It’s a mechanic that encapsulates the series’ spirit of anarchic play – so much so that, in writing this piece, I’ve had to check and double check that it definitely didn’t appear in Watch Dogs 1. When you climb into a car, the game’s roaming pointer changes priorities – eschewing pedestrians in favour of pointing out trucks that might make meaty obstructions for your pursuers, or unwitting police patrols you might send on white knuckle drives down the beach and out into the beautiful bay. There’s an illicit glee to firing a sports car through the front window of a showroom and off down to the street to cause so much chaos at close hand and yet not be held to account. It all goes down at hilariously high speeds, wheels screaming in such a way as to turn the heads of any NPCs in earshot. Though I’ve never quite managed it, I’m now driven by a belief it’s possible to pull off a perfect parallel park by remote control.Ĭalled it: Check out our Watch Dogs 2 review While Watch Dogs 1 restricted vehicular fiddling to raising forklifts or spinning the dials of a helicopter, the sequel enables full directional hacking of anything with a motor – left, right, forwards, back, or any combination thereof. While Watch Dogs 2 clings at all times to a kernel of reality, there’s more than a little of Reflections’ flights of fancy in its own vehicle hacking. Reflections’ Driver: San Francisco had a ludicrous premise in which, and this still feels absurd to write, series protagonist Tanner dreamt the events of the game in a coma – lending him the impossible ability to float up, out of his car and body, and into those of other drivers on the road. It’s not a name plucked from the air, but a wonderfully upfront nod to Driver studio Ubisoft Reflections – who expertly overhauled Watch Dogs’ driving model for the sequel, and built their own lower-res version of San Fran just five years earlier. Driving missions are accessed through an Uber-like app called Driver: San Francisco. Let’s start, as every Watch Dogs 2 mission does, with that phone. This is the most playful and free Ubi has been since Grow Home The sins of the father are not those of the child. It wasn’t just that buyers were wary of Watch Dogs 2 – they didn’t even want to hear about it. In the months before release, we’d noted alarmingly low reader traffic on previews. Watch Dogs 2 sold a fraction of the copies its predecessor did at launch, and it didn’t come as a total surprise. But, to some degree, that promotional campaign was in vain. You’ll have seen that same line drawn all over Ubisoft’s promotional shots, zigzagging across those first images until they resembled geometric puzzles. It’s a roaming cursor that represents an invisible layer of interaction GTA doesn’t have, encouraging you to stick your finger in Ubisoft Montreal’s simulation and give it an experimental waggle. A thin white line, extruding from the phone perpetually in your hand, that hops between potential hacking targets – traffic lights, SUVs, manhole covers, voicemails – with an eagerness that borders on impatience. At a glance, there’s only a thin line that separates Watch Dogs 2 from GTA.
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