Watch Dogs 2 is defined by its insecurity. From the very beginning, the game does absolutely everything in its power to tonally and aesthetically set itself apart from its darker and edgier predecessor. A squad of quirky, eccentric characters instead of a brooding, solitary protagonist; high-stakes cyberheists and Anonymous-esque exposés instead of fixer gigs and small-scale stealthy encounters; San Francisco's neon-splattered punk aesthetics instead of the sleek urban elegance of Chicago; an overall goofy and bombastic tone throughout instead of the straight-faced, byronic feel of the original. Everything is different, and yet... absolutely none of it feels authentic or genuine.
The squad of quirky, eccentric characters the plot centers around feel like hollow, depthless stereotypes designed exclusively to pander to Millenials, an aggressively samey quartet (quintet when the game remembers Horatio exists) that exist to spew out references to outdated memes, do Arnold Schwarzenegger references, and have random arguments about Aliens versus Predators. The cyberpunk element of the plot exists almost solely for spectacle; Watch Dogs 2 pretends that DedSec's hacktivism is motivated by direct action and revolutionary sentiment, but the game's politics are so shallow and so disinterested that the most definitive statement Watch Dogs 2 ever makes on its themes is a safe, surface-level "corporations suck" message that lands with absolutely zero impact given the company that made this. The graffiti-laden punk stylings of the game are equally as shallow and function as little more than colorful branding, borrowing and co-opting the aesthetics of a hack's understanding of rebellion, and the comedy and overall goofy tone of Watch Dogs 2 is, frankly, fucking awful. Now mind you, this isn't because the game isn't funny per se (though the comedy is genuinely nightmarish sometimes), but it's the sheer, utter insincerity and insecurity behind the comedy that saps all of the energy and authenticity out of Watch Dogs 2's intended tone.
Watch Dogs 2's plot is overflowing with random jokes, outdated memes, and loud, Deadpool-esque characters that exist solely to either quip, dole out references, or make funny noises. This, to me, is the sign of Ubisoft desperately compensating for the poor reception that Watch Dogs 1's plot received upon release. Aiden Pearce was often derided for essentially being the king of generic edgelords, a brooding antihero seemingly so cookie-cutter and dime-a-dozen that a lot of his critics marked him as being nothing more than a walking cliche. Now, I wrote a whole review about how I feel like Watch Dogs 1 failed to extrapolate upon the potential and hidden depths of Aiden's character; I think he was a potentially interesting villain protagonist the plot failed to do much of anything with because of its lack of creativity and nuance. I'm not about to call Aiden's critics wrong, but I'm also not about to call Marcus Holloway's fans correct, either. Aiden was certainly a very tropey and predictable character, but honestly, at least I knew who Aiden was. At least I knew what he wanted, even if it was little more than revenge. We got a pretty full picture of what Aiden was like as a character, even if that wasn't much to write home about. I've spent upwards of twenty to thirty hours with Marcus and I still have no idea who the fuck this guy even is.
Marcus does has a personality: funny, relatable nerd. Unfortunately, that is the personality of literally all of his friends in DedSec. Marcus also wants the exact same things as his DedSec comrades, for equally shallow reasons of wanting to 'stick it to the man' without ever really knowing why they want this in the first place (Horatio is the only character with a compelling premise but he is woefully underutilized). The story tells us that Marcus was falsely convicted of... something, and presumably spent some time in jail and doing community service, but that is literally all we're ever permited to learn about Marcus. We don't learn what he was falsely convicted for, we don't learn how long his jailtime was, how he was treated in jail, how expensive his bail was (if someone paid his bail at all), what his community service entailed and how long it was, or how society treats him now that he has a criminal record he never asked for. Literally none of these things matter to the overall plot, and they don't even really matter to Marcus as a whole. He goofs off and commits cyberterrorism and vandalism without a care of the world, and we never get to see what brought him to the point of radicalization beyond what essentially amounts to a hand-wavey backstory you'd probably find in the back of a game manual. Marcus is less generic than Aiden upon first blush, yes, but he's also somehow far less distinct and far less fleshed-out. I never knew what was at stake for Marcus beyond the expected punishments of imprisonment or death, and thus, it was utterly impossible to care about him whenever the game asked me to. You spend the entire game controlling an absolute stranger, and this is because Ubisoft didn't want to write a character, they wanted to make a hollow vessel for jokes, references, and memes in a misguided attempt to distance themselves from Watch Dogs 1's oft-derided darkness.
The plot absolutely refuses to take it seriously, and it doesn't want you to take it seriously... except for the moments when it absolutely does. In spite of the wackier, larger-than-life, Saints Row-knockoff tone that defines your experience with Watch Dogs 2, the game is still trying to be about the exact same intended themes of its predecessor: Big Tech, government control, conspiracy, and the way that corporations use the digital age and the Internet to manipulate and control people. These are heavy, dystopic themes that clash hard with the game's lighthearted, goofy exterior, and more often than not, the game absolutely crumbles under the weight of trying to balance these two wholly different spheres of influence.
Marcus' best friend, Horatio, is murdered by a random gang out of nowhere. It's sudden and cruel and the characters are devastated by this loss... and then one or two missions later, they're cracking unfunny jokes about 'hipster dicks' and pretending Horatio never even existed. There's a shockingly well-written and well-acted scene where the main villain reveals he's been artificially inflating DedSec's follower count with bots as a way of bringing more customers to Blume's doorstep, dropping this bombshell mere moments before calling the cops on a cornered Marcus. It's a genuinely tense moment that presents a legitimately interesting plot twist, and then immediately thereafter, Marcus and his friends dick off to the desert and get high and then hack a dinosaur statue in a hacking competition that was apparently being held in the desert because that's a thing you fucking do I guess?????? Constant, unstoppable whiplash. There are subplots about cults and human trafficking and gang violence, heavy and dramatic plot points that demand your attention alongside pop culture rants, nerdgasms, quippy puns, and an overlong mission where you fight a queer-coded SJW intentionally made to be thoroughly unlikable because fuck Tumblr, am I right? Watch Dogs 2 wants to have its cake and eat it, too. It demands you take it seriously, but it also covers itself in a thick coating of irony as a defense mechanism against criticism. Maybe this worked back in 2016, but in an era as heavily, unavoidably political as the 2020s, Watch Dogs 2's failure to commit to its themes of radicalization vs. corruption is a deeply embarrassing and deeply uninteresting reflection of the time it was made and the company who made it. Watch Dogs 2's inability to commit to either tragedy or comedy made it impossible to take either facet seriously, creating a hollow void of a plot where nothing happens and nothing matters.
Regrettably, however, the gameplay of Watch Dogs 2 is so much fun that it almost manages to make up for its disaster of a plot. Whereas 2's story and themes feel like a downgrade from even the most generic and underdeveloped plot beats of Watch Dogs 1, the gameplay loop here is a significant improvement from the decent foundation laid by its predecessor. The combat feels smoother, the infamously bad driving actually feels pretty manageable this time around, and there's so much cool and inventive stuff you can do with hacking that it makes Watch Dogs 1's hacking mechanics feel like mere waddling in the script kiddie pool (that's a hacker pun, heheheh, how do you do, fellow nerds). You can hack vehicles to swerve out of the way, you can deactivate a door and effectively lock enemies out, you can set up EMP traps, and you can even sic a gang or the police on an enemy or civilian as a patsy if you either want some backup or want to orchestrate a screening action as a decoy. You can be legitimately really smart in the moment-to-moment gameplay of Watch Dogs 2; there were several instances throughout the game where I felt like I did something very cool or very smart, and Watch Dogs 2 is very good at allowing the player to experiment and manipulate the electronic world around them. The drone and the RC car are also great additions to your arsenal, allowing you to access high and low places you were never able to see in Watch Dogs 1. Combat feels good, stealth is basically always a viable option, car chases away from the police feel exciting and dynamic, and the process is so multifaceted and nuanced now that it leaves Watch Dogs 1's already pretty-solid template behind in the dust.
The gameplay is very good, and the fact that it's forced to share living space with an obnoxiously underwritten story is a genuine shame. Watch Dogs 2 is a game defined by whiplash: its daring attempt at colorful dystopia is neutered by its cowardly sense of irony, moments of tragedy and intrigue are rendered incoherent by poorly-timed, ill-fitting "comedy", and the stimulating, entertaining gameplay is constantly hampered by the pathetic context in which the gameplay exists. It's fun to be a cybercriminal in Watch Dogs 2, but it would have been far more fun to be a revolutionary. What could have been a thrilling, pulpy take on cybercrime and direct action against the Powers That Be instead manifested as this deeply insecure and thoroughly insincere response to the mockery that Watch Dogs 1's plot received. The unfunny, performative comedy is nothing more than a shield against criticism, the punk leanings and vaguely anti-establishment themes little more than a desperate marketing strategy, and any and all attempts to say anything of merit are quickly silenced by gags, memes, and references that were outdated even by 2016 standards. In a way, it's not surprising at all that Wrench was the breakout character here, because he perfectly embodies Watch Dogs 2 (albeit not in the way they maybe intended him to): a loud, washed-up, out-of-touch, how-do-you-do-fellow-kids class clown that quickly shows his true colors of insecurity and awkwardness the moment you take his mask off.
But you can pet actual dogs in this game! You can finally watch dogs in Watch Dogs, so it honestly might be a little better than the original game just because of that.
The squad of quirky, eccentric characters the plot centers around feel like hollow, depthless stereotypes designed exclusively to pander to Millenials, an aggressively samey quartet (quintet when the game remembers Horatio exists) that exist to spew out references to outdated memes, do Arnold Schwarzenegger references, and have random arguments about Aliens versus Predators. The cyberpunk element of the plot exists almost solely for spectacle; Watch Dogs 2 pretends that DedSec's hacktivism is motivated by direct action and revolutionary sentiment, but the game's politics are so shallow and so disinterested that the most definitive statement Watch Dogs 2 ever makes on its themes is a safe, surface-level "corporations suck" message that lands with absolutely zero impact given the company that made this. The graffiti-laden punk stylings of the game are equally as shallow and function as little more than colorful branding, borrowing and co-opting the aesthetics of a hack's understanding of rebellion, and the comedy and overall goofy tone of Watch Dogs 2 is, frankly, fucking awful. Now mind you, this isn't because the game isn't funny per se (though the comedy is genuinely nightmarish sometimes), but it's the sheer, utter insincerity and insecurity behind the comedy that saps all of the energy and authenticity out of Watch Dogs 2's intended tone.
Watch Dogs 2's plot is overflowing with random jokes, outdated memes, and loud, Deadpool-esque characters that exist solely to either quip, dole out references, or make funny noises. This, to me, is the sign of Ubisoft desperately compensating for the poor reception that Watch Dogs 1's plot received upon release. Aiden Pearce was often derided for essentially being the king of generic edgelords, a brooding antihero seemingly so cookie-cutter and dime-a-dozen that a lot of his critics marked him as being nothing more than a walking cliche. Now, I wrote a whole review about how I feel like Watch Dogs 1 failed to extrapolate upon the potential and hidden depths of Aiden's character; I think he was a potentially interesting villain protagonist the plot failed to do much of anything with because of its lack of creativity and nuance. I'm not about to call Aiden's critics wrong, but I'm also not about to call Marcus Holloway's fans correct, either. Aiden was certainly a very tropey and predictable character, but honestly, at least I knew who Aiden was. At least I knew what he wanted, even if it was little more than revenge. We got a pretty full picture of what Aiden was like as a character, even if that wasn't much to write home about. I've spent upwards of twenty to thirty hours with Marcus and I still have no idea who the fuck this guy even is.
Marcus does has a personality: funny, relatable nerd. Unfortunately, that is the personality of literally all of his friends in DedSec. Marcus also wants the exact same things as his DedSec comrades, for equally shallow reasons of wanting to 'stick it to the man' without ever really knowing why they want this in the first place (Horatio is the only character with a compelling premise but he is woefully underutilized). The story tells us that Marcus was falsely convicted of... something, and presumably spent some time in jail and doing community service, but that is literally all we're ever permited to learn about Marcus. We don't learn what he was falsely convicted for, we don't learn how long his jailtime was, how he was treated in jail, how expensive his bail was (if someone paid his bail at all), what his community service entailed and how long it was, or how society treats him now that he has a criminal record he never asked for. Literally none of these things matter to the overall plot, and they don't even really matter to Marcus as a whole. He goofs off and commits cyberterrorism and vandalism without a care of the world, and we never get to see what brought him to the point of radicalization beyond what essentially amounts to a hand-wavey backstory you'd probably find in the back of a game manual. Marcus is less generic than Aiden upon first blush, yes, but he's also somehow far less distinct and far less fleshed-out. I never knew what was at stake for Marcus beyond the expected punishments of imprisonment or death, and thus, it was utterly impossible to care about him whenever the game asked me to. You spend the entire game controlling an absolute stranger, and this is because Ubisoft didn't want to write a character, they wanted to make a hollow vessel for jokes, references, and memes in a misguided attempt to distance themselves from Watch Dogs 1's oft-derided darkness.
The plot absolutely refuses to take it seriously, and it doesn't want you to take it seriously... except for the moments when it absolutely does. In spite of the wackier, larger-than-life, Saints Row-knockoff tone that defines your experience with Watch Dogs 2, the game is still trying to be about the exact same intended themes of its predecessor: Big Tech, government control, conspiracy, and the way that corporations use the digital age and the Internet to manipulate and control people. These are heavy, dystopic themes that clash hard with the game's lighthearted, goofy exterior, and more often than not, the game absolutely crumbles under the weight of trying to balance these two wholly different spheres of influence.
Marcus' best friend, Horatio, is murdered by a random gang out of nowhere. It's sudden and cruel and the characters are devastated by this loss... and then one or two missions later, they're cracking unfunny jokes about 'hipster dicks' and pretending Horatio never even existed. There's a shockingly well-written and well-acted scene where the main villain reveals he's been artificially inflating DedSec's follower count with bots as a way of bringing more customers to Blume's doorstep, dropping this bombshell mere moments before calling the cops on a cornered Marcus. It's a genuinely tense moment that presents a legitimately interesting plot twist, and then immediately thereafter, Marcus and his friends dick off to the desert and get high and then hack a dinosaur statue in a hacking competition that was apparently being held in the desert because that's a thing you fucking do I guess?????? Constant, unstoppable whiplash. There are subplots about cults and human trafficking and gang violence, heavy and dramatic plot points that demand your attention alongside pop culture rants, nerdgasms, quippy puns, and an overlong mission where you fight a queer-coded SJW intentionally made to be thoroughly unlikable because fuck Tumblr, am I right? Watch Dogs 2 wants to have its cake and eat it, too. It demands you take it seriously, but it also covers itself in a thick coating of irony as a defense mechanism against criticism. Maybe this worked back in 2016, but in an era as heavily, unavoidably political as the 2020s, Watch Dogs 2's failure to commit to its themes of radicalization vs. corruption is a deeply embarrassing and deeply uninteresting reflection of the time it was made and the company who made it. Watch Dogs 2's inability to commit to either tragedy or comedy made it impossible to take either facet seriously, creating a hollow void of a plot where nothing happens and nothing matters.
Regrettably, however, the gameplay of Watch Dogs 2 is so much fun that it almost manages to make up for its disaster of a plot. Whereas 2's story and themes feel like a downgrade from even the most generic and underdeveloped plot beats of Watch Dogs 1, the gameplay loop here is a significant improvement from the decent foundation laid by its predecessor. The combat feels smoother, the infamously bad driving actually feels pretty manageable this time around, and there's so much cool and inventive stuff you can do with hacking that it makes Watch Dogs 1's hacking mechanics feel like mere waddling in the script kiddie pool (that's a hacker pun, heheheh, how do you do, fellow nerds). You can hack vehicles to swerve out of the way, you can deactivate a door and effectively lock enemies out, you can set up EMP traps, and you can even sic a gang or the police on an enemy or civilian as a patsy if you either want some backup or want to orchestrate a screening action as a decoy. You can be legitimately really smart in the moment-to-moment gameplay of Watch Dogs 2; there were several instances throughout the game where I felt like I did something very cool or very smart, and Watch Dogs 2 is very good at allowing the player to experiment and manipulate the electronic world around them. The drone and the RC car are also great additions to your arsenal, allowing you to access high and low places you were never able to see in Watch Dogs 1. Combat feels good, stealth is basically always a viable option, car chases away from the police feel exciting and dynamic, and the process is so multifaceted and nuanced now that it leaves Watch Dogs 1's already pretty-solid template behind in the dust.
The gameplay is very good, and the fact that it's forced to share living space with an obnoxiously underwritten story is a genuine shame. Watch Dogs 2 is a game defined by whiplash: its daring attempt at colorful dystopia is neutered by its cowardly sense of irony, moments of tragedy and intrigue are rendered incoherent by poorly-timed, ill-fitting "comedy", and the stimulating, entertaining gameplay is constantly hampered by the pathetic context in which the gameplay exists. It's fun to be a cybercriminal in Watch Dogs 2, but it would have been far more fun to be a revolutionary. What could have been a thrilling, pulpy take on cybercrime and direct action against the Powers That Be instead manifested as this deeply insecure and thoroughly insincere response to the mockery that Watch Dogs 1's plot received. The unfunny, performative comedy is nothing more than a shield against criticism, the punk leanings and vaguely anti-establishment themes little more than a desperate marketing strategy, and any and all attempts to say anything of merit are quickly silenced by gags, memes, and references that were outdated even by 2016 standards. In a way, it's not surprising at all that Wrench was the breakout character here, because he perfectly embodies Watch Dogs 2 (albeit not in the way they maybe intended him to): a loud, washed-up, out-of-touch, how-do-you-do-fellow-kids class clown that quickly shows his true colors of insecurity and awkwardness the moment you take his mask off.
But you can pet actual dogs in this game! You can finally watch dogs in Watch Dogs, so it honestly might be a little better than the original game just because of that.