Watch Dogs: Legion

The game's biggest flaw definitely comes from an underutilization of the Play As Anyone mechanic - make the characters distinct! Characters do not have meaningful shortcomings or strengths because they are either insignificant to start, or mitigated by the environment (spiderbot machines and cargo drone launch pads). Let me fail! The game is relatively easy as-is, but the fact that you aren't allowed to challenge yourself with weak characters (or a character with a strange specialization) means that the "Play As Anyone" system feels more like you're playing somewhere between 1 and 5 different characters with different faces. It's a shame too, because the gameplay is decently engaging, and could be moreso if the characters you play felt different. There is a willingness to explore by adding a new mechanic, but no willingness to allow that mechanic to meaningfully impact how you play the game (or to allow the setting to change the game by maybe making guns harder to find?).

About the politics in the game: the game itself is sort of wishy-washy with its politics when it comes to things you're going to see during the course of the main story - vague allusions to "resistance," "taking things back for the people," and Bagley's jokes about "fascist school". The in-game radio shows, however, tell you the kind of weak lib shit you're meant to believe, though - that our current media landscape prizes disinformation in order to get clicks and keep you engaged, that this landscape is perfect for authoritarians to take root, but also that nothing needs to meaningfully change. It's good actually to have clickbaity news you can't trust! It teaches you to be critical (note: if you believe this, I have a bridge to sell you)! These are actual points from the game! Despite this very obvious downside to modern media that has been actually exploited in-universe to put authoritarians in power, there's nothing you can really do about the media ecosystem - you can always trust the current version of the BBC (or GBB in-game) to uh, give you fair, unbiased news that you can trust, and if authoritarians abuse this system and take over? Well, the people have to rise up of course, to restore their classic British freedoms and a capitalist democracy. If Far Cry 5 is the beer commercial version of America, this is its British equivalent.

(The audiolog I was citing can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FM4UfadGDkg)

Traditionally, I'm very supportive of gaming as a whole. I find myself to be generally more optimistic than the average connoisseur. Games that most consider to be trash, I can find some kind of light in. Watch Dogs Legion tests this a bit, but overall still is not a glaring exception. Before I dive straight in, I should be clear; Watch Dogs Legion is the weakest entry in the franchise by a good margin. That doesn't mean it's completely irredeemable, but it does take more steps backwards than forwards.

If you've played any other Watch Dogs game, you know the general concept. Open world hacking hijinks. Not hacking in the kind of way a game like Uplink or Hacknet would have you do it, no. This is more of a 'pop' form of hacking. Point your phone at an object and make it blink kind of thing. Generally, this amounts to deactivating drones and messing with traffic. Issue number one with Legion is that the hacking itself seems to actually take a little bit of a backseat to make room for one of the more heavily advertised features, which I'll touch on in a moment. It's true, you can hijack drones and turrets or scan people on the street for their personal information. You can still remotely jam peoples guns or set off electrical traps. But there are some things missing here.

One of the strengths of the first two Watch Dogs titles was the absolutely unparalled car chases. The first game's cars didn't handle particularly intuitively, but this was all forgivable due to the ways you could demolish your surroundings with a quick hack in a car chase. Traffic lights could be interfered with, pipes in the ground exploded, helicopters sent spiraling through the air--All from your phone. Legion strips this back quite a bit. Gone are the traffic light shenanigans and road explosions. Though you won't even find yourself needing these tools, as the chases have been so diminished in every other way as well.

Even outside of how it plays on the road, though, the world just feels less accessible. Watch Dogs 2 peaked in terms of just how much you could mess with. Riding a scissor lift through town or annoying gangsters with whatever RC doodads you could find was always a good time. Legion doesn't completely lack this; drones flood the skies, including huge cargo drones you can ride through town. But the sheer amount of things that sidetrack you is definitely scaled back, resulting in an experience that feels overall more dry.

The main selling point for this game is the series first ability to play as anybody. Well, nearly everybody. Any random NPC you stumble upon in the streets of London can be recruited into Dedsec, and you can switch to them at any point, taking advantage of their various perks. Some NPC's exist purely as filler, with no advantages at all. Some of them have rare perks associated with them, such as rare lethal weaponry or covert access to some faction areas. This entire concept is both the most interesting about Legion, and the biggest downfall of the game. I can't deny that there was something very cool about being able to help out anyone that you came across and then send them head first into enemy territory. Bartenders, professional hitman, old women, construction workers, cops, you name it. It felt very dynamic...Until it didn't.

The biggest downside to this 'play as anyone' concept is that you don't really feel like you're playing as anyone of any importance. Because Legion lacks a central protagonist, everything you do feels like just another cog in the machine. That can be fine, I suppose. Not every game needs to feature the hero of mankind. But you don't get the chance to relate to these cogs. There's a surprisingly robust amount of voice actors that portray these various NPC's, but the dialogue is all homogenized to fit everyone equally. The closest thing you get to a strong supporting cast is your snarky AI assistant, Bagley, who ranges from reasonably humorous to downright annoying. The various villains in the game help give it a little bit of life, but they usually don't stick around for long enough to leave a meaningful impression.

Downside number two to the 'play as everyone' approach is that virtually all side missions boil down to procedurally generated forays into the same areas over and over again. When you're not going through the main story, you're recruiting people. When you're recruiting people, you're helping them. This almost always boils down to "save this person", "download this data", or "assassinate this target". If you want to get really philosophical, you could argue that most missions in most games boil down to just a handful of common objectives. But it's all in the way it's presented. They try their best to pull from a pool of prewritten prompts, but there's absolutely no replacing a hand crafted side quest. You only need to recruit a few people before you start to realize things aren't going to pick up past this point.

But at this point, the main story should be okay, right? It has its moments, is what I'll say. Taking a cue from Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Legion is less about a massively cohesive overarching narrative, and more about smaller substories that eventually kinda maybe feed into the bigger picture. There are three or four smaller conflicts taking place during the course of the game that culminate more or less into a rather predictable finale. But these side conflicts -can- be very cool. Some of the more memorable encounters involved exploring a mad scientists secret lab with some truly horrifying results, and causing shrapnel to rain from the skies over London. Those are oversimplifications to avoid spoilers, but truly, some of the moments in the main story are genuinely cool. It's also surprisingly short. If you were to focus purely on beating the game with no side distractions, you could easily beat it in two or three sittings, provided you had a full day.

But what else is there to distract you, really? It's the Ubisoft formula, mostly. A handful of side missions to liberate the boroughs of London, upgrade points littered throughout the map in increasingly more annoying locations, and the local pub scene. At first I thought the bars were very well thought out, as they appeared to be unique. Until I realized most of them followed the same template, and just a COUPLE were unique. But that doesn't stop the fact that a good round of darts is, ironically, one of the most fun ways to pass the time in this game. Can't get over playing some darts. There are some other collectibles to grab and plenty of text and audio logs for some direly needed world building, but it's all standard Ubisoft fare.

Before I end this review, I would like to touch on the technical aspects. I played this game on the Xbox Series X. The front of the box does list this as a Series X and Xbox One compatible game, meaning it has Series X enhancements. At least, I think it does? The game is an absolute technical disaster. At the time of this review, the game ran at a mere 30 FPS on the Series X, compared to Ubisoft's other launch title, Assassin's Creed Valhalla which could indeed run at 60 FPS at a slight downscale. Legion forces ray tracing on at all times, which likely contributes to this. Besides the framerate, there are issues all over regardless. Audio often cuts out for no reason, or sound effects just don't trigger. Characters t-posing wasn't rare, models clipping through each other was constant, and the game just doesn't look all that good to begin with. If this is supposed to be a next gen game, you're not going to fool anyone.

All in all, yes, Watch Dogs Legion is a bit of a disappointment. It had some shining moments that genuinely made me grin, but they were muddled by an honestly boring gameplay loop. London isn't as fun as San Francisco was. The characters don't feel even remotely real. Technical issues mar the experience. Yet despite all that, you do still get to ride a drone over Buckingham palace and taze people as an elderly woman. There's something to say for that. I do hope this setback doesn't completely spell the end for the series, as there is a lot to give here. But for now, Legion sits as a wholly inessential experience. Give it a go if you want to see London in action, but don't expect a masterpiece.