Of course, sometimes it’s a strength when a game punishes you for failure. It was passive and often tedious, but it got the job done. The core of my strategy was hanging back, hacking into the building’s security systems, and picking off the enemies who could call for reinforcements one by one by forging criminal records and having the police come in and arrest or kill them. This makes sense in a game that wants you to use your hacker abilities to tackle the situations you’re faced with, but because failure in this game can be so punishing and send you back so far, I tended to complete most missions using the same tactic. Your character, Marcus Holloway, can’t take much punishment, and the environments are filled with enemies who will immediately call for more reinforcements at any sign of trouble, so you’re discouraged from relying on the all-out, guns-blazing approach. Nearly every main story mission has you infiltrating some heavily guarded facility or another in order to steal something or hack something, and once you find a strategy that works for you, it’s very easy to fall into a pattern of approaching all of these missions in more or less the same way. Unfortunately, Watch Dogs 2 still fails where it matters most, trotting out a series of crushingly repetitive missions that never comes close to making you feel like a hacker extraordinaire. Watch Dogs 2 makes some meaningful improvements on its predecessor: it gives us a more memorable hero and supporting cast, and a San Francisco that exudes a bit more personality than the first game’s setting did.

But with 2014’s Watch Dogs, Ubisoft failed to turn this premise into a compelling game. In our hyperconnected world, where most of us carry around handheld devices that keep us linked to the internet at all times and tech companies monitor our behavior and purchasing habits constantly, a game in which you harness that technological web to disrupt the schemes of powerful corporations makes perfect sense.

Watch dogs 2 review