Five hours with the upcoming Watch Dogs expansion, Bad Blood

Haven t you caused enough damage? Near-future Chicago is a city under secret siege, not from human traffickers, petty thugs, and gangbangers, but from you and your smartphone. The stop lights are broken, the vending machines depleted, the public s knees permanently scrapped from stooping to grab the cash you sent flying out of malfunctioning ATMs, and no one stands near vents. Isn t it time to put the phone down? Not according to Watch Dogs first expansion, Bad Blood.

Ahead of its September 23 release, I played the first four of ten campaign missions, as well as a handful of side activities and some online co-op. The story takes off directly after the conclusion of Watch Dogs. With Aiden Pearce s journey wrapped, you play his dreadlocked hacker ally Raymond T-Bone Kenney, a man fond of septum piercings, bowling shirts, and booze. This software engineer once worked for Blume, that shadowy corp behind ctOS the Central Operating System that powers Chicago s infrastructure and runs everything from road signs to data records.In fact, T-Bone wrote the base encryption code for that operating system.

After sensing how dangerous it is to give control of an entire city to a few technologically literate people, he fled the company, but not before causing the infamous 2003 North East Blackout to make his point, a blackout that inadvertently killed eleven people. Now living off the grid, wracked with guilt, and looking to take down Blume, T-Bone is the most dangerous person in Chicago. Which isn t good for Chicago.

We first meet T-Bone conducting an illegal terminal intrusion in the heart of Blume s central offices. Two guards apprehend him, but T-Bone plays bait and switch, casually insisting he s been sent by Blume to check on network integrity before pretending to talk on his phone. Unwritten rules of social politeness stress that you must never interrupt a phone conversation, so the guards wait, biting their tongues and scratching their heads. Cue T-Bone turning around and smashing their faces with a wrench and taser, his two new melee weapons. But he s not out of danger yet; now comes the escape.

Blume security know there s an intruder in the building, but fortunately for you, they don t know where. Using familiar tricks of whipping out my phone and hacking into cameras, I get a bead on patrols. I hack a device in a side room to make a noise and attract a guard, then shut the doors to lock him in. Then I sneak behind another and taser him before exploding a panel beneath the last man s feet. For those who ve played Watch Dogs, it s a familiar pattern.

Stepping into the cold Chicago night, enforcers are waiting. Snipers on skyscrapers sweep glowing red lasers across my path, so I duck between cover points until I reach the main road. It s chase time. As I make my getaway on a motorbike, two heavy duty cars with tinted windows careen after me. There are two ways to lose my tail: kill them or escape the search radius. Seeing as I ve only got a pistol, I drive up a ramp and into the bay to lose them. That s mission one of ten over. I m all wet now.

As I doggy paddle, my (thankfully waterproof) phone starts ringing. The voice on the other end sounds panicked. It s Tobias Frewer, estranged former colleague of T-Bone s at Blume, and he s in