It’s amazing what a change of scenery and some new faces can do.

When Watch Dogs made its debut in 2014, the series kicked off with a fascinating premise: a huge Grand Theft Auto-style open world to explore, coupled with gameplay that turned you into a vigilante hacker. But the final game didn’t live up to that concept. Instead, it was angry and repetitive, with a frustratingly bland story starring a completely forgettable lead. Hacking didn’t end up making it very distinct.

Watch Dogs 2 is different. The sequel moves the series to San Francisco, and puts you in the role of a new hacker, the charming and talented Marcus Holloway. While Watch Dogs 2 is fundamentally very similar to the original — you’ll still spend a lot of time hacking various electronics and sneaking around buildings — these changes make the overall experience feel more exciting, engaging, and perhaps most importantly, fun.

The game is technically a sequel, but it largely stands on its own. There are a few references to the original, and at least one important Watch Dogs character makes an appearance, but you don’t need to have played the original to understand what’s going on. Watch Dogs 2 kicks things off very fast: before you even know what’s going on, or who Marcus is, you’re breaking into a heavily protected building to hack some servers to erase his criminal record, which has been falsified by an unscrupulous tech mogul.

Like the original game, the overarching narrative of Watch Dogs 2 revolves around how large corporations and even governments use the personal data of citizens for their own gain. After his first major brush with this idea, Marcus starts to work with a hacking group called DeadSec, a more lighthearted and playful version of the real world’s Anonymous. Over the course of the game, the group dives into everything from smart homes and cities, to corrupt government officials, to Scientology-like religions. In almost every instance the goal is the same: to expose those who they believe are exploiting people using their data.

The pervasive narrative of Watch Dogs 2 can be confusing and hard to follow. It takes you to some implausible locations, and I had a hard time keeping track of all of the different fictional tech corporations that I was supposed to hate. That said, while it’s not always easy to see how they fit together, the individual pieces that make up the story are almost all great.

The shift to San Francisco from Chicago means that Watch Dogs 2 is able to closely look at the more controversial elements of Silicon Valley — an important thing for a game about hacking and personal privacy. But the sequel also has a much less severe tone than its predecessor. The original Watch Dogs was a straightforward revenge story, a dour and often miserable quest for an angry man to avenge his niece’s death. Watch Dogs 2 is an ongoing series of quests to expose the worst of Silicon Valley, and the developers at Ubisoft used this shift to make a game that not only doesn’t take itself overly seriously, but even borders on parody at times. Chicago felt gray and joyless, but San Francisco is vibrant and alive.

San Francisco is vibrant and alive

One mission has you tricking a Martin Shkreli caricature into buying a non-existent hip-hop album. Another has you invading the campus of a Google-like mega corporation called Nudle, complete with a giant slide at the reception desk and self-driving cars in the parking lot. At one point you can’t hack a new gadget because the latest version removes a previously ubiquitous port. Amidst all of these tech spoofs, the game also gets serious at times, like when a smart home company is selling data to health insurance firms in order to bump up the rates of folks who order too much takeout. Thoughtful discussions about the relationship between technology and privacy sit comfortably alongside arguments about whether Alien is better than Aliens.

This ongoing quest to expose injustice makes Watch Dogs 2 much more relatable than its predecessor. It also helps that the game has a surprisingly diverse cast of characters that you’ll actually care about. Marcus is at times both inspiring and funny, pretty much the complete opposite of Watch Dogs’ anti hero Aiden Pearce. (And given the original game’s awful tendency to reduce black characters to simple and offensive stereotypes, Marcus is also surprisingly, well, normal.) He’s joined by a lovable autistic hacker, an impossibly cool graphic designer, and Wrench, a man who wears an LCD-equipped mask at all times, turning him into a walking emoji.

This combination of story and characters makes the experience of actually playing the game much more enjoyable. Whereas the original Watch Dogs felt like a violent series of pointless tasks, in the sequel you’re fighting for something that actually feels important.

The structure of the sequel is largely the same as the first game. It takes place in a huge open world — think Grand Theft Auto or Assassin’s Creed — and strings together a series of missions the primarily boil down to sneaking into a location in order to steal some information or take out a bad guy. What makes Watch Dogs unique is its focus on hacking. Thanks to the pervasiveness of smart everything — there’s even a citywide operating system in this world — Marcus can hack just about anything using little more than his phone. And as you progress, you’ll unlock more useful and powerful abilities. Early on you’ll be able to make a guard’s phone buzz to distract them; towards the end you can sic rival gangs on each other so that you don’t have to get your hands dirty.

At its best, Watch Dogs 2 makes you feel like an all-powerful ghost. Often I was able to complete a mission while barely being physically present. I would remotely control cars, security cameras, and more, in order to create as much havoc as possible, all while sitting across the street, comfortably away from the violence. It’s incredibly satisfying being able to casually stroll into a building and grab whatever you need, while the building’s security force has already been defeated before you walk in the door.

‘Watch Dogs 2’ feels fluid and playful

The original Watch Dogs squandered this premise. Despite all of the cool hacking powers at your disposal, missions often boiled down to tedious shootouts and prolonged car chases. This happens occasionally in Watch Dogs 2, but it’s exceedingly rare. Thanks to a combination of a more open mission design philosophy and a greater number of tools and powers at your disposal, Watch Dogs 2 feels a lot more fluid and playful. There are almost always multiple ways to tackle a mission, and when I found myself stuck, a change of tactics was usually all I needed to get past the problem.

Watch Dogs 2 also introduces a number of seemingly small and cosmetic features that add up to make a much better game. You can use drones to scope out locations, and the smartphone you carry can do everything from summon cars Uber-style to snap selfies to create playlists of Run the Jewels and Bob Marley songs. There are also multiple fun, yet completely useless interactions; you can pet any dog you see on the street, or walk into a pub or cafe and have a drink.

The game also takes a page out of GTA V’s playbook and features plentiful clothing shops around the city so you can make sure you look good while hacking. In fact, overall Watch Dogs 2 is a significantly more stylish game than the original. DeadSec features a level of visual branding befitting a hip new fashion company, while beautiful graffiti can be spotted all over virtual San Francisco. Even the UI elements look great, with colorful, streamlined look. Marcus and his crew just plain look cool; he even puts in headphones so he can listen to music while on a mission. It’s a big step up from Aiden Pearce, a character defined by his boring baseball cap.

‘Watch Dogs 2’ makes good on the premise of its predecessor

The game can be frustrating at times. There are a few moments where missions feel too rigid, or where your goal is unclear. And the lack of any sort of manual save functionality means that if you fail partway through a mission, you often have to replay it from scratch. When you spend 20 minutes prepping what you think is the perfect booby trap, having to do it all over again is incredibly bothersome. There are also some timed hacking puzzles that end up being more frustrating than challenging.

But for the most part, Watch Dogs 2 makes good on the premise of its predecessor. It’s an open world action game where the focus on hacking makes it feel unique, instead of yet another third-person shooter. It’s full of thrilling escapes that will make your heart race, and moments that make you feel like a Hollywood vision of a hacker, able to bend the world to your will using just a few lines of code. And it does all this while presenting a world and characters that make you want to push forward to find what’s next.

The first Watch Dogs used hacking as just another weapon. The sequel turns it into something much more important — and fun.

Watch Dogs 2 launches on November 15th on PS4, and Xbox One, and November 29th on PC.