One of Ubisoft's Last Great Games Now Costs Less Than a Starbucks Coffee

2 hours ago 4

Published Jul 7, 2026, 7:11 PM EDT

Linda Güster is a Contributor at DualShockers and a German, UK-based gaming journalist specializing in video games, esports, industry analysis, features, lists, reviews, interviews, and news. She has been writing professionally since 2020 and began covering video games and esports in 2025, turning a lifelong passion into her professional focus.

Before joining DualShockers, Linda worked as content lead for Esports Insider DACH and The Escapist Magazine Germany. She previously worked in software engineering and digital media, giving her a strong technical background and the ability to explain complex systems clearly. Across her career, she has written thousands of news pieces and covered gaming culture, esports, technology, and broader industry developments.

Watch Dogs 2 is currently on sale, and the price is genuinely difficult to argue with. The Gold Edition – the game, the Deluxe Pack with two personalization packs, and the full Season Pass – is $4.00 on the Ubisoft Store and $2.49 on Steam.

That's the complete package, with hours of additional mission content, new co-op difficulty modes, outfits, vehicles, and a pile of other customization items included. For less than your morning coffee, you can spend a weekend in one of the more genuinely alive open worlds Ubisoft has ever built.

If you have not played Watch Dogs 2, this is a pretty amazing excuse to finally do so.

Watch Dogs 2 Deserves More Credit Than It Gets

Watch Dogs 2 has always lived awkwardly in gaming discourse. The original Watch Dogs arrived on a wave of hype it was never quite going to satisfy, and the sequel inherited a lot of that residual cynicism. People went in guarded, usually found something considerably better than expected, and then largely moved on to the next thing before really sitting with what the game had actually pulled off.

What it pulled off was a version of San Francisco that felt genuinely inviting in a way that Chicago never did. The Bay Area setting was brighter, livelier, and more visually coherent with the fantasy it was selling – a tech-obsessed playground for a hacker protagonist who actually acted like he was enjoying himself.

Marcus Holloway is a better protagonist than he gets credit for being, primarily because he's just more fun to inhabit than Aiden Pierce. Aiden was relentlessly grim about a skill set that should have felt liberating. Marcus cracked jokes, wore band tees, and approached the whole enterprise with an energy that made the hacker identity feel earned rather than imposed.

For less than your morning coffee, you can spend a weekend in one of the more genuinely alive open worlds Ubisoft has ever built.

The gameplay backed that up. Watch Dogs 2 worked best when you leaned into what it was actually designed to be – a hacking and stealth game that gave you an impressive toolkit to approach situations from almost any angle. Drones, environmental hacks, social engineering, remote vehicles, the ability to set up chain reactions that took out entire security systems before you stepped foot in a building. When the game let you play that way, it was legitimately excellent. The open-ended infiltrations in particular hold up well, and the hacking puzzles had enough variety to avoid feeling like box-checking.

The combat is the weakest part, and that's more of a structural problem rather than just an executional one. The game never fully committed to making you feel like violence was a last resort rather than a perfectly valid primary strategy. Marcus is written as someone who outsmarts enemies rather than outguns them, but the game hands you enough firepower that you can ignore that identity entirely if you want to. It would have been a stronger experience if it had pushed the nonlethal approach harder – the bones of a great stealth hacker game are absolutely there; they just didn't lean into them with enough conviction.

DedSec is similarly uneven. The hacker collective Marcus works alongside brings a specific flavor to the game that occasionally tips into cringe, and the writing around individual members ranges from genuinely charming to actively awkward. But the awkwardness was at least consistent with who these characters were supposed to be – a loose coalition of idealistic, internet-brained hackers who weren't always socially fluent. It gave DedSec a distinct identity even when the execution wobbled.

What Came After and Why It Matters

Watch Dogs Legion tried interesting things with the London setting and a rotating protagonist system, but lost the human center that made the second game work. Without a single character to anchor the experience, Legion felt diffuse in a way Watch Dogs 2 never did. That makes the sequel retrospectively look like the clearest expression of what the franchise was actually capable of – a specific mood, a specific city, a specific protagonist, all working in the same direction even when they didn't always succeed.

Ubisoft's current creative output makes Watch Dogs 2 look better than ever by comparison. The studio that made it has been grinding through financial difficulty, canceled projects, and a period of creative uncertainty. Watch Dogs 2 sits in the rearview as a reminder that Ubisoft used to be very good at building open worlds with actual personality. At $2.49 on Steam, that reminder costs almost nothing.