Game Pass added Watch Dogs 2, Ubisoft's fun open-world Hackers homage

rockpapershotgun.com:

Ubisoft's campy cybercrime-o-rama Watch Dogs 2 arrived on Game Pass this week, and it's worth a look. I've been playing Watch Dogs 2 lately myself, by coincidence, and I am enjoying its gang of goofballs who want to stick it to The Man by hacking the planet and forcing people to watch their meme videos. Good camp fun with a nice group of friends.

2016's Watch Dogs 2 is very much a typical Ubisoft open-world game of its time, but recently I had a hankering for that. I wanted to visit a virtuacity, do a little video game tourism, drive around, collect some stuff, clean up some icons, you know? So as someone who still adores the 1995 movie Hackers, I turned to Watch Dogs 2, which also delights in brash young people fighting The Man by committing cybercrime—and trying to look cool while doing it.

So off you go, dispensing digital justice in San Francisco, Oakland, and Silicon Valley by infiltrating corporate facilities, finding servers, solving puzzles, playing with a remote-controlled car and drone, and hacking everything from security systems and autonomous bots to people's phones and cars. It is often delightful to bypass complex security arrangements and armed guards by hacking a scissor lift to deliver your little car to a server. Lots of fun little puzzles around the world figuring out how to reach places and collectibles (often later realising I made it far more complex than necessary). It largely does what you would expect an Ubisoft open-world game from the tensies to do, which I usually find boring, but I like this because of the Hackers vibes.

Following the rubbish murderdad revenge story of Watch Underscore Dogs, the sequel swerved hard into colour and vibes as our man Marcus teams up with a cool young hacktivist