PlayStation 4 Critic Reviews

The UI is wonderful. You have so much information immediately available to you. Nudle Maps always has a mini-map in the lower left corner, giving you a good look at the area. Bringing up information on people gives you a crisp, clear window. Hacking offers a menu with easily recognizable icons, so you always know what your button presses will do.

Watch Dogs 2 has created an immersive world, disturbingly close to the real one. It’s still a fictitious San Francisco, but sometimes it’s difficult to tell which bits are made up. With rich, in depth missions, colourful characters, and fun open world gameplay, this might just be the best game I’ve played this year.

It’s much better than the first in lots of ways.

What Watch Dogs 2 has done for the newly-minted Ubisoft IP, and for the hacking culture they so enthusiastically embrace, is prove above and beyond that the concept and foundation are sound. They’ve injected more fun and diversity this time around, and they’ve done so with a city backdrop that is truly alive, and is utterly inviting.

Watch Dogs 2 does a great job of demonstrating the potential perils of a too-connected world and improves upon the first game in multiple ways. This is not a guns over brains game - there is an interesting topic at play here about our society's dependence on technology and Ubisoft deserves credit for exploring this theme. The characters and narrative are leaps and bounds more engaging than the revenge tale the original game tried to paint.

Watch Dogs 2 is the perfect sequel. It takes everything that made the first game unique and original, and expands on all of it. Everything is better, from the hacking, to the story, the setting and the variety of content. Watch Dogs 2 is far from being just more of the same. An apt comparison could be the jump from the first Assassins Creed game to Assassins Creed 2. While the first was a promising yet clunky new idea, the sequel delivered on that idea and turned it into one of the most iconic series of the last decade. With Watch Dogs 2, Ubisoft is well on its way to recreating that same magic.

Most importantly, Watch Dogs 2 offers a sense of humor running through it that the series badly needed. You don’t need miserable family death stories in a ludicrous game about “smart cities” and cartoony hackers. You need writing that leans into the silliness, that has a laugh at its own expense, which is exactly what this game gets.

It’s a vibrant world, more upbeat and less cruel than what we usually see in the genre, and its main characters finally seem like they’re having fun as a goofy group of hackers should. Combined with improved gameplay systems, and you will also be having fun eventually. It took me a few hours to realize that Watch Dogs 2 really had turned a corner, and after a full playthrough, I went from high skeptical to undeniably impressed.

I was expecting Watch Dogs 2 to be more enjoyable than its predecessor, but I didn't expect it to be so well designed and full of heart. Watch Dogs 2 isn't reinventing the open-world game and fans of Ubisoft's special brand of go-places-and-pick-things-up gameplay will feel right at home, but it's one of the best examples the genre has to offer – as long as you don't want to shoot anything.

The missions are varied and intense, and the characters provide plenty of great moments. If you’re craving a game with a gorgeous, busy and unique open world, this is the game for you.