If you do get spotted, Marcus’ toolset swings in a different direction with no impact on character. Then it’s back to square one, scouting and setting up with the drone again. I moved through the same rooms, the same guard paths, and to the same objective only to die from getting caught by a guard whose red outline was barely visible against a visually busy scene.

And so I’d essentially replay the whole level, but as Marcus, who is easily spotted unless he’s ‘in cover,’ meaning I’ve pushed him against a wall. There were entire floors I’d scout with a drone, sneaking by unseen to download classified files or plant a virus, only to find that Marcus’ physical presence was required to tap some keys in the end. There’s no tension in mapping out an arena with drones since everything is always in its designed place. I’m infiltrating through the same obvious path that everyone else will, just going through the motions so I know where my objective is and where all the guards are.

Snaking around most spaces are ventilation shafts just big enough for a small RC robot to roll through, but there’s never a sense I’m being stealthy or subverting the enemy threat when using vents. To truly be stealthy, you’ll spend a lot of time controlling your drones. But its stealth systems are undermined by hacking and combat abilities that feel too unwieldy and passive to be reliable, and as slapstick as it can be, relying on the same powers throughout a thirty hour runtime turns Watch Dogs 2’s best abilities boring far too soon.

There’s a lot of goofy open world fun to have in Watch Dogs 2, mostly as a byproduct of the chaos your abilities enable, and especially by combining abilities in the free roam co-op mode. Instead, you’re using brute force, whether by equipping a drone with shock mines to knock out your enemies or using a literal grenade launcher to ‘hack’ them to death by the dozen.Įven if you’re murdering people to steal data, Watch Dogs 2’s loose take on pop culture hacktivism assumes a more bizarre, self-aware direction for the series overall. (Yes, you can hack pipes.) It rarely feels like you’re using technical expertise to give big, insidious tech companies the run around. Starting with the GTA template of a city, cars, guns, and ragdoll physics, you can also use a phone to remotely overload a circuit box and knock security guards comatose or hack underground pipes to blow up huge sections of the street. Watch Dogs 2, an open world action adventure set in the San Francisco Bay Area, turns hacking into a full contact sport.

Watch dogs 1 pc metacritic