Watch Dogs 2: My Thoughts Review

Now I know that I am very late to the party on this game, but I just finished playing Watch Dogs 2 for the first time and with no prior experience to the original game I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed myself and find myself wondering why there was so much criticism about it. It was a beautiful game that had a lot of love and a lot of amusing quirks added for an immersive experience.

The things that I loved about Watch Dogs 2 is the open-world nature to the map. You didn’t have to play the main storyline if you didn’t want to, since you could drive around as you please, collecting bags of cash and solving puzzles by hacking for research points to build up your skill tree. There was plenty to do, plenty to see and you can interact with any NPC just walking around, or in some circumstances, they will randomly interact with you depending on what you are doing. Some of my best fun was harassing a random person on the street and having them get arrested because they assaulted you in front of a police officer.

The map was on the good side of extensive as it had plenty to see and do, it didn’t take too long to drive to the places you want or need and you have the opportunity to see someone or something doing something weird. 

Aside from those things, I very much loved falling for every single member of DedSec as the missions went on, they each had their own personality, their own sense of humour and they were the very definition of a motley crew that you wouldn’t think would mesh well, but ended up being a completely cohesive family unit. 

But I’m not saying that this is a perfect game by any means, it has its flaws in a few places that made it sometimes frustrating to play, for example, my biggest frustration was the controls, I often found myself doing something stupid because I forgot that sprint wasn’t the A button like I have become accustomed to with other games, instead, A was the hide/find cover button. So I would be trying to run somewhere only to duck behind a tree and fumble my way back on track.

Character development, for the most part, was quite good with an exception here or there. Unfortunately, I found myself disappointed that Ubisoft missed out on the opportunity to get me to care more for one of the DedSec members like they had made sure of with everyone else. I found that I knew more and cared more for one of the sideline antagonists than I did about this DesSec member because they had more personality, more story and more presence.

All in all, I found myself loving this franchise to bits and I am looking forward to the release of Watch Dogs: Legion and I plan on catching myself up with the original sometime soon. I felt that this was a very similar game to Grand Theft Auto, but with the flaws in GTA ironed out. The map and NPC interactions are better in Watch Dogs, but I felt that every protagonist in GTA had their time to shine and their story told better than Watch Dogs did.


Final Rating: 8/10