FYI, my rig's specs: Intel i7 4770K 3.5GHz, 16GB RAM, GTX 780 3GB, Win7 64bit Home Premium, 480GB SSD main drive. Meets the recommended specs for the game.
Just over four hours into the game. By updating to the latest Nvidia driver and using the GeForce Experience to determine my "optimal" video settings, the game runs pretty well at an almost solid 60 fps. However, I'm still experiencing that weird thing that every few minutes the game will just pause for several seconds. Nothing is lost and it resumes right where I left, so I've gotten used to it and I'm treating it like a mandatory game break
Regarding how the game looks while playing... I'm very much not a graphics whore, so it looks fine to me. It does have a bit of off-putting fuzziness to it when driving, but the first Watch_Dogs had that as well. Again, it's something you quickly get used to.
The first hour of the game is getting introduced to your character and the buddies you'll be hanging with for the game. They are pretty much what you would expect from a game about youthful hackers, somewhat annoying but since you don't interact with them very often or for very long, it's fine. By the way, I'm speaking of them as being annoying from the perspective of a 63 year old pretty much follow the rules type guy. Those of you hipper or whatever we are calling the Zeitgeist of the young, more tech savvy people of today, you might find them more appealing.
This game is
not like the original Watch Dogs. In that game your character Aidan was pretty much a loner who tolerated working with others to achieve his goals, and hacking was just one of his tools. This game, WD2, is built around hacking and doing things via hacking sometimes just for the sake of showing off. Within the first couple of hours I had achieved the research tech (basically how you get skilled at things) to be able to hack objects like forklifts and then remotely sent a forklift on a bizarre mission through downtown, ramming cars and chasing people
![Very Happy :D](./images/smilies/icon/biggrin.gif)
. However, that skill is also useful when you try to achieve missions.
Your tools include two robots, a ground drone and a quadcopter, but you have to raise money to get the latter. And needing that money motivates you to wander around the nearby streets which, in turn, flags you to uncover and retrieve money, data hacks which give you research points (which is how you get skills) and find new missions. The game doesn't lead you by the nose after the first couple of missions, you really can just wander around and do what you want, and what appeals to you.
I won't give away any spoilers, but one of the very earliest missions you'll be able to access sends you to a movie studio. Even at this early stage of the game, you really have a number of ways to approach the mission. You can go in hard, you can sneak, or you can use your drones and phone hacks to do some of the leg work for you. Or combine the different tactics. What you will find is that the more skills you learn, the more interesting ways you can approach a mission, and that motivates you to wander around looking for research points.
I'll post more impressions later on, but I'll cautiously say that so far, so good.