Five Welcome Ways Watch Dogs 2 Improves Over The Original

It could be another three or four years before we even catch a whiff of the next Grand Theft Auto. It’s an agonisingly long time to wait, yet one that allows other studios to gun for Rockstar’s crown as the behemoth slumbers.

That’s definitely the impression I got after several hours with Watch Dogs 2. Although it’s robust approach to multiplayer has largely carried over from the 2014 original, Ubisoft’s fledgling franchise has undergone a deep visual and tonal makeover.

As we slowly trundle towards the end of the 2016, we find ourselves wading through a flood of new releases. Among them, Watch Dogs 2 is certainly one of the more notable, and while it isn’t without its own troubles at launch, from wonky multiplayer to overly explicit content, it makes a number of major improvements over the original.

No More Aiden Pearce

As far as gaming protagonists go, Watch Dog’s Aiden Pearce wasn’t exactly the most likeable. His constant brooding and moral ambiguity had him swinging towards the Kane & Lynch ending of the spectrum, but at least they were interesting. Aiden was just dull and bland as he sought revenge on those whose action caused the death of his niece.

By comparison, Marcus Holloway marks a step in the right direction. He’s fairly annoying himself in some ways, but he actually feels like a person as opposed to a blank cap-wearing vehicle for the player.

Tone

In fact, as a whole, Watch Dogs 2 is way, way more upbeat than its predecessor. It constantly has its tongue firmly in cheek as you galavant around San Francisco, conversing will all kinds of wacky bystanders. Compared to the doom and gloom of Chicago, it comes as a most welcome tonal shift that’s imbued in both the characters and city itself.

The Golden City is tagged with all kinds of motifs and murals that go well beyond the lazy window dressing found in some open world games. The attention to detail here is fantastic and it rides off the back of a bolder, more vivid palette of colours. It looks great on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, but if you’re playing on either a PlayStation 4 Pro or high-end gaming PC, you’re in for a treat.

There will no doubt be a minority put off by saturated colours and poking fun at society. There are an abundance of memes and references to pop culture that come across as surprisingly organic though tap into a strain of humour poised at a millennial audience.

Hacking

Much of Watch Dogs’ core DNA is liberally borrowed from the wider collective of modern open world games. However derivative entries in this genre tend to be, each one needs to have a unique selling point which, in this case, happens to be hacking.

It was a cool novelty at the time of the original game, though looking back, the hacking options available to players during the original were severely limited. The sequel grants you an enhanced level of control over a much wider series of objects.

Simple objects like generators served a single purpose in Watch Dogs as players manually blew them up. Here they can also be used to lure nearby NPCs and even turned into a proximity mine of sorts, shocking any hostiles that come too close.

Overall, hacking feels just as substantive as it is seamless, without bombarding players with too much information. You can simply tap L1 to pull of the default hack, but holding it lets you pick from up to four options via controller’s face buttons. By the time you max out the game’s research trees, you’ll be pulling off all sorts of shenanigans without barely a thought.

Movement

Verticality is key to just about any third person action game nowadays. Unless crammed into confined spaces, there needs to be some kind of liberty given to you when exploring sizeable environments.

In fairness, Watch Dogs let us do just that with some minor freerunning spots here and there. No doubt wanting to push this further, San Fran is teeming with ladders, fences, walls, and other climbable objects often leading to hidden caches, some of which tie into the game’s many side objectives.

Mapping the sprint and freerun to two separate inputs feels a bit strange at first though definitely helps when navigating the mean streets. We wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the next Assassin’s Creed game model its own traversal system around this.

Vehicles have also undergone somewhat of a makeover with race missions being far more exhilarating than they were before and much livelier handling in sportier cars. Marcus also has access to the Jumper, a remote control hacking device that – when used properly – can navigate danger zones as you hang back some several meters away. There’s a quadcopter drone in there too, and other, more miscellaneous modes of transports including cranes and even forklifts.

Customisation

One thing that always surprised me when watching others play Grand Theft Auto V was how differently they had styled the three protagonists compared to my own. Naturally, that potential for customisation was greatly expanded when taking that game online.

Watch Dogs 2 has done exactly with the same, though with arguably more flare. Leaning into that hipster vibe with everything it has, Ubisoft Montreal has created a huge wardrobe of wavy garms with which to dress Marcus up in. Some of the designs ooze a “top knot” level of pretentiousness, though it’s all self aware.

There’s always space for fashion crimes such as this:

I am, of course, talking about the horrendous suit that guy’s wearing…