I thought this would be another slog I feel compelled to finish due to it leaving PS Now, but it picks up after the first couple hours. The most fun I've had with a Ubisoft game since Far Cry 4 at the very least.

I've long said we should expect better of the core gameplay in GTA and Red Dead, and I think this is hammered home with Ubisoft, a dev not known for tight controls these days, has outshined them in the stop-and-pop shooting department in an open world game. I wouldn't describe the running and gunning as seamlessly intuitive, but they aren't frustrating and the button mapping is pretty sensible.

The stealth feels a little too easy to rely on the same exploits for every situation, and shooting your way out is far too viable an option most of the time. I agree with George Weidman's review that racking up a body count should incur some penalties, especially since the main motivation of the story is your hacker group winning the favor of the public. Doesn't matter how many cops or civilians you murder or rob, how much property damage you inflict, those followers will keep flowing in. Oh well, perhaps Watch Dogs: Legion will have a smarter approach (doubt it).

I particularly enjoy the ability to remote hack vehicles. With a couple button presses you can cause a parked vehicle to smash into a group of enemies like bowling pins, or have a car they're using as cover zip 50 yards away, but the real fun comes with the high speed chases where you can send cop cars shooting into oncoming traffic or soaring off a cliff.

While I've enjoyed dunking on the Ubisoft towers as much as anyone, I actually quite like their equivalent here. Valuable upgrades and skill unlocks are placed up on rooftops and other hard to reach places, and while there is a "hold to parkour" button, this isn't Assassin's Creed. The puzzles necessary to get up there aren't incredibly taxing, but they encourage you to engage with the mechanics, and the emergent solutions can be cool.

Also normally the "integrated multiplayer online playground" type thing is the bane of my existence, but I've been having fun with it. I particularly like the PvP hacker mode where you have to hunt down a hacker in the crowd before they steal your data, while the hacker has to try to look as much like an NPC as possible. It's more than a little reminiscent of Assassin's Creed's multiplayer of old. The player performing the hack has to stay within an ever-shrinking circle which gets quite small towards the end, so the mode favors the hacking victim fairly heavily, but I cackled evilly when I thought I was busted but the other player ran in front of a speeding car and was knocked to the ground for the ten seconds I needed to complete the hack.

Overall not a must-play, but certainly worth a look and has restored a little of my confidence in Ubisoft.