Alright, the customary half-hour-long Ubisoft credits are rolling as I type this. I'm still going to go back and do some side missions, maybe try and get the Platinum Trophy if those co-op missions don't require PS+, but I'm finished with the main story.
I really liked it. I never played the first Watch Dogs, so I don't know how much of what I'm going to praise was done there before, but I found this a really refreshing take on the genre. The most immediate thing I noticed is that it just plays so easily, controls so well, which is remarkably uncommon for this genre. You push the analogue stick all the way forward and Marcus jogs, you click the stick and he sprints for as long as you want. Want to climb a thing? Hold R2 and you're there. Take cover with X, shoot with left trigger/right trigger, select equipment with a radial menu; there's no obnoxious control scheme or laborious animation system getting in between you and your enjoyment of the game.
The gameplay reminds me very much of Metal Gear Solid V, albeit with a hacking flavour. Most missions come down to some kind of infiltration of a restricted area, and you have so many interesting and enjoyable options at your disposal that there's practically endless fun to be had. I experimented with a whole slew of different gameplay styles in my playthrough, and the game supported them all perfectly. The actual stealth mechanics aren't especially great, particularly in that there's very little time to fix a mistake. If you accidentally end up in full view of a bad guy, there's not a whole lot you can do but accept that every guy in the base is about to be gunning for you. The melee takedown animation is too long, and silenced weapons don't actually seem to be silent at all; every time I used one it seemed to alert everyone straight away. I don't know if that's intended design or a bug, but it's pretty weird.
Marcus is just fragile enough in combat to make stealth seem like the more preferable option, but the game's perfectly happy to let you go in guns blazing if you want. I 3D-printed myself an auto-shotgun that just
tore through people, so that was always my fallback in the event that my stealth went sour. There's no ranking system or extra reward for stealthy play beyond your own sense of satisfaction, so I was never too upset if I had to start blasting fools.
I really loved all the various flavours of hacking you can do. I liked to get up in the Quadcopter and survey the area before I went in on-foot, and half the time I found myself able to complete a few of the mission objectives just by creative use of my hacking powers. Setting up traps for guards to walk into, sending people fake texts to distract them long enough to slip past (or clobber them), or luring guards into rooms and locking the doors on them were all a lot of fun, but my absolute favourite thing was remote controlling vehicles. Whether I was using them for distractions while sneaking or just sending people driving off cliffs to get them out of my way while I was speeding around on the open road, it had me giggling every time. It's something I think I'm really going to miss in every other open-world game from here on out.
Speaking of the driving, it seems like people really hate it, and I don't really know what to say about that. I thought it was great, excellent even. I felt perfectly confident weaving through traffic at top speed and making wild handbrake turns. I feel like people must not have played Just Cause 2 and 3 if they think this game has the worst handling ever
The only big negative I can think of is the totally disjointed story. It feels like all the connective tissue has been cut out, leaving a succession of vignettes that have very little to do with eachother. Every main mission is split into three to five submissions, and they tell their own self-contained stories, but they usually introduce characters or subplots that come out of nowhere and are dropped just as fast when you're finished. That mission about the politician named Thruss that they showed in an early demo is a good example: it comes fairly late in the game, but I don't believe Thruss was even mentioned once before his subplot started, and when it was done he was never mentioned again.
I don't know if you might get more out of it if you'd played the first game, but going in blind I was pretty confused. I still don't really know what Blume is, whether they're evil like Abstergo or what, and I'm pretty sure they didn't even mention the main bad guy's name until like halfway through the game. Marcus' motivation for taking down CTOS is apparently that he got racially profiled by it a few years ago, which ain't exactly "they killed my niece" as reasons for bloody vengeance go. I found myself thinking about this ideological crusade while I was brutally gunning down dozens and dozens of police
Anyway, tl;dr I liked it a lot. Gameplay's great, it feels really good under your thumbs, story is blah but it's an excellent game overall.
