If you really desperately want to remove this you should be able to mod the game yourself to remove it easily enough - though it does require some effort.

Minigame removal:

The easiest way to remove the mini-games is to load the HK campaign in the editor, save it as source somewhere, edit the files in the "bip" directory, re-load the campaign in the editor from the edited source, then export the campaign (overwriting the original). You might want to backup the campaign just in case before you do this though.

To edit the bips, you can just open the txt files in the "data/bip" directory in any text editor, and change the "force value:" to something really low (see if 0 works, if not try 1). Just do that for all files in that directory and save and export the campaign as described above.

Then when in-game you can just push the "force" button to insta-hack the blocker IC with no (or very minimal) penalty.


Watcher editing:

You can either remove the watchers altogether by editing each file in the "data/scene" directory and removing all references to "watcher IC", or you can edit all the watcher IC characters to slow them down or weaken them.

I won't go into the first option since it's likely more tedious, but for the second option locate all the "ic_lv?_watcher.ch_sht.txt" files (where ? == level number, generally 1-6). Then for each of these change whatever attributes you want, e.g.:

- move_speed - how fast they move, lower numbers slow them down.
- vision_cone_angle: reduce to narrow their vision cone
- vision_cone_distance: reduce vision range - default is 4 I think, not sure if you can set it to 0 (that might mean unlimited!), but I'd think that setting it to 1 would make things MUCH easier.
- vision_peripheral_distance: as above but for peripheral viewing. Same rules as above roughly.
- ap: reduce this to slow down how far they move during turn-based mode.
hp: reduce this to make them easier to take out.

If you want to effectively eliminate them as a threat, setting all view_distance values to 1, vision_cone_angle to 10 (or something like that) and move_speed to 1 should ensure they're slow and short-sighted. Then if you also set them to ap 1 and hp 1, you'll be able to instantly kill them in one shot (just in case they do find you somehow anyway).


Note I haven't bothered doing any of this myself - I do think the new matrix is crap and kind of annoying, but so far I've been able to beat it easily on hard so I haven't bothered doing these mods. I'm pretty sure they'll work though.