Following the disappointing but gradually beloved Watch Dogs, and the much improved upon Watch Dogs 2, we're here with Watch Dogs Legion, a game that is, to put it simply, quite a departure from the previous games.
Legion takes place in a futuristic London, where the city is under siege by the oppressive Albion military force, dangerous street gangs, the data collecting SIRS, and the mysterious Zero Day. The game once again focuses on the hacker group Dedsec, this time as they fight to liberate London, and to uncover the identity of hacker group Zero Day.
The big change in this game compared to the first two Watch Dogs games is the lack of a central character. You start out by picking a starting character, and you spend the rest of the game finding and recruiting basically whoever you want. Pretty much anyone any London is yours to recruit, each with their own strengths, weaknesses, skills, and quirks. I was honestly pretty excited for this element of the game, and in the end I think it ended up a mixed bag.
On one hand I think they nailed the concept of liberation and change, after all real change is not achieved by one person, but rather a group of people working together. I felt that all throughout the game as the public opinion of Dedsec changes as you play through the story, making it easier or even harder to recruit certain people. There's a load of different character types to recruit or find, making gameplay fun and easily customizable to your gaming tastes.
On the other hand Legion really suffered in the narrative department. A lack of a central voice in the game effected the story, the missions to recruit people ended up being super repetitive, and overall character models and voice acting was surprisingly subpar.
Speaking of the story, I thought the story was alright, it had strong points, and it had weak points. Overall I thought it was just inconsistent and unfocused. Legion tried to juggle different plot points and villains, and the end result felt jumbled. There was a lack of interesting characters, besides Bagley, the AI programmed to help Dedsec and their cause. Throughout all the strengths and weaknesses of the first two games, at least they had an interesting story to tell. Unfortunately, as much as I had to admit it since I was really excited about the story, it underperformed in this department.
The repetitive nature of the missions and the underwhelming story was made better by Legion's gameplay, which like the others two games, is quite fun. With a mixture of stealth tactics, gadgets, melee, or gunplay, there's a ton of ways to go about playing through this game. Not to mention all the different characters you can find adds to the fun and absurdity of it all. Legion also includes an optional permadeth mode, basically if an operative dies during the game, they're gone for good. This adds to the experience by making the stakes higher and makes you think hard about who you take with you on a mission, after all one wrong move and you can lose your favorite operative in the game (totally didn't happen to me.)
And finally, the open world of Watch Dogs Legion, a thing that I still believe is an extremely strong point of the first two games. And once again, it's a mixed bag in this game. A lot of people critique the open world cityscape of London in this game, and I really don't. The dreary weather, rain made the world feel authentic, all the iconic structures are also present for all of your sightseeing desires. Personally I loved traversing the world. Graphically the game's fine, but not too much better than Watch Dogs 2 surprisingly. There are some obvious improvements on newer gen consoles, especially with raytracing though.
I was disappointed in the lack of activities in this game, especially compared to Watch Dogs 2. Aside from the main story, side missions, and repetitive recruiting missions, there's not a lot to do aside from drinking at the pub, playing football, and delivering packages.
Overall it seems like Ubisoft took their time with certain new elements of the game, that they ignored a lot of what makes Watch Dogs so great. Still, the story is good enough to play through, the gameplay is fun, and if you're a fan of the previous Watch Dogs games, it may be worth your time.