Marcus swings and spins the ball around his body at such speed that you feel more like spectator than perpetrator, triggering an attack before watching the yo-yo animations unfurl at length.

His predecessor’s brutal baton has been replaced by something more DIY – a billiard ball tied to a cord lanyard – but that’s one change that underwhelms.

Marcus moves with more verve and intent that Aiden, though his physical skillset remains largely the same. It remains true that Watch Dogs is best enjoyed as a patient observer, taking your time rather than indulging in instincts honed by years of GTA – although Ubi have expanded the moral viability of going all-action with non-lethal tasers and electro-bombs. Stealth is still reliant on cover-to-cover moves stolen from Splinter Cell, and Watch Dogs 2 has also nicked Sam Fisher’s RC quadcopter for good measure – best used for scouting and marking enemies, or hovering near the top of the Coit Tower and staring out over the beautiful bay. The sense of fun is unrecognisable to anybody who regularly made miserable, guilty visits to Aiden’s sister’s house, and finally matches the gleeful fantasy of remotely manipulating the modern world. In our demo, the scene climaxed with the remote defenestration of an indoor show car through a plate glass window. “Play me something fresh,” he asks a Dedsec chum, and the rest of the infiltration plays out to saxy ‘90s-style hip hop. In one mission – to invade the penthouse office of a corrupt political campaign and capture evidence of wrongdoing – Marcus pauses on the rooftop to pop in his headphones. If Ubi occasionally slip into down-with-the-kids absurdity, however, the gains in vitality are absolutely worth it. A mask, I’m sorry to add, that covers his eyes with digital flat screens that display and #s as he speaks. One particular comrade-in-code, Wrench, borders on the obnoxious – screaming “F***ING A!” in your earpiece and sporting a Deadmau5-style stud-covered mask. Mission chat in Watch Dogs now sounds like a dramatic reading of a lively WhatsApp group – a mixture of mick-taking and goofing around that makes it clear these parkour-hackers are having the time of their lives. Crucially, he has a far healthier social life than Aiden did: Marcus runs with the hacktivist group Dedsec, who claim to defend democracy by exposing corporate interests in politics and the data control wielded by San Francisco’s social media giants.ĭedsec seem custom-designed to infuriate anybody who’s ever written a disdainful thinkpiece about ‘millennials’ – driven by self-belief and a need to conspicuously impress each other.

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