Personally, I wasn’t always the biggest fan of the first Watch Dogs, but now, 2 years later, my first hands-on experience with Watch Dogs 2 may have turned me around when it comes to one of Ubisoft’s potential new flagship franchises.
From the start of our session we were met with the fact that Watch Dogs 2 shares a lot of the DNA of its predecessor, but like what Assassin’s Creed II was to the first game, Watch Dogs 2 seems like a product that has learned a lot from the missteps of the first game and takes a great attempt at providing a user experience that is much closer to the expectations that players had of the original game.
Using wits and tricks, the array of tools to hack the world and take out enemies has heavily expanded and this time round you can do it all without a single fatality. Using a mix and mash of techniques and gadgets we were met with the task of retrieving multiple items of interest from two enemies situated in a hostile area, though, I didn’t need to go in alone. Accompanied by a second player from the team at Ubisoft, who joined our session seamlessly just a few moments earlier, we set out to infiltrate the facility and get the job done.
The game gives you a much wider sense of freedom when it comes to hacking and other core gameplay features, but a small gripe would be the fact that the control scheme sometimes feels slightly confusing feature-wise, as the game does exchange some of its simplicity for features.
After this we were put into a multiplayer session with 3 other members of the press, where we would be shown the ins and outs of the game’s new Bounty mode, which puts the mark on one or multiple players as the remaining players and the police collaborate on taking down these wanted individuals on the streets of San Francisco, where driving would be a major factor. The driving mechanics of the first game was arguably one of its greatest weaknesses, though whilst this game makes some improvements to the foundations that were there, it’s not quite the driving experience we (and arguably a lot of others) were looking for. With this, driving has moved on from being a grade-A issue to being a minor gripe, which still isn’t ideal, but I didn’t find myself in as much of a frustrating situation as I often did myself with the first.
Graphically Watch Dogs 2 seemed like a big improvement over the first, but this is mostly due to the environmental switch for the setting that does the engine and lighting systems a lot more favor, creating a much visually appealing and varied environment that ranges from good looking to great in certain locations and time of days.
Watch Dogs 2 wasn’t the ultimate improvement I had hoped for so far, but it does have a lot of qualities that always seemed to be missing from the first, which really made it clear that Ubisoft has gone to great lengths in order to create an experience that has learned from the mistakes of the past, which already goes a long way by itself.