Watch Dogs 2 - PC - First Impressions

Many Good Features - Better Than The First?

** Photo Credit BagoGames

In a moment of weakness. I purchased Watch Dogs 2 as a pre-release. I almost never do that but I really was looking for something new to play and I had watched some of the footage from PS4 gameplay. I also checked out several reviews and most of them I would have to say that I agree with after 7 hours of play time.

To begin with the PC version has not seemed to have the problems with textures that some noted with the PS4 version. I have noticed almost no texture popping. Overall the clarity and shading are great and make San Francisco a wonderful place to have a pretty well done open world game. I did download the high rez texture pack right away. I do computer graphics for a living and for those who follow me, it is mostly architecture and environment. Both of these score pretty well in my book. While San Francisco in the game is scaled down they did a good job at presenting many of the major landmarks.

To get some context on things let me mention my setup and settings. To begin with I have a GTX 770 with 4 gigs of ram that runs 3 large monitors. The game does not seem to support them as one large monitor but that is okay. I have all of the settings maxed out at a resolution of 1920x1080. I am estimating that still leaves me with about 40 fps. Not bad considering how much geometry there is in the game. So overall I give the graphics a thumbs up.

Audio

This game has pretty good environmental sounds but I feel that the music selection is a bit lacking.

Game Play

I think the actual missions in this version are better because they have sort of streamlined much of the game mechanics. The story is a bit weak at times and it does cause me to wonder who exactly this game is targeted to reach. It is an odd combination of hip youngsters who are a little too violent bringing down big brother. I wish the game relied a bit more on stealth. Now that I have earned a little rank all I have to do is call in a gang or the cops and they take out a lot of the bad guys. I have had to sort of go out of the way to use stealth.

Finally Ubisoft figured out the car handling. This has to be one of my biggest complaints about the previous title. It is much easier to run the cars hard but they can be a little touchy. It is certainly no GTA 5. But you should still be able to finally get around and not regret taking the car.

The hacking features are much better. Though I still would like to do a little more real hacking and less of the old puzzles that were in the last game. Two new fun additions to hacking are your drones. Both of them are printed out at the HQ for Deadsec. You can also print out guns there too making the gun stores useless if you don't want to make an extra trip out.

Overall

My overall impression of the game is good. It certainly does not meet up to the game mechanics and acting that are in GTA 5. But it is a great improvement over the last version. I would probably recommend that you wait for a sale to pick it up. Not a fire sale but you may want to save the premium for a little hotter title.