Watch Dogs 2 was a step in the right direction for a series that initially went over like a wet fart. It traded in the all business plank of wood protagonist know as Aiden Pierce for Marcus Holloway, a young hacker leading hacking collective Deadsec on adventures taking down greedy corporate douchebags and mustache-twirling pharmaceutical and tech companies. Essentially it turned a boring over serious open-world game and turned it into a wacky adventure overflowing with style and charm. It’s strange then that Watch Dogs Legion manages to keep a lot of that fun and style intact while struggling to find a balance between a hack the planet type adventure and a decidedly dark tone.
Watch Dogs: Legion (PS4 [reviewed], PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, PC, Stadia)
Developer: Ubisoft Toronto
Publisher: Ubisoft
Release Date: October 29, 2020
MSRP: $59.99
The London set adventure takes place in a near-future city filled with self-driving cars, huge construction drones, black market organ deals, and prison camps weirdly plopped in the center of a major metropolitan city.
At the games start, you’re playing as Dalton, an MI6 super-spy type and a member of Deadsec. You go on a short mission to stop a bombing inside Parliament, but you’re foiled by a hacker group known as Zero Day and ultimately framed for the whole thing. This results in Albion taking over London and Deadsec in hiding, making Legion’s focus around building the former hacking superpower from the ground up.
In Legion, there is no main character. Every single person in virtual London is capable of being recruited to your cause, some more easily than others. After the small intromission, you’re given a list of roughly ten characters to choose from, and you start building up your team from there. Most of these characters aren’t talented hackers, but that makes the gameplay loop more enjoyable. Sure your hacking specialist might be able to infiltrate and download faster, but this construction worker can summon a ridable construction drone at will, and he’s got a nail gun for putting down those Albion goons with style.
This idea is the heart of the game. While, in truth, there is probably a shortlist of real ways to complete each mission, the character you choose to do so with dramatically changes your approach and can lead to some unique immersive storytelling. For players looking for that extra challenge, there’s even a permadeath difficulty setting where characters can get put down for good and removed from your roster. Under normal circumstances, a character’s death results in either arrest or hospitalization, taking them out of the equation temporarily.
Clearing out entire districts on the map even results in special agents’ recruitment like a Spy complete with cloaking Aston Martin and silenced pistol and a professional Bee Keeper with a nano bee firing gun. Yes, you read that correctly.
While even characters as simple as a professional driver have unique quirks that make them fun, it’s no doubt the more negative ones that can make the game enjoyable. A street performer with a sporadic death quirk leads to them randomly kicking the bucket while I’m in a police chase or a Hitman with a random case of hiccups making it tough to sneak around.
Unfortunately, this recruit anyone angle also comes with significant drawbacks. It was only a few short hours before I noticed many mismatched voices and similar voices in my characters. You can’t blame Ubisoft. Nobody expected them to hire five hundred voice actors, but the randomly pitched up, or down collection of maybe fifteen different voices is noticeable and strange.
The story also suffers due to the lack of any real protagonist. These characters feel like they have no real agency in the overall plot. It’s like a theme park ride, and your AI assistant Bagley and your handler back at the hideout are the ones making the real calls. Because of this, I never really cared about any of my agents. That permadeath mode never made me miss anyone when they were gone, especially knowing I could just recruit a new drone specialist once the mission was over. You end up missing skills, not people.
The story’s overall bleak tone also feels at odds with most of your agents’ upbeat attitude. Maybe two minutes after discovering an underground prison of immigrants being kept alive as an organ farm, my chipper Hitman Grandma noted that his hacker thing was “quite fun.” It isn’t a huge deal, but it’s strange and takes you out of some of those big moments it feels like the developers were at least trying to make impactful.
The beat for beat narrative isn’t anything revolutionary. Still, it keeps you moving, and the larger story beats were intriguing enough to keep me going even when those big moments were drained by the wacky comments of a construction worker. It’s standard fare, rebuild your group, takedown the three evil elements controlling London and clear your name. The weirdest element is how much the story drives home how unequipped you are to handle the enemy despite making you feel pretty overpowered from the word go.
I challenge anyone to find a more effective way to clear a mission than attacking from the sky via construction drone and landing to complete your objective once things are clear. It feels like cheating half the time, So much so that I had to force myself to find other routes to keep things interesting as the game went on. Flying around on drones and fighting out of an enemy camp from the center still proves to be the most fun Legion has to offer.
Visually Watch Dogs Legion looks and runs great on PS4. Framerate rarely felt and consistent drops and only really gave me trouble when I would do things like drive massive military ships into docks. Sometimes we have to make our own fun.
Verdict: Watch Dogs Legion is a story that feels deflated by its own ambitious recruitment system. It loses some of the charms of Watch Dogs 2 but gains one of the most fun sandboxes I’ve ever been in even if it does feel a bit dated. It lacks challenge at times but is all about the fun you make for yourself. There’s something here but not sixty dollars worth, wait for a sale.
Wait for a sale
Author: Rich Meister
[This review is based on a retail build of the game purchased by the reviewer]