Watch Dogs Legion

Watch Dogs‘ identity crisis ended when the series decided to stop taking itself so seriously. The jump from Aiden Pearce’s revenge-fueled techno war to Marcus Holloway’s hacker rebellion was stark. Watch Dogs 2 is an infinitely more enjoyable game because it took the brilliant ideas of the original, stripped them of pretense, and used them for entertaining scenarios. Sure, I enjoyed Watch Dogs at the time but, like many, I felt it didn’t live up to that earth-shattering E3 reveal. Despite the grim underbelly of Chicago lacking sharp fangs, there were a few “adult” themes Watch Dogs dared to explore that felt just edgy enough to be intriguing. But often the gameplay felt at odds with the tone.

Watch Dogs Legion aims to serve a higher purpose. In a microcosm, it’s an eight-year promise fulfilled. Finally, a world of limitless hacking. Espionage blends with stealth, action, and NPC profiling. Better yet, Watch Dogs Legion does not shove itself down the player’s throat. It does not shy away from loaded themes but knows when to inject humor and heart. It retains the series’ accomplishments while making an incredible, unexpected stride.

Yes, Watch Dogs Legion allows you to recruit any NPC in the game, allowing them to become a playable character in your roster. Does it always make sense? No. But it allows an unprecedented amount of experimentation and player agency in a genre that frequently relies on giving players a long leash and little more. Continuing the momentum of Watch Dogs 2, Legion lays out a clear path of where Ubisoft’s focus should be as this series continues to mature.

The game starts with a bang as your James Bond-like character working for DedSec–the hacktivist group that has persisted throughout the entire series–infiltrates the House of Parliament to defuse bombs planted by another hacktivist group called Zero Day. Because a happy outcome would result in a boring action game, the plan fails as Zero Day has planted bombs across London.

The tonal shift from stealthy action to watching your playable character be shot to death as London goes up in flames is in stark contrast to the plucky beginnings of Watch Dogs 2. This time around, DedSec is on the brink of collapse, not riding the waves of a youthful family dynamic. Not to mention, witnessing the death of the character you were playing for the past ten minutes is not a move often seen in a game of this pedigree. But Legion‘s story is often more concerned with the one players create using the toolkit Ubisoft has provided.

Thankfully, London is packed with thousands of potential DedSec recruits. And so begins Legion‘s crawl towards becoming a game like Hades or Spelunky 2. During their journey, players will encounter a story that is set in stone from beginning to end. The world is partially malleable to your actions, allowing a large amount of freedom in what goals are tackled and when. The major shift comes from who players will use to pick up the pieces of DedSec.

Legion truly begins as players control a spider drone in an attempt to hack into a server to find one of the last remaining local DedSec sympathizers. A podcast supplements the robotic crawling, setting the stage of a city controlled by a militaristic police force and the ever-watchful eye of technology. Upon successful entry into the server, players are given a roster of characters to choose as their next “hero” who will set the wheels in motion.

Understandably, criticism arises that Legion does not have a central, playable protagonist to embody. Players aren’t given the option to make broad choices like a Commander Shepard or live out the fantasy of a Geralt who can shape the world with their actions. Legion uses the populous of a major city as its roster of characters. They are mostly average humans with few remarkable things about them. You may be a construction worker who wields a massive wrench and can easily summon supply drones. You could play as a daycare worker who gets a discount at clothing stores and nothing else.

Each person–each protagonist–is capable of completing a mission and leading a player to the end credits. Legion is beyond a shadow of a doubt one of the most diverse games that has ever been released. London is a city of diversity and Ubisoft has not shied away from filling its game with people from all walks of life. On the surface, it is an impressive feat that should allow many players to feel a sense of empowerment in being able to fill their DedSec team with any person they wish. That impression arrives at the first character select scene and remains throughout the game. I could have chose any number of weirdos to start my journey with in Legion and I settled on a woman who used a crowbar because she had an interesting backstory and a bizarre outfit.

To provide something for players to latch onto, Legion gives us DedSec leader Sabine and AI partner Bagley as constructs. In the absence of a main named character, these two provide equal parts gravity, humor, and exposition. Sabine is passionate and cool, showing the player how to rescue London from its chains and prove that DedSec was not responsible for the bombings. Bagley is often the comic relief, using dry humor to lighten the mood while making mission briefings and updates sound much less humdrum. Legion‘s villains are equally imposing as Zero Day’s twisted rationales are slowly unearthed. There is a noble balancing act of light and dark in the game’s storytelling and it never runs the risk of falling into the shadows like the original Watch Dogs.

To beat Legion, players are not asked to do any task exponentially different from a standard open world game. There are characters who need help and offer side quests. A plethora of distractions like bare-knuckle boxing and kicking around a soccer ball provide silly points of interest. In many ways, it feels like the closest thing to a Grand Theft Auto game Ubisoft has made since, well, Watch Dogs 2. But the provided sandbox has become an interesting experiment for the developer over the past couple generations.

Watch Dogs is the kind of game where an objective–whether it be a human, junction box, or item–is placed in an area and players must reach it. But Watch Dogs over time has allowed an increasing number of ways for players to reach this objective. One can simply take a character into guarded territory and massacre any opposition with guns. They could also sneak in and silently disable everyone. Or a player could hack a camera and try and set proximity traps to disable guards constantly bouncing around from various points of view. A supply drone could be summoned and let players fly across town to the top of a building and work their way around. Most parts of the game where a quest is found might also have vents to allow a spider bot to crawl around in. Hell, even puzzles can be beaten by driving a lift across town and raising it to the top of a building where a collectible is.

Legion thrives on these experimental moments just like its predecessors. However, the unique twist comes from that ever-growing list of DedSec operatives. Need to infiltrate an Albion building? Recruit an Albion guard who won’t instantly raise the alarm. Know that your mettle will be testing in a fist fight? Choose the guy who does more punching damage when drunk and chug a drink before getting in a fight.

In the opening hours, Legion shows players the ropes of recruitment by forcing them to help out a construction worker. You see, not everyone in London knows or even cares about DedSec. To bring more and more people into the cause, you need to do favors for them. These are people who have daily schedules, jobs, and a purpose, even if that purpose is extremely basic. Maybe someone needs a foe taken out. Maybe someone needs some data hacked. Pulling out your phone and attempting to recruit someone will trigger these recruitment missions. Complete them and say hello to a new DedSec agent. Players will also gain access to a deep profiler that reveals more information about targeted people and allows for recruitment of those who simply hate DedSec.

Not every common Londoner is going to be useful. Players can see the various perks of a person when looking at them with a phone. If you care nothing about driving in the game, it may be best to completely avoid characters who simply come with a fancy car that can be summoned. Love being stealthy? Get a person with a silenced pistol. Improved hacking perks and other bonuses can all be found on any number of citizens. But there’s also people who might just sneeze or pass gas randomly, or simply die for no reason. Old people won’t be able to dash or do flying kicks. Bagley will often point out recruits who have particularly good skill sets and the game allows you to keep track of people that you might wish to recruit later on.

By having such diversity in how characters both look and play, Ubisoft opted to not include some of the more powerful hacking abilities found in previous games. The ability to shut down the power across entire blocks or summon a police raid on a hostile camp are gone, meaning there is a bit less controlled chaos than before. Instead of growing individual characters over time, players can collect tech points that are used to unlock upgrades that apply to every DedSec member. In addition to the deep profiler, players can unlock guns and further improve them, gain the ability to hack different types of drones, or use tools to further assist in mission completions. Among the best is an AR Cloak to cause the player to temporarily go invisible and break line of sight. It’s also useful to invest in hacks that can further disable enemies and interact with the world.

Players will eventually go into a rhythm of swapping characters in and out based on changing situations. For a more intense experience, I would advise players to change the difficulty to hard and enable permadeath. With permadeath, DedSec members don’t temporarily tap out by getting sent to the hospital or arrested by police, they die and are gone for good. Enabling permadeath and hard difficulty made me become more attached to my growing list of characters and appreciate all their quirks.

Legion would make a perfect game for streamers looking to do joke runs by picking awful characters or those players who simply wish to roleplay with the given story provided by Ubisoft and crafting a narrative from there. In the time since the game’s release, I’ve watched a number of people play the game differently with varying degrees of seriousness and silliness.

The system is not perfect, that must be said. Depending on your level of investment, the charm may wear thin as the game reaches a sense of finality. Without multiplayer fully implemented, it might feel like there are less reasons to care about tapping into all that London has to offer. Recruitment missions lose their variety and luster, regardless of how quickly they can be tackled. But I see Legion as a stepping stone to a bigger vision. As it exists, your recruits mostly exist in the microcosm of DedSec as independent agents. It was strange to be walking the streets and suddenly be accosted by a random person only to look at the profiler and be told they were hospitalized because of my actions in a previous mission. Family members may mourn the loss of a loved one felled by the player or you may see a familiar face that is grateful for your help. These little moments really drive home those individual stories every player will have when they play through Legion.

However, having all of London be a buffet of new characters does not mean players will feel like all of these people live in the same world or act towards the same goals. There simply are not enough instances where more than one of your DedSec operatives is working on a mission together. Akin to Grand Theft Auto 5, it would have been amazing to see a handful of these random allies in the same mission and have the chance to swap back and forth to complete objectives that would finish a mission. What if you were forced to play as that old lady with a taser and not the super spy? It would force players to adapt and embrace all that Legion can offer.

I often thought of Rogue Legacy when playing Legion. Maybe London was not like that ever-changing castle but after a point, it felt familiar. It was just every knight that was new, possessing a desirable or undesirable quirk that made players want to choose them in hopes of surviving longer. Watch Dogs Legion feels like one of the first triple-A games dabbling in the formula that has made roguelikes so enticing over the past several years. But it also clings to the open world stylings that have proved so profitable.

It should also go without saying that on PlayStation 5 (and I’m sure Xbox Series X and high-end PCs), Watch Dogs Legion is a much more enjoyable game. On my PlayStation 4 Pro I was subject to long load times and a good amount of pop-in and wonky bugs. Faster loading eliminates a massive amount of hassle from the game as fast-traveling and character-swapping takes significantly less time. But don’t worry, the game is still host to funky animations and enough broken AI to garner a good amount of laughter. Regardless of what system you play on, the technology-rich London is still a major accomplishment. The sheer volume of characters existing at one time and living their own lives should wow.

Though Watch Dogs Legion approaches the open world formula in many familiar ways, it ultimately triumphs because of the unique ability to grant anyone passage into the fold of DedSec. Players may check off quests and collectible boxes through a recognizable blend of action and stealth but the new twist manages to warp the expectations of what a game this size and scope can offer. These individuals can be followed around all day, observed from a distance while they fulfill their programmed schedule. Or they can be completely ignored and join your ranks with a few button presses and a one-off quest.

Those who invest their own sense of role playing into Watch Dogs Legion will reap more rewards. But in the future, when this concept has gestated longer, we may see deeper interaction of this world of NPCs turned PCs. If Watch Dogs Legion was yet another entry in the series where you could hack into phones and distract a bad guy to sneak past them, it wouldn’t feel as special. And while the idea of random characters interacting with a semi-static world isn’t anything new, it manages to transform the expected into something clever and surprising.