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Watching what happens when you lob permutations at all the weaponized variables is half the fun. Missions in Watch Dogs 2 are like poking ants in an ant farm, little hubs of intersectional activity you enter into after motoring (or warping) to a location. When it feels like you’re hitting tactical synchronicity off improvised solutions to surprises as they crop up, it’s because you are. They’re essential additions to the game’s playground puzzles, and superb examples of design iteration that’s both meaningful and airtight. The latter can’t really hack anything, but lets you reconnoiter battlefields, marking targets so you can decide how best to proceed. The former becomes your proxy in hard-to-reach spaces, skulking through ventilation shafts to reach wall panels that unlock essential routes. In addition to bopping from security cam to cam (as in the last game, based on line of sight), you can now deploy a two-wheeled robot or quadcopter drone from your hiding spot.
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You’ll steal past the mini-map’s “danger” threshold, then slink between covers spots like desks, potted plants and wall corners.
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Maybe you’re after a bank of servers nestled in the basement of a corporate complex. Watch Dogs 2 steps up the story, trades the last game’s self-important blather for charming for-the-lulz irreverence and makes the game’s reason for existing - using hacks to play enemies and environs off each other - feel almost jazz-like. It’s certainly better than the 2014 original with its forgettable hero and potboiler cyber-thriller plot. Stay at that comfortable cruising altitude and you’ve got a game that mostly works. The view from 30,000 feet is that you’re a white hat cyber-hero prowling San Francisco’s storied streets putting the world to rights by getting the vox populi its vox back. That he can siphon endless dollars from individual passerby without fear of detection, ghost any Internet-of-Things onramp with a CPU, or zombify opponents by making their cellphones ring - all in seconds per a few button taps - is just cotton candy for the carnival ride. But no, we’re meant to understand the character we play in Ubisoft’s open world hack-a-palooza in abstract: an elite cybercriminal amidst fellow anarchists fomenting a populist revolt. That would be something, by the way, if the protagonist turned out to be an alien from another planet gifted with crazy abilities, or just a dude with paranormal powers. A few examples: The gimmicky police/gang swatting tactics the money that grows on people instead of trees the climbing puzzles always half a block from a scissor lift vehicle the folks who’ll call your headset though you’re standing right beside them the anticlimactic ending with its all but straightjacketed shootout the way you’re really a magical superhero masquerading as a hacker. Watch Dogs 2, out now for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, almost lost me so many times I stopped counting.