Watch Dogs®: Legion

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SCORE: ★★★: Liked It THE BREAKDOWN +Novel character-swapping system allows building a varied and often hilarious team of specialists for each task +Impressive graphics for the sheer scale of the game and London feels lovingly realized +Surprising amount of personality in the procedural operatives that helps build attachment +The mix of hacking, melee, and shooting remains pretty unique in gaming -General Ubisoft open-world clutter is at its worst with endless rote work -Operatives are poorly balanced, with most becoming obsolete once you get your first real pros -The plot peaks at ‘fine’ at its best moments Ubisoft games, by and large, occupy a certain ‘popcorn game’ space in my mind. There’s few of them I would say that I love, but they often go on sale for a pretty cheap price and often have as many novel ideas as they do unfortunate nitpicks. Of the previous two Watch Dogs games, I found the first one pretty middling and the second one rather charming. Considering that my favorite part of Watch Dogs 2 was the cast of colorful characters and their investment in the plot, I was worried that Watch Dogs: Legion’s primary premise – the idea of an ‘anyone, anywhere’ recruitment system instead of set protagonists – would make it lose all appeal for me. While the game didn’t manage to entirely conquer these concerns, I did find it to be an admirable example of how much creativity is bursting from the developers at Ubisoft when they get a chance to experiment a little bit. Taking place after the events of the first two games in the heart of merry old England, Watch Dogs: Legion sees London’s policing and military privatized under a paramilitary corporate force called Albion. After DedSec – the series’ group of vigilante hackers the player is part of – is framed for a terrorist attack, Albion jumps on public sentiment to crack down on freedoms and implement high-tech surveillance while not-so-secretly working alongside the city’s biggest crime syndicate. After a short prologue where DedSec is nearly wiped out, the player is thrust into the shoes of a freshly minted vigilante and tasked with both rebuilding the collective and finding proof of Albion’s crimes. There are major NPCs, such as Sabine, formerly DedSec’s ‘voice on the mic’ and now its informal leader, but most of the plot-relevant dialogue is delivered by Bagley, Sabine’s personalized and upgraded version of the same one in every citizen’s electronic devices. An unshackled Siri by way of a Stephen Merchant impression, Bagley serves as the highly sarcastic mission control and thread that weaves the mostly procedural cast of playable protagonists together. These procedural protagonists are the star of the show, and I’m a little surprised to say the concept mostly works. The idea is pretty simple: instead of following a single operative, Legion is about causing a mass uprising in London, and in the spirit of that, the game encourages finding or convincing others to join DedSec. While the story and side missions will do their part to highlight potentially useful operatives, it’s also possible to just walk up to anyone on the street you like the look of and trigger a random mission to win their loyalty over, with unlockable skills allowing greater insight into their abilities and weaknesses, alongside some pretty interesting and often funny trivia. That elderly woman across the street? She might seem harmless, but she’s actually an experienced paramedic who can not only infiltrate hospitals and summon an ambulance, but shorten the recovery of wounded members of your team and even use defibrillators in combat. Oh, and check out her file – turns out she’s committed assault twice, survived pancreatic cancer, and won a hot dog eating contest once. It’s a surprisingly robust system, largely in part thanks to the sheer amount of effort that went into giving each potential freedom fighter a unique-seeming background. A shame, then, that the power creep kicks in almost immediately. Even if one doesn’t count the seemingly standard-these-days ‘Ubisoft DLC power creep’ and ignores the high-powered downloadable operatives (including Aiden Pearce and Wrench from previous Watch Dogs games alongside a story expansion and an actual Assassin from Assassin’s Creed), it isn’t long before elites like former MI6 spies and professional hitmen become available, rendering anyone who doesn’t have a unique niche skill pretty obsolete. This wouldn’t bother me so much if it better reflected a natural growth curve, but it’s far too easy from the jump to basically render the whole system unnecessary just by liberating the first of many London districts. There’s very little sense of progression, especially since each individual is always going to be as the player got them. You can spend an in-game currency from completing missions and finding intel to buy universal gadgets and skills, but there’s really no getting around this egregious gap in capability. This imbalance carries over into pretty much every facet of the gameplay, but thankfully there’s enough variety and polish to keep things fun. Combat, driving, and hacking are all fundamentally pretty simple to accommodate the wide variety of characters, but playing specialists is surprisingly fun. Hop into the shoes of that MI6 spy I mentioned and enjoy a cloaking, rocket-equipped sports car; play a boxer and enjoy efficient, hard-hitting melee combos that are incredibly useful both in stealth and direct combat. As much as I wish it wasn’t a blatant downgrade to whip out my construction worker or drone pilot, there’s no lack of interesting archetypes to tool around with in the end, so it’s a fairly minor complaint, and the penalty for experimenting is pretty minor since any arrested or downed DedSec member will return in time, and more quickly if you have a paramedic or barrister to speed things along. Still, there’s the question of what it’s all for, and I struggled to stay interested in the why of things. Bagley and the rest of the cast of major characters do their best to create investment in the narrative, but the lack of real protagonist is a serious hit, and while it might have been possible to weave a compelling tale without one, the writers don’t quite pull it off here. There were a few individual missions I found that were real highlights – like investigating the abandoned home of a suspicious tech billionaire – so it’s not like Legion is entirely lacking in memorable moments, but they’re too few and far between for how long the game is. As is often the case in Ubisoft games, this is compounded by an enormous amount of open world clutter and insignificant errand work. All in all, Watch Dogs: Legion is a solid game with a novel premise that it works pretty hard to take full advantage of. While I walked away only liking it instead of loving it, I felt it was worth my time largely to explore the idea of picking people off the street, recruiting them into my rebel cell, and finding out what their specialty was. As a structured experience, Legion is a bit lacking, but it’s a pretty fascinating playground.