$49.99Watch_Dogs® 2 Hack a Whole City With Friends
Join a hacker collective and turn San Francisco's traffic, drones and gadgets into your playground, alone or in co-op.
Is Watch_Dogs® 2 worth it?
Watch_Dogs® 2 is worth it if…
- you like open worlds where the puzzle is how to get in, not how fast you can shoot
Screenshots
The city is your weapon
Every connected device in San Francisco is fair game. You can flip a traffic light to cause a pileup, hijack someone's phone, or open a locked door from a camera on the far side of the building. The fun is chaining it together: send the RC car under a fence, fly the quadcopter up to scout the guards, then walk in through a route nobody is watching. You can finish most missions without firing a shot, and the game gives you non-lethal options if you want to keep it that way. Between jobs you upgrade your skills and print your own weapons, so the toolkit grows with you.
A sunny San Francisco with a grudge
This is a bright, colourful Bay Area, from the steep streets to Silicon Valley offices, and it looks great doing it. You play Marcus, framed by ctOS 2.0 and recruited by DedSec, a hacker crew out to expose the corporations watching everyone. The crew carries the story: Wrench, Sitara, Josh and Horatio give the missions their personality, and the writing is genuinely funny in places. Fair warning: the jokes lean hard on memes and social media, and that tone divides people. Some find the crew charming, others find it trying too hard. The hacking sandbox and the city itself are what keep people playing.
Better with a friend on the line
The online mode drops you into a shared San Francisco where friends can join seamlessly, no lobby wrangling required. You can team up for co-op objectives, or turn on each other in adversarial modes where one player invades another's game. It works as a social sandbox too: half the appeal is messing around together, hacking pedestrians and causing pileups while someone films it. One honest caveat: getting connected can be finicky, and the netcode is the rough edge in an otherwise smooth game. Solo players get plenty out of it, but the chaos is funnier with company.
Can you play it without killing anyone?
Do you need to play the first Watch_Dogs first?
No. This is a new main character, a new city and a much lighter tone than the first game. There are a couple of nods to the original for those who know it, but the story stands on its own and explains everything you need.
How much is there to do besides the story?
Plenty. The open world is packed with side activities: hacking events, races, photo spots, money bags to chase and isolated rooms to break into, often by combining the drone, the RC car and Marcus himself. Several side operations are proper missions in their own right, and the world rewards poking at its edges.
How does the multiplayer actually work?
It is seamless: other players can appear in your world without a menu or a lobby, and you can join theirs the same way. There are co-op objectives to run together and adversarial modes where you hunt or get hunted. The catch is the connection itself, which can be unreliable, so treat online as a bonus rather than the core.
