Watch Dogs 2

I wonder if any of you could remember the movie Hackers, I think it was one of the first ever movies that Angelina Jolie ever starred in.

Well, you most definitely will if you were part of those who grew up like me in the early nineties, with things like Nirvana, game arcades and no social media. It was a much more simpler time, the internet was like a brand new baby. I remember having to wait a few minutes and that all too familiar sound your computer would make when it connected. Many of us grew up with the internet and this brought a whole new world of opportunities with it, good and bad. This gave rise to the infamous hacker, those who were able to break into networks and do either good or bad things.

Getting back to the movie, this was one of the first films that came out about the very secretive world of hackers. It gained quite a cult following and probably inspired many to become hackers. The hacker community is pretty much split into two sides, the Black Hats and the White Hats, those who hack to steal and those who hack for good. Now what is to be considered right and wrong is very much dependent on your world view. Watch Dogs 2 is like being thrown into the deep end of the hacker world, and to me it felt very much like a continuation of a story I began a very long time ago.

This is the sequel to the 2014 game Watch Dogs, in which we got to know Aiden Pearce, a hacker who gets involved with some rather shady characters when a bank hacking job goes wrong, and his identity is exposed.

He then has to get his family to safety before returning to Chicago a year later. Aiden then meets up with an underground hacking group known as DedSec, who are in the process of fighting a war against the ctOS operating system. This system is used by everyone and holds every detail imaginable on everyone, DedSec plans to infect this operating system with a virus to bring it to the ground.

Watch Dogs 2 follows everything that happens in Chicago. The next city to adopt and install the ctOS is San Francisco, where we meet our protagonist Hacker Marcus Holloway. He is identified by the new operating system as a person of interest, which constantly gets him into trouble with the authorities. He comes to the conclusion how dangerous the ctOS system actually is, and how it can be used against the masses by those who control it.

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Watch Dogs 2 is a great improvement from the previous game, and the developers definitely paid attention to what the fans wanted changed.

The one big issue I had with the first game and probably the reason I didn't finish it was the main character Aiden, who was pretty boring, and the entire motivation and reasoning was just revenge. If you read the previous post on the new God of War, you would know there is a good way of making a story about revenge and then there's the first Watch Dogs game. The new main character Marcus has much more depth and his personal philosophy for going down the vigilante path is far more relate-able. Although I do think there were some great improvements, it seems the writers just have a hard time in general with characters. The obnoxious DedSec hacker gang really annoyed me, it was like the cast of a high school movie got together to like hack stuff.

I really hate bringing out the negative aspects of the game first, but there were some ideological issues I had with the game which let me down a little bit. Marcus is an ordinary guy who notices the start of an Orwellian style surveillance state, and his motivation is to stop the misuse of everyone's personal information, but at the same time he is killing people. It would have been so much better if Marcus stuck more to Batman's ethics code. Running around killing people in the name of keeping their information safe just made it kind of unbelievable.

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"In my neighborhood, you stood up or you got beat down...So I stood up. I ran with an ugly crowd. Learned how to fight. How to shoot. I paid for it too. I took the hits so my family wouldn't have to. Mom always said we escaped Dad when we left him back in Belfast. She only wanted peace for us and he was always fighting for something. She saw that fire in me, too. She said her sweet little boy was gone - I'd turned into Dad. That should have stung, but it didn't. I was proud to hear it." - Aiden Pearce

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Now for what I did like, the huge open world play is amazing and I felt like I might actually be in San Francisco, not that I've ever been there.

I basically tried playing the game my own way and trying to kill as little as possible and relied mostly on stealth. The hacking had an amazing upgrade and is far more versatile than before. When you hack an object there are now several different options rather than just a basic hack, like doors that can be opened and locked. I would have loved to see some more difficulty in hacking random people's bank accounts, walking by and just clicking your phone to hack their bank account felt rather too easy. One of my personal favorite abilities was planting fake evidence on someone and then calling the cops, a very easy way in helping you take some enemies down.

I would probably recommend you to play this, it was very enjoyable, but the question is would I recommend you to buy it? Probably not. Wait until you can get it for a good deal or maybe when it is on special somewhere, or even hopefully a free game on the PlayStation Plus. Oh wait, it's Ubisoft, not much of their games are ever available for free.

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Watch Dogs 2 is an action-adventure game developed by the very nice people who also made most, if not all of the Assassins Creed series, no other than Ubisoft Montreal.

The game was released in November of 2016, and is the sequel to 2014's Watch Dogs. What was really interesting was that actual real life hackers were consulted to validate scripts and game mechanics for authenticity. Let's hope they didn't add any dodgy code to game that wipes your bank account, good thing I played this on console. As always the game is available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Microsoft Windows.