DARKMATTERS - The Mind of Matt

You met me at a very strange time in my life...

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Friday, November 18, 2016

Darkmatters Review: WatchDogs 2


Matt Adcock reviews Watch_Dogs 2 (PS4)

"Are you gonna bark all day, little doggy, or are you gonna bite ..."

This is what you wanted people, this is what you voted for, no, not Trump or Brexit, but a place run by the Blume Corporation where absolutely everyone is constantly under the gaze of an advanced Big Brother surveillance system. This near future society is a ‘Black Mirror-esque’ tech-ed up city where ctOS2.0 (central Operating System), connects everyone with everything and knows all about each citizen. And with the corrupt powers that be using the ctOS system for their own ends somebody needs to fight back and that is where you come in.

Deadmau5 who?

Watch_Dogs 2 picks up after the Chicago based events of the original game which saw young hacker Aiden Pearce hunting for those who hurt his family and taking high-tech enabled revenge. Now despite the hacking antics of the first game, Blume Corp has installed ctOS in San Francisco and a new hacker hero arises in the form of Marcus Holloway who was framed for a crime by the upgraded ctOS 2.0. This time Holloway joins hacking group ‘DedSec’ in order to take the fight to Blume using their own ctOS 2.0 as his weapon.

nice car... I'll take it

If you played Watch_Dogs you’ll immediately know the score in terms of very GTA-alike third-person gameplay where the open world is yours to explore on-foot or by a good range of vehicles. Ubisoft have taken everything that made the first game a fun if not perfect experience and improved on it – which is most apparent in the great visuals and more elaborate and less ‘samey’ missions that allow for multiple ways for you to complete them.

Who invited Metal Mickey?

The friendly hacker crew of DedSec is made up of Sitara who is the marketing brains behind their anarchist ‘brand’, Josh - the ‘Mr Robot’ of the bunch who does the coding and the mysterious Wrench (always wearing a light up mask like some kind of Deadmau5 dropout) who is the gadget and weapons specialist. Holloway becomes the DedSec operations man, carrying out missions in order to get people’s attention and get the masses to download their app allowing DedSec to harness the processing power of thousands of regular folks’ phones to via a botnet – a weaponised super-system that can take Blume down for good.

The big question here though is Watch_Dogs 2 good enough to go toe-to-toe with the global phenomenon of GTA V which has become the gold standard of open world mayhem-em-up games?

Read the full review over at: PUSHSQUARE

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