Punch-Out!!

Posted by binarymessiah on 08/16/2019
Posted in: Nintendo Consoles, Wii. Leave a comment

35591-punch-outPublisher: Nintendo7.0

Developer: Next Level Games

Release Date: 05/18/2009

Rating: Everyone 10+

MSRP: $49.99

Available Exclusively On

wii

 

 

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Punch-Out!! is a Nintendo staple as it was one of the first established exclusives of the NES. Playing as Little Mac, you run through a gauntlet of characatures with varying difficulty to put your reflexes to the test. Punch-Out!! is a remake of that game and utilizes the Wii motion controls.

Let’s get down to the dirty business of this game. In essence, this is an arcade game you must perfect to the T without missing a beat. Your reflexes are required to be lightning-fast to get very far in this game. Each character has a unique set of 5 moves that require memorization and pattern recognition or you will simply never get past the Title Bout of the Minor Circuit which is when the game gets really hard. The first three characters aren’t very difficult and are just warm-ups for what’s to come. You can duck, dodge left or right, and block, but blocking is rarely used as most attacks can’t be blocked. You can then jab and hook left or right. The controls are the same as the NES version, and this makes the game overly simple for some or just enough for others. Newcomers may find this game too shallow while veterans will feel right at home.

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That’s where the motion controls come in. For a game that requires response time in the milliseconds’ motion controls just don’t cut it. I got through the first two circuits with them, but after so long I had to switch to the buttons on the Wii remote as I need to be that much quicker. Using the nunchuk and remote you can jab left or right and then dodge with the C-stick. I found this to be more complicated than it needed to me and punching with the motion controls just doesn’t feel like punching but more mindless shaking. The Wii remote on its side is the best way to go here or even the classic controller.

That’s the essence of Punch-Out!!. Soda Popinski took me 90 minutes to beat and maybe two dozen restarts as you have to learn his patterns and when to dodge his moves. He also drinks soda to refill his health and you only get a split second to knock it out of his hand. There are also taunts that some characters do that can earn you stars for Star punches that do extra damage, but these are rare and hard to get. Outside of the main career mode, there is Exhibition and a two-player mode so it’s definitely light on modes and things to do. This game is not for casual players despite seeming like it is. This is for hardcore arcade goers or veterans of the original. I thought I was going to blow through this game in a couple of hours, but I spent that one a few characters alone.

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It does get incredibly frustrating needing to have such perfect timing and reflexes and almost seems unnecessary. Sadly, there are no difficulty changes, but there are a few hidden secrets that can give you an edge. When the ref is counting down you can rapidly tap 1 and 2 to regain health. At the end of each round, you can press – and hear a chime and you will refill your health. This only works twice though. This leads to my biggest complaint of the game: You never do more than a smidge of damage to each character and there’s no way to level up and get more powerful. I had to widdle away at the health when a character could knock me out in two hits. I found this heavily unbalanced and unfair. Shouldn’t Little Mac get stronger as he fights and shouldn’t there be a training mode with mini-games to level up? It just makes sense. This game is too similar to the NES version and carries over all of its flaws.

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As it stands, Punch-Out!! is a really fun game of reflexes and timing with interesting and funny characters, but it lacks modes, a way to get stronger, and restarting matches two to three dozen times just isn’t fun after a while. The motion controls also just don’t work for this kind of game that requires precise movements and response times. I also wish there were some original characters and maybe not rely on this being a remake of a 25-year-old game. At the end of the day, this would have been a good rental, but for $50 there’s just not enough meat here to justify that cost.

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Excite Truck

Posted by binarymessiah on 08/15/2019
Posted in: Nintendo Consoles, Wii. Leave a comment

76080_frontPublisher: Nintendo6.0

Developer: Monster Games, Inc.

Release Date: 11/19/2006

Rating: Everyone

MSRP: $49.99

Available Exclusively On

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Most people think of Excite Bike on the NES when they were the word Excite with Nintendo, but a truck series? It intrigued people and had the potential to be as addictive as Excite Bike all those years ago. Being a launch title on the Wii, just like Excite Bike was for NES, it had a lot of hardcore Nintendo fans excited. Insane speeds, jumps, stunts, smashing? Was this Excite Bike evolved for the next generation?

The short answer is no, and the long answer is God, no, but it does have some good merits. While not really resembling anything Excite Bike related, not even a track editor, it has its name and name only. Excite Truck pits generic monster trucks against each other and equally generic tracks turboing and drifting around corners to rack up as many stars as you can. This includes jumping through rings, morphing terrain, and getting invincibility power-ups. Sounds exciting, and it is quite thrilling, but it’s all flash and no substance.

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The entire game is controlled with just the Wii remote on its side and you steer by turning the remote. The controls right off the bat are way too sensitive and this is especially noticeable once you are going at mach speeds and on cars that don’t have a high grip rating. I crashed into trees and went off course numerous times, but thankfully if you mash the 2 button fast enough you can hop back on track with a boost. Another underlying issue is the track design isn’t built for these insane speeds. It’s like they finished building the tracks and then decided to make the cars faster. A lot of times I would be a top speed-boosting through jumps only to jump farther than the turn or overshoot things. When you’re going this fast you shouldn’t have to hold back on the boost, it defeats the purpose. I’m not going to strategically manage my boost as most arcade games don’t do this. It feels like they were trying to make the player compensate for their mistake by letting you go too fast.

The speed and squirreliness of the cars lead to missed pick up items such as the terrain morphs (they add a jump in front of your or lower you down to the water to cool your boost meter) or the invincibility pick up are too small to hit when going at insane speeds. It just feels so unbalanced and not playtested enough. I constantly missed these things unless I slowed down to a crawl, and thankfully the AI is brain dead and incredibly easy as even in my worst races I still made first. There’s just too much to do in this game on the track at these speeds. I don’t want to do 360s in the air, I don’t want to morph the terrain. I want well built, memorable tracks with insane jumps and better physics.

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This leads me to more problems. The lack of content and just the overall meh feeling of everything. The tracks are some of the most generic I have ever seen. Just random turns and jumps with dirt and trees splattered around. I can’t tell one track from the next, and the visuals are so bad (even for Wii standards) that you won’t care. Awful aliasing and flat textures are just everywhere. Outside of the 25 races in the main event, there are challenging that have you racing through gates or flying through rings. Not very exciting honestly. After the first cup was finished I saw all there was that this game offered and it wasn’t much. This is one of the most generic and plain racers on the Wii and it shouldn’t carry the Excite name at all.

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Overall, Excite Truck is a game with an awesome sense of speed, and after about 10 races it all wears off. Horrible track design, generic presentation, lack of content, and just too much speed for tracks not designed for it. I never felt completely in control of a race or my car no matter how good I was at it. A track editor would have been nice to make better ones than the developers provided, and there’s no online play. At best, it’s a filler launch title that I would have been mad to pay $50 for. It’s just like eating a small bag of potato chips. It’s fun during the 10 minutes it takes to eat them then you toss the bag and forget all about it.

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Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles

Posted by binarymessiah on 08/15/2019
Posted in: Nintendo Consoles, PlayStation 3, Sony Consoles, Wii. Leave a comment

220px-Resident_evil_the_umbrella_chronicles_uscoverPublisher: Capcom7.0

Developer: Cavia, Inc.

Release Date: 11/13/2007

MSRP: $49.99

Rating: Mature

Also Available On

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Resident Evil is less known for their light-gun arcade games as these are held in public places that are niche hang out spots. The Wii with its remote and Zapper attachment is just begging to be used as a light-gun and many of these games followed and Capcom jumped on the bandwagon. Umbrella Chronicles is one of the more solid light-gun games on Wii, but it must be played co-op or you’re not going to have a good time.

The game has four chapters with each one following bits and pieces from Resident Evil 0, 1, and 3: Nemesis respectively with the final chapter being an exclusively unique section just for this game. Each chapter has three or four sub-chapters and a few side chapters that are shorter and feature an alternate perspective featuring Ada Wong, Albert Wesker, and one Umbrella operative Hunk. Story-wise, don’t expect to get a comprehensive telling of the Resident Evil series as pre-rendered cut-scenes are chopped up and it’s not very cohesive or easy to understand. This is more for people who played the older games before.

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Outside of that the shooting itself is rather solid. There are over a dozen weapons in the game with your side pistol having unlimited ammo and various other guns like sub-machine, shotgun, rocket launchers, and hand-cannons making up the majority of the arsenal, but the ammo for these guns is extremely limited, and that’s the first downfall of this game. Why make an action game from survival horror and keep the ammo count low? The pistol does very little damage and just forget about beating a boss with it. Ammo is incredibly scarce and requires you to have a partner as some scenarios and waves just can’t be defeated with only the pistol. Hordes of enemies sometimes over a dozen will spawn in front of you and popping them with 8-10 shots each with a pistol is just not feasible. With a second player, it’s possible, but solo is not. After chapter 3 I had to resort to a partner because it just gets too hard and too demanding for one player.

There are a good variety of enemies in the game with some not appearing until the final chapter, and the bosses are all unique and incredibly challenging and require great reflexes and aim and actual skill. Bosses are recycled from previous games, but fighting them in a 3D environment is pretty awesome. Some bosses have multiple stages, but these repeat in a cycle and can even include quick time events that require button presses or a quick waggle. Quick time events are peppered throughout the game, and thankfully not abused, but they don’t appear on-screen long enough and the waggle ones won’t trigger unless you start waggling the second it appears on the screen. This can lead to frustrating deaths.

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Speaking of deaths, if you find a health spray this acts as an extra life and can resurrect you on the spot, but without one, you start at the last checkpoint. There are herbs lying around for health, ammo, grenades, and barrels just begging to be blown up to take out large groups. This is one of the most difficult light-gun games I have ever played, and sadly it’s impossible to finish solo without having unlocked the infinite ammo. The first two chapters have a nice difficulty scale and it just ramps up way too hard on chapter 3 and 4. There’s also an issue with the game feeling too repetitive and not having enough variety like vehicle scenes similar to other light-gun games. It relies too much on just shooting the same enemies ad nauseum.

Let’s talk about production values. Capcom is never one to skimp on a Resident Evil game, usually, and while Umbrella Chronicles looks fine it shows it doesn’t push the Wii in the right direction. It looks like a GameCube game at best with muddy low-resolution textures, but somehow there’s still slowdown when too much is going on. It really could have looked better, even on the Wii as there are better-looking games on the system, but what’s here is fine. The menus are pretty ugly with not much going on and everything looks so blurry and low-res. I need to redact my GameCube comparison from earlier, it’s more like a Dreamcast port, to be honest.

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Overall, Umbrella Chronicles is a decent light-gun game that requires a second player or you won’t get very far. The boss fights are bombastic and fun and each is unique, but the same enemies repeat over and over and the scenarios don’t change. You’re just running down hallways or open areas blasting enemies. The game goes on way longer than it needs to with each chapter taking about 30-45 minutes to complete if you include the bonus missions. There is a lack in variety when it comes to other stuff to do to make this game just more exciting to play. The extras aren’t worth unlocking as they require S ranks in each chapter, most of the time, and after finishing this game once there’s no real reason to go back.

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Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter

Posted by binarymessiah on 08/03/2019
Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 2, Sony Consoles, Xbox, Xbox360. Leave a comment

s-l300Publisher: Ubisoft6.0

Developer: Grin

Release Date: 05/03/2006

Rating: Teen

MSRP: $59.99

Also Available On

 

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Ghost Recon has always been a part of my childhood as it was one of my dad’s favorite games. While we only had the inferior PS2 versions, they were kind of fun to play and really challenging. The slow pace of crawling through enemy territory and deciding the best way to take them all out without dying after 3 shots could sometimes be quite rewarding especially since this is what the series was popular for. GRAW carries this over on the PC version specifically while the Xbox 360 version is faster paced. I personally think this is a much inferior version and the slower pace feels dated and boring.

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After so many Ghost Recon games, it was exciting to get a new game in the series on the brink of brand new technology. While the PC version sure looks great, it uses a slightly different engine and is in a first person perspective rather than third like the Xbox 360 version. Everything just feels completely different such as enemies not staying tagged with the orange diamonds and this became a real big problem. You get a drone in this game but it’s tied to a tactical map rather than viewing it in real-time overhead. You can use basic commands to send squad members to an area and take out enemies, but you’re so blind and the angle of the camera for the map is really strange and distorts your perspective. Many times my men died because I didn’t know what was ahead and unless you play at a snail’s pace you’re going to die a lot.

That also goes for your character. Two or three shots and your dead and the checkpoints are so infrequent and spread apart that it leads to many frustrations. The PC version should have a manul quick save feature and it doesn’t. The character walks like a geriatric on a crutch or sprints as fast as a turtle. The maps are bland and void of any type of action or ambiance. Just plain walls, silos, warehouses, and blown up cars. Once I did get a few bad guys tagged I would send my guys out, but stray too far and the tags disappear which is really pointless. Just on the training map alone, I died maybe 6 or 7 times because it’s just so hard to see what’s coming up in a large open map. I need something like, I don’t know, my drone’s tags to stay up and I see where every bad guy is and either skip some or avoid certain areas.

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At least giving commands is rather simple as using the mouse wheel or number row tells your guys to stop, follow, attack, or carry out commands set on the map. However, the AI is weird as sometimes my guys would pop people I never even saw and then not engage on tagged targets I told them to attack. They would just stand there and stare and sometimes get shot up and tell me that the target isn’t reachable. With all of this combined, this makes for a buggy and frustrating mess of a game that doesn’t exist on the Xbox 360 version. The snail’s pace alone isn’t fun and is boring and bland and takes away all the character and amazing pace of the console version. Why Ubisoft tried to make the PC slower is beyond me as I wanted the 360 version just with better visuals maybe? Even the art style is completely different despite most of the maps and missions being the same.

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Overall, GRAW on PC is a huge let down as Ubisoft thinks we want a slower more boring game? It feels more like Rainbow Six than Ghost Recon and carries with it too many of the issues from past Ghost Recon games. Get rid of the slow pace and animations, make the AI better, and stop making up crawl around a massive map trying to pick off-targets. It’s just not fun at all. Some people may love this, such as those who actually like boring tactical shooters that play at a crawl, but GRAW on PC just doesn’t cut it and shouldn’t exist when a superior version exists on Xbox 360.

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Too Human

Posted by binarymessiah on 08/01/2019
Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, Uncategorized, Xbox360. Leave a comment

too_human-1683703Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios4.0

Developer: Silicon Knights

Release Date: 08/19/2008

Rating: Teen

MSRP: $59.99

Available Exclusively On

x360

 

 

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What do you do with one of the most infamously bad games of the seventh generation consoles? Well, you play it of course! Why would play such a masochistic game? For curiosities sake which is why most people play terrible games anyways. Too Human is a hack and slash style game comprised of Norse mythology and mostly a lot of problems.

You play as the Norse god Baldur whose purpose in this game is completely unclear as the story is lost, pointless, and full of so many plot holes I lost count. Something about trying to find out about the death of his wife and the Aesir trying to kill Loki and they literally never explain why. With the game only having four chapters and 6 hours long there’s not enough time to establish a good story and characters. Now, before I go on a long rant about what’s bad about this game, as there’s more bad than good, let’s at least talk about what actually is good. For starters, the combat system is an interesting idea with the right analog stick being used for attacks kind of like a twin-stick shooter, the issue with this is you have to rely on a completely brain dead camera with presets that never really work. It’s unresponsive, sluggish, and the number of combo attacks can be counted on one hand. Aerial combat is out of the question as timing pop-ups is nearly impossible, but that’s still not the worst problem. Gun combat works well enough and you have to rely on it quite a bit because the melee combat is mostly broken, but more on that later still.

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There is a lot of loot in this game and some of it is quite good as well as blueprints you can pick up to create the most powerful armor in the game. Each armor piece has a unique look and that was at least nice, but it’s lost in the pile of crap this game has. Let’s also talk about these Cyberspace sections that are 100% completely useless and have no meaning in the game. You will find a well here and there that connects you to a vibrant and foilage-lush “cyberspace” which is used for only one purpose and that’s to waste your time. In these tiny rooms, all you do is push open a door or lift something to open up something in the “real world”. Why bother? Why can’t I just do it in the real-world? The cyberspace is also never explained as to why it even exists or its purpose. Some times the cyberspace would only hold a treasure spire that had health orbs. All of that for just a couple of health obs. It’s one of the most pointless features in a game I have ever seen.

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Let’s get back to combat. I can’t think of any more positive things for this game. While a right stick oriented combat system could work it just doesn’t here. The fundamentals of hack and slash Diablo-style combat are just completely broken. Outside of the easiest enemies that die in one hit you can never get your combat momentum up enough to make large combos. Anything above those one-hit enemies requires a dozen hits for starters all the way up to enemies that require parts of their bodies to be targeted and taken down. This becomes a problem when you’re swarmed with enemies with zero hit feedback and you have to take each one down one at a time. You could pop them all up into the air, but taking them down this way takes forever as air combat is practically useless as explained earlier. Sometimes the animations don’t connect, sometimes Baldur just stands in one spot spinning his weapon around despite me telling him to move. This leads to the largest issue of the entire game, death after death. I died 127 times in 6 hours and this causes a long death animation to play out in which a Valkyrie comes down from the sky and picks you up…just to restart in the same spot, but nothing else resets. What’s the point of death then? I died on the final boss maybe 30+ times and each time I went through a 30-45 second death animation just to spawn in the same spot. It’s absolutely frustrating and has no purpose.

When it comes to leveling up and upgrading that’s also pointless. You get skill points to spend, but the tree is so useless and poorly designed that you must unlock a previous item before getting to the next. It’s just one line straight down and you can’t skip around really. Each skill can hold 10 points and it needs 5 before moving onto the next one. I only got to level 27 before the game ended so there’s not enough time to unlock all the skills. No matter how much I leveled up or how good my armor or weapons were I took the same amount of damage and dealt the same amount of damage. Never did I surpass a certain enemy and only take 2 hits instead of 7 after acquiring a much more powerful weapon. Enemies level up with you so that same enemy from level 2 takes the same amount of hits at level 20. Speaking of enemies they are repetitive, dull, brainless, and repeat hundreds of times ad nauseum. It’s a bore-fest.

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To wrap all of this up, the entire game is just broken, frustrating, and boring. Audio constantly cuts out and the death animation song bit gets stuck through the whole game. During the final boss fight, I had zero audio except Baldur’s grunts and that death song repeating randomly and cutting out. The level design is abysmal at best with bland generic corridors literally copied and pasted through a level. There’s no variation or break in the patterns. Bosses are laughably easy or frustratingly difficult such as the last boss in the game. 90 minutes to kill her just because of how little my level 27 hammer did against her. I literally shaved pixels off with each hit and it’s broken up into four stages. Even if you exclude the 10 minutes worth of death animations, it still takes way too long because of the poor difficulty balancing. Let’s also not forget the awful characters, poor dialog, and a story that makes about as much sense as a car with square wheels.

Even the game runs poorly with massive frame drops in the menus no less, and muddy textures. There’s hardly anything redeeming about this game except that you can play co-op and share the misery with a friend. Too Human died for a good reason and remains my least favorite Xbox 360 exclusive to date. Do yourself a favor and play something much better.

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Vane

Posted by binarymessiah on 07/29/2019
Posted in: Uncategorized. Leave a comment

VanePublisher: Friend & Foe6.0

Developer: Friend & Foe

Release Date: 01/15/19 (PS4), 07/22/19 (PC)

Rating: Everyone 10+

MSRP: $19.99

Also Available On

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Sony is well known for their “artsy-fartsy” games that started way back on the PS1 with titles such as Intelligent Qube and Vib-Ribbon. Later games such as echochrome and Unfinished Swan pushed this further as indie-friendly games that are all about art and vision rather than sales. Vane is another game in this…vain…ha! It sadly misses the mark on what these other art house games do.

You play as a girl who can turn into a crow and you start out flying around a valley and the direction of what to do is unclear just like the story itself. Most of these artsy games have some clear story through visual or audio representation and by the end, you get the message, but Vane doesn’t have either of these. We open up with the girl delivering a gold something to a large crow elder in a storm and she gets shunned away and gets eaten by the storm. As we fly around as the crow we are attracted to shiny objects in the distance on windmills and these release gold leaves and more crows follow you to the centerpiece windmill that requires enough crows to release a gold ball.

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As this ball is released you are taken prisoner and somehow you must free more crows and the gold stuff turn you into a little girl that can walk around. This second area is the last time you will use your flying skills as the entire back half of the game sees you just walking around and rolling a giant gold ball around. So that’s the entirety of the game. There’s no point to it all and the ending doesn’t answer anything either. There are a few push/pull puzzles with the giant ball as you need to find more girls to use your scream powers to rewind time in a large enough area to recreate bridges. After that it’s more stuff with the gold and no explanation as to what it’s used for, who are these crow elders, why are we bringing this gold ball to the top of a tower? Nothing, there’s no investment for the 2 hours of your life you will never get back.

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If you’re going to do an artsy game at least give us a story at the bare minimum. Journey did this wonderfully and was memorable because of the visuals, music, and visual story it told. The problems don’t end there with Vane however, there are glitches and bugs that require restarts such as physics issues in which I would get stuck on something or the giant gold ball would roll in the wrong direction and not be retrievable. One time my crow wouldn’t transform into a girl and required a manual restart.

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At least the visuals are nice with an abstract fractal typesetting with some great lighting and well-designed characters, but it’s all for naught if there’s nothing to care about in the game. Vane is a sadly missed opportunity with too much emphasis on visuals and less on something the player needs to strive for. We know these girls are desperate to save something, but what? It’s never clear and not really worth the time to play through.

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Watch Dogs 2

Posted by binarymessiah on 07/23/2019
Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 4, Sony Consoles, Xbox One. Leave a comment

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Developer: Ubisoft Montreal

Release Date: 11/15/2016

Rating: Mature

MSRP: $59.99

Also Available On

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Do you trust your government? Do you trust your social media outlets? Do you trust anyone with money or power? That’s what Watch Dogs 2 constantly asks you as you play through the campaign. You play as a hacker named Marcus who is trying to take over what Aiden Pierce did in the first Watch Dogs and take down the corporate conglomerate Blume and their ctOS 2.0 system that is continuously monitoring the people’s every move and step to a creepy factor.

Watch Dogs 2, now set in San Fransisco instead of Chicago, is a gorgeous open-world game full of many activities as well as side missions to complete next to the main campaign. There are also collectibles and various shops in which you can deck Marcus out in cool hip threads. But, that’s not what I want to talk about first. Let’s first talk about this whole “hack anything” gameplay feature that Ubisoft bragged about for Watch Dogs 1 and didn’t deliver. Your main weapon is your cell phone and when you move the camera a white line will connect to everything around you from cars to electrical boxes to people and let you either control it or the citizen’s cell phones in various ways. Steal cash from their bank account, burn their phone up (and kill them in the process), set the police or gangs on them, and even listen in on texts and audio calls. It’s really neat and works much better than the first game and it’s integral for combat when going into restricted areas which are about 90% of every mission’s contents.

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When you get to a restricted area it can be as small as a house or as large as a rocket building facility or even a boat. You can either go in guns blazing which is impossible early on as the better weapons are really expensive to buy and you must unlock weapon slots. Your main tools are your RC Jumper Car and your RC Copter. The RC Copter comes in halfway through the campaign, but you get the car immediately and you can complete entire missions with this thing without ever having to walk in. Set up just outside the restricted boundaries and control your RC car through vents, doors, have it hack laptops, and even distract guards by making their cell phone ring so you can roll on by. The RC car has physical capabilities that the copter can not do such as pick up items and physically hack certain things that require access through to main objectives.

The RC copter is great for scouting and remotely hacking things that don’t require physical interaction. Now, there are some missions in which Marcus must physically hack into something himself and these can get a little though. You don’t last very long in this game by shooting as you die after a few shots. It’s better to maybe call in the mafia on a guard and have them shoot it out and thin the herd a bit, or use the cameras around the building and maybe rig electrical boxes and have guards go out that way. Sometimes I would just remotely have a car rampage its way through an area which is a lot of fun. There are so many ways to complete objectives and it’s basically a fun sandbox of hacking and shooting. The RC car and RC copter are a Godsend as some facilities are just too difficult for Marcus to enter without dying constantly.

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Then there are a few missions where you just hack your way through via scripted puzzles which are a blast. Making people suffer or humiliating them through various hacking scenarios is just so much fun and I always wanted more. Outside of these missions, scenarios are how you escape from the cops and that’s a whole thing. You do have a cooldown timer when you are caught and once you hid long enough everyone will break off, but it’s not as easy as it sounds. In the city, running from the cops requires either hiding away from streets or ducking down in a car. I would sometimes duck down in a car and when a cop car strolled by I would hack their car and kick it into reverse before they spotted me. It’s really cool to see so many ways to play around with the game from having cranes lift you hundreds of feet into the air and onto a building, to using a forklift to deliver an explosive canister to a group of guards and have them blow up.

That’s what the game is mostly made up of with some side activities such as races, hacking events, real-time co-op side missions, and situations in which another player enters your area and you must find them with your hacker vision before they steal your followers. Outside of this, the story is great with memorable characters that I really cared about thanks to the amazing voice acting and well-written dialog. The cut scenes kept me pushing through this game through an entire week and I didn’t want to put it down. The game uses fake groups that represent real-life corporations such as Nudle (Google), !Nvite (Facebook), and the overall social media trend being used to manipulate the public. It really makes you think about what’s going on in the world today and I have to commend Ubisoft for making real-world problems like racism, sexism, and various social issues present in the game to wake up gamers.

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The game also looks fantastic with a very realistic San Francisco such as the Golden Gate Bridge, the famous hairpin street, various monuments, and buildings. The game, however, suffers from a poorly optimized engine with even two GPU generations ahead of what’s required struggling to keep up at max settings at 4K. MSAA anti-aliasing cripples anything but multiple GPU setups and I constantly would go from 90FPS and dip into the 30s during driving scenes or climbing buildings for no apparent reason. Despite all of this, the game looks fantastic.

Overall, Watch Dogs 2 is a sandbox of hacking and shooting with so many fun scenarios and ways to complete them. The story, characters, and dialog are all well written and keep you coming for more and using real-world problems to deliver this story is a plus. Despite the poorly optimized engine, the game looks amazing and the rebuilt San Francisco is a blast. I just didn’t care much for the tedious activities and collecting spray cans and hacker points to max out my research. It just felt incredibly tedious.

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