The Watch Dogs Series and its See-Saw of Style and Subtance

Like the angry and revenge-fuelled protagonist of the first game in a nunnery, my opinion on Watch Dogs 2 seems at odds with those around me. More particularly, my opinion on the quality of the second instalment in relation to its predecessor. In fact, seeing as I agree with most that Watch Dogs 2 is a fairly average open-world game, perhaps it is my opinion of the first game that is is conflict with most. In either case, I think there is an interesting lesson to be learnt from the franchise which has somehow become one of Ubisoft’s main focuses over the next few years despite still lacking a solid entry at this point.

It is very much a case of style or substance. Of course the very best games do not make this choice; they have both and hopefully a lot of both, but neither Watch Dogs is up there with the very best. The first Watch Dogs had a reasonable level of substance to it, by no means am I calling it a game with real depth, and absolutely zero style and was lambasted for it. The main character was, correctly, labelled boring. The rainy Chicago setting was, fairly, labelled bland. The storyline was, unjustly in my opinion, dismissed. Ubisoft took that criticism on board and ran with it, swinging completely the other way.

For its sequel, which they needed to do well, Ubisoft essentially revived Watch Dogs by filling it with brightly coloured sweets and hanging it up for us to shake a stick at. This meant once I’d strolled through the main mission and the side missions, of which there were surprisingly few, I was left with a very empty vessel swinging dutifully before me but with nothing to offer.

Whilst Aiden Pearce (pictured), main character of the last game, was labelled boring and monotonous, at least I knew his motive. You join Marcus Holloway, this games protagonist, in the middle of his induction into Dedsec, the vigilante hacker group who this game revolves around. While this means that the action gets going right away it also means I have no idea why Marcus want to join them other then their cool aesthetics. This level of shallowness is rife in Watch Dogs 2. For instance the only thing I could tell you about Sitara which somebody who hasn’t watched the trailer could is that she turned her back on some very rich parents and uses their money to fund the group and I only know this because I bothered to hack the audio files which were inexplicably lying around our headquarters. Surprisingly, the only character with a shred of depth is Wrench: the emoji-masked pop culture-reference machine.

The main story is essentially comprised of a checklist of pop-culture which they wanted to satirise. You invade the headquarters and hack into a bit of important information for a fictionalised version of Scientology, Google, NASA and Facebook (twice) as well as a few others. They loosely pull all these together by having the antagonist, the CEO of a data company who buy and sell your privacy to all of Silicon Valley, turn up at the end of each mission to remind you he’s running the show. After eight or so of these missions you then take his corporation down with no real explanation as to why you couldn’t have just done that to begin with. There is a similar format used in Assassin’s Creed Syndicate except in that game it was open and up front about how it was going to work and did a better job explaining why you had to go around Victorian London crippling the antagonists body before cutting the head off. Plus you had a second storyline in which a second protagonist was searching for some ancient artefact whose poncey name escapes me now. This is all missing from Watch Dogs 2 meaning that by the time you get to the end you feel slightly surprised that it is over already and very underwhelmed.

This is all very disappointing because the game had a lot of premise in the initial stages. The antagonist had a very cool, calm and in control aura about him. He reminded me a lot of Oscar Isaacs character in the fantastic Ex Machina. Furthermore, setting the game in San Francisco not only added a lot of colour and verve that was missing in the original but gave the opportunity for some great satire. Unfortunately, the light tone of the game means that the scary message of the dangers of a surveillance state and loss of privacy are diluted which is strange because there is also a disappointing lack of humorous satire beyond a quick laugh at the pretentious “pomegrapples” that the fictionalised Google employees enjoy so much.

Even the gameplay, one of the stronger parts of Watch Dogs 1, suffers as a result of this focus on style. Making the main characters stricter moral compass and general likability make the inclusion of guns in his arsenal of gadgets quite jarring, something that isn’t made up for by them being colourful, 3D-printed guns. Extra fun factor is added with the addition of drones to your dispersal. You have one that flies and one that jumps which should be ways to scout out locations before infiltrating but often leave Marcus redundantly sitting just outside the hostile area as they do all the leg work for him. Yes, they can be spotted but then the enemies will search the red zone and somehow ignore the very suspicious looking guy sitting just outside the red zone sitting down with his laptop open and a Dedsec labelled bag. I had a lot more fun in the first game when hopping between cameras was the only way to scout the location and maybe take a few people out before Aiden went in on foot. Marcus, with all his gadgets available to him, feels somewhat overpowered.

All in all, Watch Dogs 2 is a very underwhelming entry to a franchise which somehow already feels a bit tired. Ubisoft have stood by it and say that there focus is going to shift slowly away from Assassins Creed to their other IPs, Watch Dogs included. One can only hope that the third is better able to balance the potential substance that the core premise has to offer with the style that an open world game needs to compete with the big daddy of them all: GTA. It’s shadow looms large over any entry into the genre but if they find a middle ground and get it right Ubisoft could have a real competitor.

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