Watch Dogs: Legion review

Reviewed on: PC

Recruitment: Are we the resistance?!?

Watch Dogs Legion is the third game in Ubisoft’s hacker franchise, and arrives with a very ambitious and innovative proposal… in the game you can literally be whoever you want (even an old lady with arthritis)! Saw a passerby on the street and liked him or her? Well, you can recruit and play as them whenever you like. The core of the game is building your “legion” to fight the system, in a dystopian London, and this works, believe it or not, very well.

Each recruited citizen has their specific abilities. It’s up to the player to look for and use those that suit them best. The abilities really make a difference and let you build distinct approach strategies, that is, you literally choose the “right person for the job”. In several missions, choosing the wrong approach can make you spend quite a few extra minutes completing them, whereas choosing the “right” approach can let you complete a mission in the snap of a finger. I’ll cite as an example a mission where I needed to get data from a server at the top of a tower; going the usual way (infiltrating the place and trying to go unnoticed up to the top of the tower) I had several problems and ended up being detected by security several times. After taking quite a beating, I decided to switch to a character who had a personal cargo drone; she could (through her skill with drones) call a drone, climb on it and fly… with this I quickly reached the top of the building and was able to complete the mission facing a very small number of guards.

To recruit a person you need to use the profiler (phone) on them and then choose the “Recruitment” option; with that the corresponding mission is unlocked and after completing it the chosen person joins the team. The more “aligned” they are with DedSec’s ideals the easier the recruitment, and the opposite is also true, because on your journey you will meet several people who hate DedSec, and to recruit them you can only do so by unlocking the full profiling ability, which lets you investigate deeper to find useful information about the person; after that you can start the recruitment mission.

Yet another dystopian city…

As already mentioned above, the game’s story takes place in a dystopian London where information is controlled and manipulated by an organization known as BLUME and its CTOS system; against them a hacker group known as DedSec rises with the goal of unmasking them… yes, the story fulfills the purpose of contextualizing the whole damn thing and unfortunately stops there. Do you remember the ambitious and innovative proposal I mentioned above? If in the gameplay side (possibilities) it proves very well-judged, here it takes the role of villain… the possibility of recruiting anyone and playing as that person greatly limits character development; basically you know the person’s profession and their abilities and nothing more. This ends up undoing almost any empathy the player could have with the “legion”, and if that weren’t enough, we also have the voice acting, which on several occasions either repeats or doesn’t match the character, coming off quite caricatured.

The missions

This is the part I feel “most reluctant” to talk about; let me explain: I saw several complaints about the repetitiveness of the missions… when I got the game I imagined it would be one of those Ubisoft games LOADED with ctrl c + ctrl v missions, and I was wrong… like, there are still repeated missions, but I found them in totally acceptable numbers, seriously!

I was very positively surprised: besides not feeling that tedious sense of repetitiveness (hi Assassin’s Creed Odyssey), I also had a blast exploring the possibilities, both of the different characters and their “unique” abilities and of the gadgets like the spider bot, invisibility, hacking options and so on… the feeling I had was quite the opposite of some opinions I saw out there. And not wanting to be contrarian, but already being one, I really liked the variety of the missions, and even the missions that repeat don’t do it exhaustively to the point of tiring the player, and besides that there is a dose of randomness in some missions that can surprise you. Allow me to give another example: in one mission I needed to hack an executive, but she was inside an extremely well-protected building; the approach I chose was to cause chaos, hacking anti-riot drones and using them to reduce the number of guards and other drones… well, I did that, I took control of an anti-riot drone and used it to defeat the guards, and here is where something unexpected happened: the confusion created by the gunfire made the ordinary people in the building start fleeing, and with that my target left the limits of the security area and so I could hack her without problems! I found that kind of possibility very interesting and fitting for something that could happen in such a situation!

The problems

Here is the main aspect that stops the game from being something grander… the game has a series of technical problems that disrupt or lower the player’s experience. Collision bugs: you hit a car at high speed and aren’t thrown, but hit at an extremely low speed, almost stopped, and fly several meters; artificial intelligence bugs where enemies keep walking against the wall or stand still doing nothing, enemies that forget about you and go back to their ordinary routine out of nowhere, LOTS of pop-in of scenery objects (when driving a vehicle), vehicles that pass through each other like ghosts, screen tearing (when driving vehicles). Seriously, the list is quite long; I really think this game deserved a delay of a few months to fix flaws, it would improve the experience a lot.