Mechanics

Three of the side systems we have written up for Watch Dogs 2 are scored in three different ways, and that turns out to be the useful difference between them. Drone racing hands out a Golden Medal, and you keep it only for a run that clips nothing. Sailboat racing has no medal on our page at all, so you are measured against the boats alongside you and the weather decides how that comparison goes. Hacking is graded by nobody: our page names no medal, no clock and no finishing order, only a list of options and one reminder that what you switch off comes back on. They are set out below in that order, strictest marking first, and each section says what a good run looks like and what takes it away from you.

Drone races: the one series with a medal to lose

Nothing here opens until the game's first Main Operation is behind you. After that, walk round to the garden at the back of DedSec's Mission Dolores Park Hackerspace, speak to a man named Mark, and ten race spots scattered across the map will take you, assuming you own a Quadcopter to fly them. Each one runs its checkpoints along a different path, though the job behind all ten is the same, and our drone races guide notes that your smartphone gives you a course's difficulty, its reward and its completion time before you commit to anything.

The Golden Medal is what that page is written around, and nearly all of its advice is about protecting the medal from your own thumb. Speed Boost is the upgrade it pushes hardest, because held down it carries the drone through checkpoints in a straight line in seconds, and it is also the quickest way to throw a run away: rush and you get a missed waypoint or a crash, and either one ends that run's claim on the medal. What the page asks for instead is two or three upcoming checkpoints kept in view the whole way round, which is what tells you where the boost is safe, where to ease off, where a turn is coming and how high the Quadcopter needs to be flying. Keep buying upgrades for the drone between races as well, since the page is blunt that constant upgrading is what raises your hit rate. Medal or no medal, the page recommends the whole series as a source of extra cash and of Followers.

Sailboat races: judged against the boats beside you

This is the one of the three that will not let you start until you have spent money. The Sailboat Shop sits inside the Yacht Club of Legacy Bay over in Marin, and our sailboat races guide says the hull you leave with does not have to be the quickest on sale, only the best you can manage at the time. That done, six races are waiting around San Francisco Bay, each with its own layout and one approach behind all of them, and the smartphone readout of difficulty, reward and time works here exactly as it does on the drone courses.

With no medal in it, the thing you are playing against is the field. City driving habits work against you straight away, since the wind is what sets your speed: the shortest line between two checkpoints is not automatically the quick one, the wind direction shows on your mini-map, which is where the page wants your attention, and most of a race is spent keeping that wind in your sails. Where our page finds its edge is at the buoys. Rival crews take the wide line to avoid hitting each other, which leaves the inside open, so build speed up to the marker and turn hard as late as you dare without touching anything. To shed speed before that turn, unfurling the sails stops the wind passing through them and pulls the boat up short. Once you are slow, the next buoy has to be reached in as few turns as possible, because each extra one drains more speed and a boat that keeps turning ruins its own chances of winning.

Hacking: the system nothing grades

Our hacking guide carries no medal and no finishing order, which is why it reads as a set of options rather than as a technique. The habit it opens with is switching NetHack on the moment you arrive somewhere, before you commit to anything: it reads through walls and doors, marks enemies in red and puts every hackable thing in the area on screen, and the page compares it to Eagle Vision from the Assassin's Creed games. Everything after that is chosen from whatever the sweep turned up, the positions of the CCTV cameras included.

An object can be worked four ways. Trigger detonates it, Shutdown switches off hardware such as motion detectors and lasers, Proximity Trigger leaves it armed so that it goes off when an enemy walks into it, and Attract pulls nearby enemies towards it. The pairing our page recommends is the last two together, which turns a piece of scenery into bait and a trap at once.

People take the same treatment. Call the Police tags a target for arrest, and it works on policemen as well. Call a Gang brings a rival crew in, which our page rates for tying up police, and Distract either drops a target for a few seconds or simply makes them look at their phone. Acquire is the one that quietly funds the rest of the game, topping up money and BotNet while also opening private conversations. Vehicles can be nudged in a direction, driven remotely or stopped outright, and on a chase the Automatic Takedown prompt lets you pass a pursuing car and fold a billboard, a steam pipe or a set of traffic lights onto it.

Locked doors are where the hacking work turns into puzzle work. A red BLUME box holds the gate shut, NetHack exposes the dataflow feeding it, and hacking that flow from red to blue opens the way through. Where the flow will not travel on its own, the Network Bypass mini-game asks you to slide conduit nodes until the whole line goes blue, a leftover from the first Watch Dogs that the sequel keeps in its main missions and its side work alike. Access Keys come from one of two places, an enemy or a laptop, and that entry is the only one on the page which reaches for a camera feed or sends the Quadcopter or the RC Jumper out to find the source. Those same red boxes stand in front of three of the rare rides on our unique vehicles guide.

Two entries sit at the loud end. Mass Hack has three settings: Mass System Crash kills every hackable object nearby, Mass Comms Disruptor distracts the enemies and civilians in the area, and Mass Vehicle Hack sends the traffic off in random directions until something explodes. Remote Control takes over cranes and forklifts, which is how you reach places the map does not want you walking into. The one deadline the page puts on you is the security systems: motion detectors and lasers go down temporarily and no longer, so a disabled laser is a window rather than a solved problem, and that window is as close as hacking ever gets to a clock.

What the three of them leave behind

Both race series pay the same two things, cash and Followers, and between them they account for sixteen courses. Hacking pays in access instead: gates that were shut, cameras that were not yours, cars that belonged to somebody else, and a steady top-up of money and BotNet through Acquire. The gadgets do not stay in the races either, since the Quadcopter and the RC Jumper carry a good deal of the work in our side operations guide. If you would rather see where all of this sits in the game as a whole, the Watch Dogs 2 guide hub sorts every page we have by the tool the job puts in Marcus's hands.