Watch Dogs: Legion

 

Having finished every game in the series, it was only a matter of time before I got to Legion. I thought the first Watch Dogs was decent and hated Watch Dogs 2, so my expectations were already low. After a brief opening that feels like a discount James Bond mission, Legion reveals its main twist: instead of playing a defined protagonist like Watch Dogs 1 and 2, you recruit and control random NPCs from the city, each with their own perks and traits. It is a novel idea on paper, but the game introduces it clumsily enough that I initially thought I was stuck with my first recruit for much longer than I actually was.

As for the premise, it is the usual Watch Dogs setup of surveillance, corruption, and activist resistance, except this time it takes place in London, which is a fascinating setting for a GTA type game. Although the narrative is told with the same heavy-handed, black-and-white political writing Ubisoft always falls back on. Rather than feeling thoughtful, it mostly feels lazy and eye-roll inducing. You never get the sense Ubisoft is exploring these ideas with any real curiosity. It feels more like the game is lecturing the player than presenting a believable world.

Still its an interesting setting, I just feel like it could be better executed in the hands of a different developer.

The game starts off with a small roster of playable characters, but as you progress, you can recruit just about anyone you see on the street. The reason to recruit more people is becasue the game is designed in such a way where it seems impossible to actually obtain weapons, its just whatever the character happens to spawn with. You kill all sorts of enemies and they drop their guns, but you cant ever pick them up, a departure from how previous games worked. You cant even purcahse guns from shops or anything, its ONLY whatever your team mates have. This is a strange, awkward design because by default most operatives only have these shitty yellow non-lethal stun guns. They work okay, but certainly not something you want to be stuck with the whole game, even just due to lack of variety.

So the main draw, at least for me, to recruit other people is to actually get access to some real weapons. You can hold middle mouse button to view the loadout of random pedestrians, some of them have their own perks and traits, such as stuff like  store discounts, melee damage, rifle damage, more health, hacking speed, and so on. Nothing really drastic stands out as super interesting, except perhaps the fact that you can recruit Lawyers which reduce jail time if you get arrested, and Paramedics which randomly can revive a downed member instead of having to wait the 30 or so minutes it usually takes. But mostly the main thing you care about is their gun. It's a novel idea, to actually recruit different people you can swap in and out of, you can have dozens of them, but overall it turns out to be a gimmick that you barely care about, mostly playing as one or two people the entire game. Shortly into the game I found this british guy that  comes with a silenced MP5, I recruited him and used him for most of the game because it was so uncommon to find anyone else with a decent gun.

Recruting people can be a little annoying, too. You usually have to go on some side quest for them, usually mundane fetch quests, infiltrate this building and hack this computer, go into this building and do this puzzle. Sometimes its multiple of them back to back just to recruit one person, so at a certain point I just got tired of recruting people because its not really worth it anyway since most of them are already worse than the one or two good guys I already had. Its a bit of a let down mechanically, I think the system would of worked better if instead you could recruit people using some currency, instead of constantly having to do side quests. Also, you should be able to at least buy weapons instead of relying on what these operatives spawn with. Sure you can swap out to other weapons, but only the ones you can buy from the upgrade menu, and theres apparently only 4 of them, all yellow colored Toy looking guns. Why cant I just buy an AK47 to unlock permanently and give to anyone I want? I guess its because they really wanted to try to force the player to use all sorts of different people, and the only way they could figure out how to do that is by making obtaining guns impossible.

A bit more into the game I came across this person that spawns with an AK47, and also has a perk that he takes overall reduce damage. Clearly the best guy in the game so far. I used him whenever I could for the rest of the game. The people that spawn with guns are few and far between, so really for the whole game I mostly used the MP5 guy , and then this AK47 guy. The rest of the entire recruting mechanic just fell flat past that. One or two times I used a construction guy that has the ability to spawn this drone you can ride, I used him to reach hard to get areas, but past that there wasnt much more depth to it.

So the main mechanic of the game ends up feeling like more style than substance, sadly. Still, the game world of London is impressively detailed, its again a novel idea to center the game in Europe instead of typical America, so the game does get points for having multiple features and mechanics which are unique.

For the entire game you also have this AI sidekick that talks in your ear called Bagley, which to me felt like Ubisoft trying to go for a kind of Portal Glados or Borderlands Claptrap type companion, overly quirky, whimsical, and silly, for the most part ends up cringy and annoying, with constant dumb jokes. Its like they thought this guy would turn into a beloved mascot but really it comes off as grating more than anything. Sure theres moments here and there where hes almost amusing to listen to but more often than not its irritating.

And the actual bulk of the games missions are , like the previous game, not very exciting. The games main missions have you bouncing from location to location, thankfully there is a fast travel where you can fast travel to many different stations around the map, that you unlock by I think just driving past them for the first time, you cannot fast travel directly to the main mission but often enough theres a fast travel point close by anyway. Then usually every mission has you infiltrating some building and hacking a computer, or doing the same copy paste puzzles over and over. Usually either the Spiderbot segments which are mostly boring, you play as a spider crawling through vents or doing lackluster platforming segments, with some notably annoying segments with unintuitive pacing, just to finally hack into some computer. Or you're doing the same puzzle with the colored grids, shifting the colored lines around until they all match up. Rinse and repeat. In between these two segments you have combat.

The combat is standard as you would expect, not much different than previous games, but actually a bit worse since the lack of weapon variety. I basically played the entire game using only the MP5 or AK from the two team members with good guns I had. Switching team members is not instant, also, you cant do it while in combat, so even less variety since you dont swap that often. Its a basic third person cover shooter, except at times I found the controls to snap into cover clunky and not accurate. The basic shooting feels okay, with hit markers and different kinds of enemies like heavily armored enemies, regular enemies, and lots of drones. Youre fighting the police government force called Albion, and not really anyone else for the entire game. Theres really not too much to say about the combat, its just so generic its the same youve seen a thousand times already, regenerating health, lots of ammo everywhere, standard but competent cover shooter. The only extra is the use of gadgets but none of them are fun to use or exciting. Its a bunch of different droens, a missle drone, you can use the spiderbot to explode enemies, and a cloak to temporarily go invisible. You can do other novelty things like using hacks to make the enemies gun jam, or hacking their phone to distract them, but thats about it.

The upgrades and unlocks in general are reallly lackluster, like I said theres only 4 guns you can actually unlock and upgrade. All the other unlocks and upgrades are the various drones I just mentioned. Its really quite underwhelming and unimaginative and I think a step down from even previous games.


Of course the game has driving and car chases and police chases as well, as its a standard kind of GTA game. Commonly after missions you get the objective to Escape and you have the police after you so you have to do a basic cop escape, its fine enough. Theres a wanted meter, and you can see the cops on your minimap, just need to evade them and be outside the red bubble for long enough, you can hide in alleyways and stuff like that, its fine. The driving feels good enough, the cars are snappy and most of them are surprisingly fast, I don't have any complaints with the driving mechanics its self, its just that it never really gets utilized in any meaningful way, theres hardly any car missions or driving missions, the only time youre really in a car for any substancial amount of time is like I just said at the end of some missions doing the cop escape. Its not like GTA games where theres full missions dedicated to driving. Which makes the game feel even more monotonous and repetiive, theres a lack of variety in the missions.

There's a few missions in particular that were very annoying because they were so unintuitive in how to progress, a few times the controls really fumbled me up because sometimes you have to press Middle mouse instead of Q  to be able to finally reveal a hidden mandatory puzzle, why does it work like that? Sometimes id just run around in circles for a dozen minutes before I found it, just terrible. Theres really no standout missions, its all just variations of go into a building and do this colored grid puzzle, hack some cameras and find the way to unlock the door, follow the colored lines and hack the door electric box, over and over until the end of the game. The main thing the game has going for it is the London setting, and the novel mechanics of hiring anyone to be a playable character, it was a bit fun to checkout every NPC and see what kind of perks traits and equipment they use, and the story while painfully generic and preachy is at least entertaining at times.

The games last boss is a joke, too. You fight through the head of the militia's complex, get to him, and its just a big drone in an arena where you have to do yet another grid puzzle. Really? Thats all they could come up with? Do yet another puzzle for the last boss except this time youre being shot at? When you complete the puzzle you get a boss fight with the actual guy outside the drone but I literally killed him in under 5 seconds its like what was they point? Why didnt they make him have more health? Hes suited up in big armor it makes no sense.

Theres a short segment after this boss where you do 2 more missions to track down some other evil person whos left over and then you have to go disable the Bigsly AI which is supposed to be this heart tugging painful thing because the devs want the player to reallly be attached to this personality but it did nothing for me. Then the credits roll, and after credits surprise! hes not actually dead. Eyeroll isnt it?

Thats Watch Dogs Legion. I dont think this series has much life in it, its very good conceptually, GTA but what if everyone is owned by technology and megacorporations and such, its just that Ubisoft tends to turn good ideas to slop at a rapid pace. This game doesnt feel or play much different than many other Ubisoft games. It is impressive how you can play as any random NPC, full with their own voice acting and maybe even voice lines? Not sure how its handled but I was amused by swapping between characters and seeing how their personality is different in cutscenes. But now its been 6 years since the last Watch Dogs release so maybe thats all we'll see from this franchise, a bit of a sour note to end on as this game is overall mind numbingly average. At least I finished it in only 2 sessions, its not as long as Watch Dogs 2 , so that helps.

5/10