Mechanics

Four of the things Aiden can do in Chicago are not Chicago at all. A chess board on a folding table, a drug that rewrites the skyline, and two modes that quietly drop a stranger into your save. What separates them is not how they play, it is where the progress ends up afterwards, and that runs from a system whose reward lands directly in your campaign skill tree to one whose entire score exists only between two players.

The four side systems and what you keep from each

Chess is the one that changes your save

Somebody at Ubisoft decided the highest grade of Focus should sit behind a board game, so ten solutions are the entry fee. The library runs to 150 puzzles across the four families named in our solutions guide, Path, Survival, End Game and Capture, and you are free to skip whichever ones you cannot read. Ten is a small number against 150, which makes this the cheapest permanent upgrade anywhere outside the campaign and the only item on this page that is still working for you an hour later.

Digital Trips build a tree you then leave behind

Defalt's product is bought from his vendors or straight off the smartphone, and it strips Aiden of both his combat kit and his hacks on the way in. Each trip then hands you a private tree to rebuild with. Alone drops you in a Loop held by robots and asks for 20 generators, paid for with an EMP belt that holds five charges and stuns for seven seconds until the Beta Wave Emitter stretches that to ten. Conspiracy wants cyborgs profiled for their weak points before their detonators finish counting, and refunds Focus on every kill. Madness gives you an indestructible car, a city of demons to flatten for Soul Power, and Control Freaks who cannot actually catch you.

The last two drop the pretence of being missions. Psychedelic is 18 levels of staying airborne between enormous flowers, scoring higher when you land dead centre, and it is the only trip with no tree of its own. Spider Tank is 15 timed levels of wrecking Mad Mile from eight metal legs, with a heat gauge that punishes holding the trigger and damage that wipes clean between levels. Finish either and what you carry out is a costume.

Decryption spends what the campaign gave you

Decryption runs either as a free for all or as a team match, and the job never changes: hold the file and push a counter from zero to a hundred before the other side does. You cannot hand it off, so the carrier hides and everyone else builds a perimeter around them. The six loadouts you choose from at the start are the one place the campaign reaches in, since only the first three are open from the beginning. Our map notes cover all eleven arenas, from Goldmine and Trailer Park out in Pawnee through to Ones and Zeroes and Exploited in Mad Mile, and the good decryption spots are the ones with a single approach you can seed with proximity IEDs.

Invasions keep score between the two of you and nobody else

Hacking and tailing put you in a stranger's Chicago as the Fixer, and the whole thing is built so you cannot fight back. Installing the backdoor lights a blue circle on both maps that shrinks while the hack runs, and stepping outside it freezes your progress and tells the Target exactly what you did. Tailing is quieter still, since you only need eyes on the mark, which means the cameras you take over are cameras he suddenly cannot use. On the receiving end the only tell is that kind of small wrongness, and the reward for winning is a rating that other people read before they pick you. The game keeps the last five people who came for you, so nothing here is ever really finished.

None of these four print anything on your map, which makes them the opposite of the counted sets in our investigations guide and of the two collectible trails covered under pickups and hackable objects. If Chicago itself is stuttering before you get this far, start instead with the setup notes on the Watch Dogs hub.