Watch Dogs 2

Hands-on with another stylish but unconvincing hacktivist yarn.

- Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

Watch Dogs 2 is about Sticking it to the Man in the same way that ordering salad in a burger joint is about bringing down the entire fast food industry. It’s about being an online freedom fighter, waging war on the power-brokers of cyberspace, in the same way that owning a Che Guevara poster makes you a fully paid-up communist.

It’s also a joyfully barmy open-world affair in which you can get yourself murdered by blowing kisses at gangsters, and a sleek stealth-action sandbox in which you can dismantle an entire factory complex using nothing but gas pipelines and an RC car.

To play Watch Dogs 2 is to alternate between giddy enjoyment and a sense of overwhelming superficiality. When I hack the ignition on a yacht through the eyes of my quadrotor drone, smashing the boat against a jetty to the surprise of guards who I then bombard with shock grenades as they move to investigate, I want to buy the designers a drink. But when I hear my character’s DedSec chums rant about conformity and consumerism while sipping take-out coffees and brandishing phones full of licensed music, I want to reach through the screen and give everybody a clip round the ear. The game is a hoot under the thumb, but its hacktivist premise rings incredibly hollow.

Thematic inconsistencies of this sort are nothing new, but there’s something especially grating about a tale of battling Big Data told through a game with a raft of persistent online features, a story about political and artistic transgression which leverages open-world design principles as old and fusty as Assassin’s Creed.