Hands-on with another stylish but unconvincing hacktivist yarn.
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.
この記事は PC Gamer US Edition の Holiday 2016 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です ? サインイン
この記事は PC Gamer US Edition の Holiday 2016 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です? サインイン
Special Report- Stacked Deck - Monster Train, a deckbuilding roguelike that firmly entrenched itself as the crown prince to the kingly Slay the Spire back in 2020, was the kind of smash success you might call Champagne Big.
Monster Train, a deckbuilding roguelike that firmly entrenched itself as the crown prince to the kingly Slay the Spire back in 2020, was the kind of smash success you might call Champagne Big. Four years later, its successor Inkbound’s launch from Early Access was looking more like Sandwich Big.I’m not just saying that because of the mountain of lamb and eggplants I ate while meeting with developer Shiny Shoe over lunch, to feel out what the aftermath of releasing a game looks like in 2024. I mean, have I thought about that sandwich every day since? Yes. But also, the indie team talked frankly about the struggle of luring Monster Train’s audience on board for its next game.
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