London Calling.
I can honestly say that I wasn’t a huge fan of the original Watch Dogs. It was decent enough but was never a game that I felt stayed with me in any real capacity. While Watch Dog 2 was a huge step up, not just in tone or in character, it was just infinitely more fun to play as well. When its follow-up, Watch Dogs: Legion, was shown off at E3 2019, it already seemed like something more exciting than what had come before. Legion, taking place in a massive recreation of London, was shown to have a gimmick where any person walking the streets could be recruited as a playable character, having a unique voice and personality all their own. That said, I was extremely skeptical at the scale of this offering. While it doesn’t always hit the mark, the concept nonetheless works, allowing me to craft a team unique to myself, full of character and British charm. The game itself has some issues, but I’m still rather impressed at the whole thing regardless.
Watch Dogs: Legion has you back in the seat of a Dedsec operative, one tasked with shutting down various factions around London that are bent on taking control of the city. You also have to deal with a new shadow hacker group called Zero Day, who seems to have their hands in many pies. While you’ll start out with a preset operative, things go sideways when a series of bombs go off in London, with your operative killed shortly after. The bombings are then blamed on Dedsec, causing the factions to rise in power, and any favor that Dedsec had with the common man, was then greatly soured. The last few members of Dedsec then recruit someone of your choosing, picking from a random selection of characters, brandishing a set of perks that could very well save your life, or at least make things a tiny bit easier.
Now, when Legion was first announced to have this recruit anybody system, I had a few questions. Would they talk? Would they all have the same set of dialogue? The same voice? Would they simply feel like perk or ability swaps than fully realized people? Thankfully, I got all those answers and more. Each character has a largely unique voice to a certain extent, even if they don’t really control the narrative, becoming more of a follower than any sort of leader. You’ll find those who have similar voices, often pitched higher or lower, and while I never encountered an exact duplicate, I wondered if the game took that into account and always modulated your new recruits. Depending on their accent, and other unknown factors, I had wildly different dialogue in moments where my operative was injured and removed from play for a short spell and then replaced with one of my others, joining into the mission and offered up entirely new dialogue. While the villains just spoke the same lines regardless of who was before them, it was still interesting to see how different my characters were in their responses and their tone of the situation.
Watch Dogs: Legion’s main threat is a private military company called Albion, charged with public security around London. Headed up by one Nigel Cass, he is more or less the central villain, even if the game attempts to often tell you different. Each faction has its own series of missions, with certain strings being pulled from outside forces. The story itself is largely about rebuilding Dedsec, dealing with each faction, and getting to the bottom of just who Zero Day is, and who is behind this hacker collective. For the most part, the narrative is often enjoyable, but the missions built around the story usually just results in you getting to a location, sneaking around, pressing a button to hack, and the various shootouts you’ll take part in, largely with non-lethal weaponry, because that’s how Dedsec rolls. Now, videogames being videogames, I get why the game is structured like that, and while it’s easy to write off some of the gameplay to being a well-tread and generic formula, it’s your characters, their perks and abilities, that often make each mission that much more impressive and in some ways, unique to you.
Each character you recruit will have a variety of different perks, ranging from having their own melee weapon, vehicle, or in the case of my favorite operative, a drone that I can fly atop of, making vertical climbs a breeze. It also helps that she comes standard with a massive wrench and a “fuck you” attitude. As you progress throughout the game, you’ll be tasked with recruiting more people to the cause, and in some cases, certain genders in order to woo specific people, making that recruit the only male I kept in my group; as my Lizbeth Salander crew needed to maintain their image. While you can simply go up to any character and signal them for recruitment, some will often have issues with Dedsec themselves, making you work that much harder to earn them; often diving deep into who that character is and seeing what their daily schedule entails. The amount of information each character has on them can often be staggering, often in parallel to the amount of information we equally place out into the world. Walking up and finding out that a common passerby is the husband to one of my recruits was interesting, and I would often see other members of my team just out enjoying the city, especially the lady in my group that controlled an army of robotic bees.
Each recruitment will require a mission or two out of you; often requesting you get them medicine for a sick friend, hacking some form of data that they require, or some other ‘go to a location and press a button’ type mission. This is where the game can get rather repetitive as many missions can often take place in the same building you just were in, or another you’ve completed a dozen times already. Now, I get there is a procedural method to this structure, I mean, you can’t create an infinite amount of missions and have them all feel unique or original, but there were tons of locations I only visited once, or not at all, that would have been great to visit at least another time or two.
Now, as you move around the city, your AI, Bagley, will often point out special candidates, people with either special skills or fancy weaponry. One character that I found from this method was someone who reduced the jail time an imprisoned character was serving, who was often a huge help to my team, as was the lady who came with a permanent discount to buying clothing. My favorite operative, the woman I mentioned who came with the drone, also was a construction worker, so her default outfit could also allow me to sneak into a construction site with little to no alerts. It’s nice to maintain a solid variety of characters for each situation, as you never know what you’ll need on the ready at any given moment. Also, should you want, you can play with permadeath, losing that character permanently should they die, but frankly, that wasn’t what I wanted out of the game, so I chose to just have them sit in a cooldown if they were injured in a mission.
Each character does operate in much the same way, having access to the same weapons and abilities that you’ll unlock as you track down tech points to work through a series of upgradeable abilities. You can give them certain weaponry or perks like making enemies cloak upon death, or equipping them with a spider bot, a very useful tool that you’ll use to tunnel through vents, attack guards, or go in places a tad too dangerous for your human operative. I found that I ended up always having a spider bot with me, as they just proved far too useful to not have them with me at all times. They can leap pretty high, especially when you upgrade them, and several of the pickups hidden around the city are only accessible with them. Spider bots, as well as the smaller drones, can also be used to hack, and while you can always default to using CCTV cameras to do so, the more agile spider bot allows you far more freedom in moving around, especially when you’re trying to navigate a massive hacking infrastructure, connecting nodes and switches to keep the connection flowing.
Now, having a unified team does mean that should you be down one operative for a spell, that you can usually jump into the boots of another without missing out on too much from a gameplay perspective, but it’s a shame that each character didn’t have some sort of procedural skill-tree to give them more depth, or specializations that you could work on, upgrade and make them more efficient. Granted, permadeath would sour that a bit if you ended up sinking a lot of time into them, but I can’t help but feel that I would be more attached to my operatives if they had that added depth. It’s not a bad thing that the game didn’t go that way, but merely me thinking about how I’d go about it myself.
Alongside your operatives, you’ll meet a small cast of characters, and while a few of them are decent enough to have conversations with, especially your cheeky AI companion named Bagely, several others tend to just enter into the role of a talking head or voice in your ear than contributing to the team in larger ways. I still found characters like Nowt or Hamish to be solid allies, but once you recruit them, they simply fade into being less than interesting characters. The more engaging of the cast that you’ll tend to have more interactions with are the bad guys, from each of the factions, giving you more potent reasons to keep them in the back of your head as you move around the city. Watch Dogs 2 had a solid cast of characters in your home base, and Legion just doesn’t reach those same highs. This is also likely due to most of your interactions being with your recruits, who often don’t have much to say.
While characters will default to their basic look when you’re not using them, you can outfit them in a huge variety of clothing, either from your home base’s shop, or the various vendors around town. Each shop sells its own brand and styles, so visiting them, especially with an operative who comes with a discount, allows you to dress them in new jackets, shirts, pants, backpacks, gloves, shoes, and more. So yes, you can make that grandma recruit you just snagged wear the latest hip trends or maybe wear that skull helmet you just unlocked. ETO, which is the currency you’ll spend, is easy enough to access as you can hack various bank or casino machines, and you’ll earn plenty of it on missions as well. You’ll also need to watch out for who you’ll recruit as some characters have shopping problems or gambling addictions, making you burn through your money incredibly fast.
Among getting into shootouts, or sneaking around hacking various traps to incapacitate your foes, you’ll also be doing a ton of driving. While I haven’t found a way to bank certain vehicles, some operatives come with one, but it’s incredibly easy to grab an AI-driven cab or steal a luxury car within seconds. The soundtrack present in the game is decent too, making some drives pretty entertaining, especially to the likes of Lilly Allen’s “Fuck you” song. The driving mechanics are some of the best Ubisoft has done, making nearly every vehicle a blast to rip down the road, making sure you’re on the right side of it, that is. It took a while for me to get used to getting into the car on the right side, but your character will also just hop into the driver seat from entering the passenger’s door easy enough as well.
London itself is very impressive, composed of a vast array of cultures, much like the actual city itself, due to many of its citizens being born in other countries. This vibrance of culture is seen everywhere in the game, from its color, its tone, to nearly everywhere you can travel across its painstakingly remade environment. While some details are a bit off; some statues either not correct, or a few locations condensed, this is still probably the most accurate and detailed open world based on an actual location that exists in video games. While I’ve never been to London, and frankly, this game has made me want to visit, I dived into Google Maps to check out how certain locations compared; spoilers.. it compared rather nicely. While sure, some houses are gone, or buildings are entirely different, there is enough here where you certainly could navigate the city itself in the real world solely off what Ubisoft has done here. To add, this level of what London offers for its culture and those that call it home, allows the game to have a vast array of accents and dialects, giving us a wide variety of voices, characters, and personality that is just simply incredible.
Now, I played Watch Dogs: Legion on both Xbox One X and Series X, and while the differences are not mindblowing, the game certainly ran smoother and did look considerably better on the newer hardware, especially for a transition game between console generations. The game also loads considerably faster on the Series X, due in large part to the lighting fast SSD. The performance of the game on the Series X does paint the picture of what to expect from gaming going forward on the platform with ray-traced reflections, improved shadow quality, and variable refresh rates. The ray-traced reflections are gorgeous, with vast differences between the two consoles by having colorful and detailed reflections of bright neon signs highlighted in the water on the road, to reflections of buildings in cars, instead of none of this featured on the Xbox One X. If you were to play them apart from one another, it’s unlikely that many of the differences are going to really stand out, but seeing them side by side, it’s quite the difference and again, makes the prospect of what a console like the Series X, and the PS5 for that matter, can do in the future when games are built solely for next-gen and not held back to run on vastly older hardware.
Watch Dogs: Legion is impressive. It doesn’t always hit the mark with variety to its missions, but the gameplay itself, combined with the ability to recruit literally anyone, makes for a very engaging and sometimes unique experience. London itself is a joy to explore, an ever-sprawling location that honestly doesn’t get enough love in video games. Exploring it, tracking down tech points, or scouting for my next recruit never lost its charm as I was always finding a near-perfect mix of character and ability that it became almost an obsession to find someone that would line up with everything I’d want from them. Legion does pave the way for a new entry that I hope furthers along with this concept, maybe taking a page out of Shadow of Mordor for its villains, making an experience custom to its user. Again, Legion is sometimes run of the mill for the publisher, but its gimmick more or less pays off in some interesting and enjoyable ways.
Developer - Ubisoft Toronto Publisher - Ubisoft Released - October 29th, 2020. Available On - Xbox One X, Series X/S, PS4, PS5, Windows PC, Stadia. Rated - (M) Blood and Gore, Drug Reference, Intense Violence, Sexual Themes, Strong Language, and Use of Alcohol. Platform Reviewed - Xbox One X, and Xbox Series X. Review Access - Watch Dogs: Legion was purchased by the reviewer.