Finished it last night and really enjoyed it through and through.
I mentioned this in another post but the overarching story is very barebones ironically enough it works just fine and i think its a large part as to why the characters are as likeable as they are. Each missions feels quite self contained where the whole thing feels like a sitcom in video game form. I approached each mission feeling like, ok what are these wacky rag tag group of kids going to get themselves into now and it worked brilliantly and it doesn't get bogged down under the weight of itself because all they want to do, mission to mission, is to strengthen their brand and raise public awareness to all of blumes shenanigans. The characters are the story and it was great to see an open world game take this approach and successfully pull it off.
I know people have a lot of disdain for Mafia 3 but narratively i think their both quite similar in that their stories are one note and everything you do contributes to that. In Mafia 3 you're taking down Mercano's organization to get revenge. In WD2 you're exposing blume in order to boost Dedsec followers. Neither game elevates into anything more or changes into something different. Mafia 3's obvious downfall was that the gameplay was one note as well.
There's so much to like about the game. The characters, the world, the activities, the clothes, hell- i even loved the way they grouped your xp so that everytime you level up your amount of followers, you were always getting a bunch of points instead of just 1. This made leveling up feel rewarding because it pretty much meant theres was something you could invest in everytime you leveled versus if you were getting 1 point every level, you end up stockpiling them until you have enough to get what you want.
There are however 3 things that i hated pretty much the entire game. The weapon wheel, the gunplay/combat and the cop chases. I hate that the weapon wheel requires you to take your hand off the left thumbstick to use it. It makes switching weapons in the heat of the moment very frustrating. The gunplay/combat in general is pretty bad. Marcus is quite fragile which i'd be fine with if it werent for the fact that the weapons feel weak and the AI is super aggressive and omnipotent if things go tits up. The cop chases are just awful. They just don't let up. IIRC, there are two missions that force you into cop chases and the two of those missions alone were so awful that it has me questioning if i even want to go through the game again from the beginning.
I haven't done any co-op mission yet, any feedback on it?
Co-op is fun. 99% of the people i've played with (PS4) will make a valiant attempt to do things stealthy. I never let people join my game, i've always joined someone elses and i've met a lot of people who seemingly don't have as many abilities as I do or just don't have a strategic way to approach the compounds so when i'm doing my thing taking out like half the building on my own, people have deferred to me to take the lead on future missions even though im in their game and willing to play however they want to play. So overall people seem to be very cooperative
My only complaints with co-op is that sometimes you'll get disconnected from a person just as you start a mission for whatever reason and that the cop chases are even more annoying than usual because you and you're partner can have seperate wanted levels even if you're sitting in the same car. I've had a couple of situations where i was driving during a cop chase and have managed to have my wanted to go from "escaping" to "vanish" only to drive by a cop on the next block and have it shoot back up because "the police have engaged your partner in combat"
