In today’s post we talk about one of the games that I finally gave up: Watch_Dogs 2. After not really being convinced by Watch_Dogs at the time, this part was recommended to me again. You can read here whether he has eliminated the weaknesses of the first part.

In principle, I could be excited about Watch_Dogs: an open-world action game in which you have to send the main character through numerous main and side missions. Social criticism, current issues and a lot of shooting make it sound like a new GTA part. Throw in hacking as the main theme of the game and how the increasingly connected world is affecting us, and you can’t go wrong, right?

As always, the answer is theoretically “yes”, but in reality it is unfortunately a bit different. Because whoever (intentionally or unintentionally) orients himself strongly towards GTA, must also inevitably be measured by it; I think that was also the biggest problem I have with it – I just know that other people do it better.

But first let’s look at the positive aspects. Technically the game is stable. There were no crashes, no big hitches, all in all everything worked out quite well. Minor bugs were annoying, but didn’t make the game unplayable. An example here is the navigation system in vehicles, which sometimes just wasn’t activated. Maybe that had a logical reason too, but I couldn’t see it.

Apart from that, the game also looked very good. The city was very beautiful both graphically and structurally. San Francisco served as a template here and it was implemented very nicely – I was amazed by the view time and time again. The various locations were also set up in a coherent manner. The Noodle HQ (adapted from a popular search engine) looked exactly how you would imagine it.

Before I get to the content of the story, however, I must also mention the negative points. On the one hand there is the sometimes absolutely bad physics. And before the objection comes, no, it wasn’t bugs that I picked out at certain points. The physics were consistently and reproducibly broken. The most prominent example of this was the ability to run a motorcycle into a truck and force it off the road. Or the constantly spectacularly exploding cars – I don’t mind artistic liberties, but that was just too much and reminded me a lot of the Mafia 3 debacle.

The other, more negative point concerned the core of the game: the hacking. While some features were useful or just plain funny, the actions often didn’t make much sense. For example, you could have people entered into the police database so that they would then be arrested – but this didn’t prove to be really practical in any mission, as it lost the entire stealth effect. Most other functions also put the guards on alert every time – then I could’ve just run in with a machine gun.

And this is the last item on my list of criticisms: the weapons. You had to craft (print) a weapon because of the story, the rest wasn’t really necessary. It was strong enough, enemies had plenty of weapons to loot, and ammunition was never short – all incentive to complete a mission stealthily was gone.

But now we come to a point that I feel is more a shame than badly done: the story. Watch_Dogs had dealt exclusively with the danger of the networked city; everyone is always monitored, individuals take advantage of this power. Nothing you haven’t seen before, just a solidly told story.

Watch_Dogs 2 is now trying the same thing again. The only difference: it’s about ctOS version 2 and an even bigger conspiracy. There is a minor plot twist, but it’s nothing special and actually more to be expected. Current topics are included, for example a trans woman as a senator who helps us with various missions. I found their integration into the story to be very appropriate and not forced, as (to me personally) it sometimes seems.

Otherwise, we have our standard group of different members, whose story is sometimes discussed more, sometimes less – not bad, but not particularly exciting either.

Overall, however, I have to say that this is not enough for me. The mechanics aren’t particularly innovative or interesting, the best way for missions is always with a lot of violence (but that’s because of the broken stealth mechanics) and there are still a few technical quirks that make the game frustrating – hence it ends up on the pile , which will probably not be completed.

What do you think about that? Do you see it the same way as I do or completely differently? Feel free to discuss it on Discord!