Watch Dogs 2
PC Gamer US Edition|Holiday 2016

Hands-on with another stylish but unconvincing hacktivist yarn.

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
Watch Dogs 2

Watch Dogs 2 is about Sticking it to the Man in the same way that ordering salad in a burger joint is about bringing down the entire fast food industry. It’s about being an online freedom fighter, waging war on the power-brokers of cyberspace, in the same way that owning a Che Guevara poster makes you a fully paid-up communist.

It’s also a joyfully barmy open-world affair in which you can get yourself murdered by blowing kisses at gangsters, and a sleek stealth-action sandbox in which you can dismantle an entire factory complex using nothing but gas pipelines and an RC car.

To play Watch Dogs 2 is to alternate between giddy enjoyment and a sense of overwhelming superficiality. When I hack the ignition on a yacht through the eyes of my quadrotor drone, smashing the boat against a jetty to the surprise of guards who I then bombard with shock grenades as they move to investigate, I want to buy the designers a drink. But when I hear my character’s DedSec chums rant about conformity and consumerism while sipping take-out coffees and brandishing phones full of licensed music, I want to reach through the screen and give everybody a clip round the ear. The game is a hoot under the thumb, but its hacktivist premise rings incredibly hollow.

Thematic inconsistencies of this sort are nothing new, but there’s something especially grating about a tale of battling Big Data told through a game with a raft of persistent online features, a story about political and artistic transgression which leverages open-world design principles as old and fusty as Assassin’s Creed.

هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة Holiday 2016 من PC Gamer US Edition.

ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.

هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة Holiday 2016 من PC Gamer US Edition.

ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.