But Watch Dogs 2’s irreverence makes these individuals and institutions fit well and meaningfully with the action. In Watch Dogs’ previous form, these commentaries would’ve been on the nose – its bland script incapable of making such inclusions feel like anything more than checklist nods to modern culture. Best of all, the game’s primary antagonist is a bearded, top-knot-wearing idiot in a tracksuit who you bump into while he’s night jogging along the water’s edge, then catch him doing sun salutations in a room alone. There’s a social media network called !NViTE and a Google allegory called Nudle – one of the game’s missions sees you hijacking the Nudle Bus and carting all of its pretentious employees to work before you knuckle down to stealing stuff. You’ll expose a paedophile selling indecent images, and teach the odd petty thief a lesson or two. There’s an occult group known as New Dawn, a mysterious organisation that manipulates people and takes their money, in a stark allegory to the Church of Scientology. There’s a Martin Shkreli-type pharma bad boy who DedSec rips off for millions, sending the money to a medical research company. Photograph: Ubisoftįrom there you’ll take down a bunch of millionaires and mega-companies, most of clearly have a basis in reality.
The game features a beautifully rendered approximation of San Francisco, including tourist traps such as Fisherman’s Wharf. In its place, we get a glorious rendition of San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area the overpriced suburbs of Palo Alto and the warm city offshoots of Oakland – it’s all beautifully replicated in one of Ubisoft’s most colourful and vibrant open worlds. This sequel also leaves the drab, rain-slicked streets of grey Chicago behind. He’s the most likeable Ubisoft lead since Ezio Auditore of Assassin’s Creed II, Brotherhood and Revelations.
In Watch Dogs 2, developer Ubisoft Montreal not only takes the foundations of the original to build a good, fun game around its core ideas, it also births a great lead character, Marcus Holloway.
A lot of people had trouble getting on board with that. Indirectly responsible for the death of his niece and the comatose state of his sister, Aiden’s resolution was to go out for revenge. The chief complaint being that its protagonist, Aiden Pearce, was a bland and unlikeable guy, someone that you never sympathised with despite his dark, guilt-ridden Max Payne-esque past. As a proof of concept for a cyber-drama take on Assassin’s Creed, complete with all-encompassing hacking abilities, the original Watch Dogs really worked.
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