Dogs 2 makes you fight it out, it suffers. Cover-based shooting and stealth get equal billing next to the game’s much more interesting premise of hacking just about everything in the game world to confuse, attack or otherwise trick enemies. While Watch Dogs 2 is an improvement in many, many ways over its 2014 predecessor, the game’s core gameplay does not feel as fresh as its narrative. You don’t get to steal Trump’s tax returns, find Clinton’s deleted emails, or block Russia from hacking the American electoral process, but you come pretty close. Watch Dogs 2’s missions to wreck fraudulent voting machines rigged using data stolen by a social media network, or blow open a conspiracy by a smart home company to spy on homeowners’ personal habits to drive up their insurance rates, feel perfectly placed. Like its 2014 predecessor, Watch Dogs 2 imagines a tech dystopia of corporations like Google and Facebook sucking up their customers’ personal data and putting it to all sorts of nefarious purposes – and then tasks the player with breaking in and shining bright sunlight on all that Silicon Valley evil-doing. Wikileaks and Russian hacks played roles in the story, and Facebook has been accused of influencing some voters with its unfiltered news feed, which often surfaces fake reports that users might think are real.įor the fictional hacker group DedSec, the heroes of Watch Dogs 2, these news items would be calls to action. presidential election that included everything from leaked emails to declarations of voter fraud has left many people angry about the state of government. Watch Dogs 2 couldn’t have come along at a better time.