Watch Dogs 2 Reviews
Watch_Dogs 2 heads in a lot of directions, and fails at every turn. Sloppy, contradictory writing and a severe lack of focus and polish make Ubisoft's latest title an internal fatal error.
I did miss the more serious, almost Blade Runner style vibe from the first game. Despite the fact that Aiden Pearce was an asshole, I always felt cool hacking and infiltrating facilities in that game. Here, that feeling is quite gone, and everything just feels more frivolous. Watch Dogs 2 is an enjoyable, yet flawed, ride. However, poor check-pointing, and putting in place limitations to keep the player underpowered for a long stretch of the game mar this experience.
There are gameplay concerns but the setting helps to make up for it as Watch Dogs 2’s version of San Francisco is faithful, colourful and a joy to explore. It’s not in the top calibre of games this year, but it has interesting characters, unique elements, and more than enough missions to keep you busy for a while.
Watch Dogs 2 makes a few right steps following Watch Dogs 2, but spends too much of its time trying to distract the player from what is a very interesting world.
While the sequel is a definite improvement over the original, the improvements are coming in baby steps, not leaps and bounds. A great first step would be to make a game that has a proper tone, because Watch Dogs 2 feels like it doesn’t know what it is.
Whilst Ubisoft makes a strong effort to improve upon the original, there are still major problem with this hacking open world game.
Watch Dogs 2 takes a different thematic approach to the hacking culture, opting for a very laid back attitude that you may or may not enjoy, and offering a number of gameplay alterations of similarly variable quality.
A great PC port and lovely open world don’t give depth to Watch Dogs 2’s shallow combat and stealth design.
Watch Dogs 2 might be the best soundtrack and scenic open world game from Ubisoft in recent memory, but inconsistent theme and my failure to really resonate with the central themes prevented me from enjoying it.
As an open world sandpit to explore and sink your time into, Watch Dogs 2 provides a lot of content and opportunities to have fun. How much fun you can have depends on your capacity for exploration. Things start to fall apart once you are forced to take part in the very structured main missions and the glaring mechanical issues come to the fore. A refurbishment and a lick of paint can work wonders – but if the foundations aren’t solid, then the results won’t be fantastic. Watch Dogs 2 is a massive improvement over its predecessor, but if a stealth game isn’t fun to play in a stealthy way, then you know something isn’t quite right.
Despite some undeniable improvements in terms of art direction and the underlying soul of the concept, Watch_Dogs 2 is still a sloppy product. With the persistence of AI oddities, dull graphics and physics, stereotypical plot and character design, conspicuous asset recycling, serious online problems and so on, Watch_Dogs 2 lack of polish stops it from achieving excellence once again.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
Overall, Watch Dogs 2 is a solid title that improves upon the original in gameplay and plot but still has some flaws. It's too easy at times, and the plot isn't structured well enough to have the desired impact, but that's easy to forgive when you're setting up a Rube Goldberg contraption to send a hacked car covered with sticky bombs into the middle of a group of gang members. It won't drastically change your mind if you disliked the first Watch Dogs, but if you found it flawed but fun, you'll probably enjoy the bulk of the sequel's improvements. The drop-in multiplayer and freedom of gameplay do a lot to keep the title feeling engaging, but it depends on a player's creativity in order to thrive.
Desperate to be different, but ultimately too familiar
I think that Watch Dogs 2 wants to say a whole lot about the contemporary world, but it never moves away from generic statements like “information good” and “military-industrial complex bad” to say anything specific. In fact, it has some profound convictions about not saying much at all. The positions it lays out remind me of competitive debate: forcefully presented but never all that convincing.
The good outweighs the bad, with Watch Dogs 2 providing lots of stellar opportunities for players to hack the planet.
Fun, jolly, and with tongue planted firmly in cheek for most of the game: Watch Dogs 2 isn't a must-have, but it's still a rather good time.
Watch Dogs 2 is a well-made game that tries hard to (over)compensate for the dour mood of its predecessor with a peppy script and a vibrant game world stuffed full of life and colour. But the game's ever-changing tone, confused narrative, and undercooked gameplay elements still leave room for improvement. It's a solid open world game, but rarely spectacular. <iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Kw1dK-st_O4" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Watch Dogs 2 is a title that can secure space within the gaming market but is not able to emerge as it should, in some respects it is also difficult to give it an evaluation as we have a product from a solid foundation that supports all positive side of his predecessor, but from the high point we remain stuck in a mediocre game where the narrative can not spin the fly and leaves us a sense of void and incompleteness.
Review in Italian | Read full review
You’ll almost certainly enjoy it if you buy it, but I can’t recommend it if you haven’t.
Watch Dogs 2 tells the story of Marcus Holloway in a completely different way than the first chapter. There are some interesting additions that will be digested only if they're close to your personal taste. This is a fun title that can entertain you for a few dozen hours without difficulty, but it isn't able to emotionally get you in the beautiful but hardly-dynamic San Francisco.
Review in Italian | Read full review