Last year, we were teased with this surveillance techno-thriller from Ubisoft to great effect and if we include the recent revelations about the NSA spy programs, it certainly is beginning to strike home.

This year’s Ubisoft press conference brought up a new trailer…short, sweet, to the point–and powerful. Yet still, it’s just a tease. Little information that we don’t already know about Watch Dogs has come out. However, those of us with a science fiction and cyberpunk background are loving what we’re seeing.

Watch Dogs is in every essence a technothriller of a video that strikes a chord with today’s cloud-centric, Internet-intensive world full of connected people, connected devices, and smart cities. The smart city in WD is Chicago, and the main character drives the plot by hacking through Chicago’s surveillance operation system and into the lives of his hapless victims (who happen to be criminals).

In the game, you play Aiden Pearce, a man obsessed with surveillance—as is the city itself. In fact, the Chicago of Watch Dogs is the almost-dystopian now, where every device, every database, and even the very basis of the infrastructure of the city, could be at the beck-and-call of a hacker like Pearce. All he needs is a clear signal to Chicago’s primary operating system and he can draw up any information he wants from your smartphone, your criminal record, and even plant information on or about you.

This is all important to the emerging plot of the story.

You see, Aiden Pearce fights crime—primarily human trafficking (according to the trailer you’re about to watch).

To do this, he not only needs intel on the bad guys who perpetrate it, he needs to be able to move like an anonymous blot amid a sea of data. A single face in a crowd of faces, invisible but mobile through a sea of smartphones, and mobile devices, so that he can do his vigilante dirty work. He’s no caped crusader—why be Batman when the city will do it for you? —and he’s certainly not the masked comic hero of the 70s. Instead, he’s a new breed: someone who uses the information architecture of the city as a weapon in and of itself.