Watch Dogs 2
Ubisoft Montreal · Shooter, Action, Open World
Overview
Welcome to San Francisco. Play as Marcus, a brilliant young hacker, and join the most notorious hacker group, DedSec. Your objective: execute the biggest hack of history.
Read moreShow less
Play as Marcus Holloway, a brilliant young hacker living in the birthplace of the tech revolution, the San Francisco Bay Area.
Team up with Dedsec, a notorious group of hackers, to execute the biggest hack in history; take down ctOS 2.0, an invasive operating system being used by criminal masterminds to monitor and manipulate citizens on a massive scale.
- Explore the dynamic open-world, full of gameplay possibilities
- Hack into every connected device and take control of the city infrastructure.
- Develop different skills to suit your playstyle, and upgrade your hacker tools – RC cars, Quadcopter drone, 3D printed weapons and much more.
- Stay seamlessly connected to your friends with a brand new co-op and adversarial multiplayer Watch Dogs experience.
PUT YOUR EYES IN CTRL
Get the upper hand with Tobii Eye Tracking. Let your gaze aid you in weaponizing the “internet of things”, aim at enemies and take cover while you naturally explore the environment. Combine the extensive eye tracking feature set to pinpoint enemies, interact with your surroundings, locate shelter points, and rapidly select hackable targets. Let your vision lead the hacking of the city’s digital brain.
Compatible with all Tobii Eye Tracking gaming devices.
---
Additional notes:
Eye tracking features available with Tobii Eye Tracking.
From the game's Steam store page.
THE GAMEQ VERDICT9,999 reviews analyzed
What players are actually saying
1. Summary
Four in five reviews recommend Watch_Dogs 2, and what players praise is specific: hacking turns a mission into a puzzle you can solve from a rooftop with a drone, a hijacked forklift or a gang you called in, and the compressed San Francisco Bay Area reads to them as detailed and lived in. About one in ten longer reviews compares it with GTA ("GTA but with hacking" turns up again and again), and the reviews that bring up Legion usually rank this game above it. The story and cast divide people. Some find DedSec funny and warm, Wrench above all; others find the writing corny and miss the first game's darker tone.
A quarter of the longer reviews (25%) raise a technical or launcher problem, and among the longer negative reviews that rises to 48%. The complaint raised most often is a shadow and sky flicker on recent Nvidia RTX cards, which players describe as strobing and headache-inducing. Ubisoft Connect account, login and ownership failures come next, then crashes and launch failures. Several reviewers sum it up as a great game once it runs, best bought on sale.
2. What keeps coming up
What players praise
Hacking that turns missions into open-ended puzzlesHigh
Hacking comes up in 24% of the longer reviews. What players like is clearing a restricted area without walking into it: the quadcopter and the RC jumper scout, open doors and plant charges, hacked cars swerve into enemies, and a flagged guard brings the police or a rival gang down on him. "Watch Dogs 2 is probably one of the best examples of an open world game where simply messing around with the mechanics can be more entertaining than actually following the missions," one player wrote, and another said the game "consistently surprised me with how lively its city is, and how clever they let me be for my solutions to missions." A minority push back that the drones make missions too easy, and that hacking "is just a tool to open doors or control cameras" once a gun is faster.
A detailed, lively San Francisco that still looks goodHigh
"It's one of the few open world games where the world actually feels alive." The city comes up in 21% of the longer reviews, and players single out the Golden Gate Bridge, Oakland, Alcatraz, the fog and pedestrians who seem to have lives of their own. Bay Area residents enjoy finding real streets, though a few regret that San Jose and other areas are missing. Some add that the graphics hold up years after release. A smaller group finds the map "as wide as an ocean but as deep as a puddle", with a lot of collectibles and races between the good parts.
GTA with hacking, and better than LegionMedium
About 10% of the longer reviews compare it with GTA, usually to put it beside or above GTA V as a cheaper, more playful sandbox. A smaller 4% mention Watch Dogs: Legion, and most of those call Watch_Dogs 2 the better game; several hope a future entry builds on this one rather than on Legion.
Parkour, music and small detailsLow
Smaller points recur: smooth parkour animations, the radio stations and in-game music app ("Just driving, good music, nice art."), petting dogs, selfies, and the DedSec street-art style. A few note the parkour is limited because Marcus cannot jump freely.
Where players are split
The story, tone and DedSec castHigh
About a third of the longer reviews talk about the story, writing or characters, and they disagree. Fans like the lighter, comedic tone, the friendship within the crew and especially Wrench; one called the game "worth playing purely for the bromance between Marcus and Wrench". Critics call the dialogue dated and try-hard, reaching for words like cringe, corny or cheesy, and one summed it up as "The open world is fantastic and the mission design is pretty great, but the dialog is so awful I skipped every cutscene and phone call." Smaller groups raise specific complaints: the follower-gathering plot feels thin, Horatio's death lands without setup ("Horatio's death was entirely unnecessary."), the ending feels rushed, and the main campaign is short. A few point to the gap between cheerful hacktivists and what the game lets you do: "Marcus' personality clashes hard with the fact that your going to end up slaughtering dozens of security guards with 3D printed weapons."
Comparisons with the first Watch DogsHigh
Nearly a fifth of the longer reviews measure the game against Watch Dogs 1, and a recurring verdict among them is better gameplay, weaker story, or as one reviewer put it, "Better gameplay than wd1, but worse story". Players who loved Aiden Pearce and Chicago's darker mood tend to reject the sequel's tone, while others say the first game "tried too damn hard" and this one fixed it.
Price: a bargain on sale, too much at full priceMedium
Sales and full price come up in about 12% of the longer reviews. The usual advice is that it is excellent value at a deep discount and not worth the full launch price; one player put it as "Its a yes if under 10$ and a no if over 10$". Several warn that the Gold and Deluxe bundles come with DLC activation trouble (see below).
Seamless online play and invasionsMedium
Online features come up in 13% of the longer reviews. Fans enjoy bounty hunts, co-op operations with friends and the surprise of being hacked by another player mid-mission. Others resent the intrusion in a game they bought for single player and report that turning online features off does not stop it ("I turned off all Online features in the settings, but I still had randoms joining my missions."). There are also reports of friends failing to connect, empty or broken leaderboards, and cheaters in PvP.
What frustrates players
Shadow and sky flicker on modern Nvidia cardsHigh
The flicker is raised in 12% of the longer reviews and in 23% of the longer negative ones, more than any other problem. Reviewers report that on RTX 30, 40 and 50 series cards the sky, shadows and foliage flicker or strobe, often across the whole daytime sky, and a few say some AMD cards are affected too. One player wrote that "the screen alternates between dark and light every second giving headaches and making the game UNPLAYABLE", and several warn people with epilepsy. Some refunded. Others used community fixes they found in Steam guides and on PCGamingWiki, an Nvidia Profile Inspector setting or a DXVK swap, and describe the costs: "You will have to redo this fix each time you update your graphics driver," reviewers say the DXVK route trips Easy Anti-Cheat and so rules out online play, and cloud streaming players cannot apply either fix. The grievance that repeats is that the bug stayed unpatched for years.
Ubisoft Connect, accounts and ownership checksHigh
Nine percent of the longer reviews describe trouble with Ubisoft Connect: new accounts suspended for too many login attempts the player never made, account creation stuck on captchas, the game linked to the wrong Ubisoft account, the launcher suddenly saying the player does not own the game, CD key prompts, forced logins even for offline play, and support that answers slowly or with copy-paste advice. These reviewers often have under an hour in the game. "I've never experienced a launcher that's trying its best just not to make you play the game!" one wrote.
Crashes, launch failures and poor optimizationMedium
Seven percent of the longer reviews report crashes or the game refusing to launch, and a similar share complain about performance. Players describe crashes during gang wars, gunfights and cutscenes, endless black screens, freezes that also lock Task Manager, a crash reporter that cannot send reports, and frame rates that stay uneven even on high-end hardware. Some found that capping the frame rate or lowering settings helped.
Stealth alerts, police spawning and drivingMedium
Even players who like the stealth complain about how enemies react: one guard spotting Marcus alerts everyone, silenced weapons barely help, and Marcus dies quickly in gunfights. "i dont like how everyone gets alerted when one person sees you but the combat and stealth is still fun" is a mild version. Police chases draw similar complaints ("police will spawn directly in front of you"), along with helicopters that make escape hard early on. Opinions on driving divide: some find it improved over the first game, others say "all vehicles drive like karts with different speeds."
Repetitive missions and side contentLow
A smaller group finds that missions settle into one formula, which one player described as "drive to mission, find way inside/hack, fetch data, leave." ATM hacks and graffiti tags are the side activities named in these complaints, and some note the main story ends quickly.
Physics that break at high frame ratesLow
Crane and window-washer lift sections keep coming up, especially in one late story mission, where cables jitter and kill the player. Bodies flying into the air and cars launching are reported too. Several players trace it to high frame rates: "Lightning is broken on modern graphic cards, physics also breaks at high fps. Other than that actually a great game." The workaround they suggest is capping at 60 fps.
DLC activation and achievementsLow
Buyers of the Gold Edition, Deluxe bundle or season pass report DLC that never appeared in game, sometimes for weeks, and one warned "DO NOT BUY THE GOLD OR DIGITAL DELUXE VERSIONS." Achievement hunters complain about achievements tied to online modes and DLC, and some older reviews about Steam achievements being absent.
Region-locked languagesLow
Players who bought the game in some regions (Ukraine, Moldova, Kazakhstan and others) found their copy limited to Russian and Simplified Chinese, and several quote the store notice that "Purchases made in this region will only receive the Russian and Simplified Chinese languages." It is a small group, and a few of them refunded.
Anti-cheat, Denuvo and LinuxLow
A few reviews object to Easy Anti-Cheat and Denuvo in a mostly single-player game, noting that "Community fixes will trigger EAC which shuts the game down and you'll have to play in offline mode." Linux and Steam Deck players report the game runs but multiplayer does not.
Keyboard and mouse controlsLow
A small number find the controls awkward on mouse and keyboard ("It's a console port with controls that are awkward on m+kb."), with complaints about the dialogue-skip key being shared with exiting cameras, missing rebinding and limited support for newer controllers.
3. The player conversation
Reviewers are warm toward the game and hostile toward the upkeep of the PC version. Many reviews are one-line endorsements, jokes about the title ("you can watch dogs") or "GTA but you hack" quips, and the technical complaints sit in the detailed ones. Some negative reviews open by saying the game itself is great and that the thumbs-down is for the flicker or the launcher.
Reviewers who quit within the first hour mostly write about Ubisoft Connect accounts, ownership errors, the region language lock and the flicker, then mention a refund. Those who finished the campaign write about the story, the comparison with Watch Dogs 1, repetitive side content, the crane missions and online achievements. Some are returning players who first played on PS4 or Xbox and bought it again on Steam during a sale.
Because this slice is the most recently updated reviews, the weekly spikes around sales reflect when people bought and reviewed, not a shift in opinion. The flicker reports name RTX 30, 40 and 50 series cards, so they come from reviews written after those cards existed, and the complaint that it was never patched runs through them.
4. What the developers could do
- Patch the RTX shadow and sky flicker in the game itself. It is the problem reviewers raise most often, some refunded over it, and players say the community fixes break with each driver update and rule out online play.
- Remove the Ubisoft Connect friction for Steam buyers. Account suspensions, captcha loops, wrong-account linking and false ownership errors stop players from launching a game they paid for, often within their first hour.
- Fix the crashes during combat, gang wars and cutscenes, and the launch failures. Players report repeated crashes that cost mission progress and a crash reporter that cannot send anything.
- Make DLC from Steam bundles activate reliably. Gold Edition and season pass buyers report content that never appears, with support taking weeks to respond.
- Decouple physics from frame rate. Players report crane, lift and ragdoll physics breaking at high refresh rates, killing players in one late story mission among other places.
- Add English to every regional copy. Buyers in affected regions were locked to Russian and Simplified Chinese, and a few refunded.
- Let single-player fans switch online intrusions fully off. Players report invasions and random players joining missions even after disabling online features, while others want working friend invites and leaderboards.
