Watch Dogs: Legion Review

Introduction

Watch Dogs: Legion is an action adventure open world game that is the third instalment to the Watch Dogs series. It was developed by Ubisoft Toronto and published by Ubisoft. It was released for Consoles and PC in October 2020.

Review

When a serious threat comes to London, Dalton and his team take up the mantle to stop the threat. Dedsec is a wide spread source of good. Until of course disaster strikes and suddenly Dedsec is cast as the villains, all the members are spread, and the evil corporations take control of London to “protect the people!”.

 

My one big concern about the story was that there was no true main character of the game, as the main draw of the game is being able to “play as anyone”. Luckily I found a character I really enjoyed playing as, as their abilities were decent enough and they actually came with a good weapon. So I played as Joseph, the Professional Hitman the entire story. Luckily for me, he really fit the narrative and I fell in love.

The story went in places that I didn’t expect for Watch Dogs. The main point of the story is finding out who a hacker by the name of Zero-Day is, as you try to find out who framed Dedsec in the big events at the beginning of the game. Little do you know, you end up figuring out a lot about all the other organizations in London, and how they’re all tied together.

So you end up working your way through many scenarios that are mostly dedicated to one organization at a time. The story was dark and twisted, and again very unexpected. But the writing was superb, and the AI who stays with you the whole time had me chuckling most of the time, which is where 98% of the humour comes from in the game.

When it comes to the rest of the game, this is where I start to become very indifferent to it all. The biggest draw to the game was that you can “play as anyone”. So you can walk up to a random person on the street and recruit them to the team. The one big thing is that you usually have to do a drawn out mission to recruit them. So in all honesty, I only ended up recruiting like 3 people before I got absolutely annoyed with the system. But it was kind of cool that everyone has their own skills. So a cop can arrest people. An Albion Guard can sneak into most restricted places. A protest leader can call on civilians to beat down goons. It was pretty sweet.

The game is very filled with collectibles, which makes the mini-map very cluttered. Not only are collectibles on it, but spots to call drones, NPCs, and random other symbols. If I ever wanted to see something from the map in the map screen, I’d have to zoom all the way in, which would put the camera at a weird angle, then just fill it with a ton of things again, with no way to filter them. I didn’t want to see the hundreds of text files that did nothing for me but give me random lore to the world. They never gave me experience of skill points or anything, and sometimes, along with the audio files, drag on for so long!

Exploration was annoying in its own right as well. Everything required drones. Whether I had to use a drone to sneak into vents to unlock doors, or use drones to get on-top of buildings. It was monotonous and annoying. Call a drone, control the drone to me, get on the drone, control the drone to the roof, get off the drone, get the collectible, get on the drone, control the drone to the ground, get off the drone. This was done ad nauseum for whatever reason and I got so annoyed when I had to do it over and over and over. During police chases there’s even drones that follow you forever! You have to disable them, while driving, just for the cooldown to take forever to disable the next. I never want to see a drone again!

The combat of the game works very well. Especially with the gun that my character had. I really enjoyed blowing my way through compounds, but the game relies more on hand to hand over anything. If you don’t have a gun out, enemies will try to fight you instead. This was pretty boring as the most you’ll be doing is mashing triangle and occasionally pressing circle to dodge attacks for a counter attack. I expected combos, but got nothing. But as the game went on, and I got more upgrades, it was fun to hack a turret or drone so it would attack every other enemy and I’d have to do less work in the long run!

Rating

Pros:

• Well Done Story
• Likeable Companion

Cons:

• Play As Anyone Is Terribly Implemented
• So Many Drones
• Tons Of Icons On The Mini-map

Summary

When I started this game, I hated everything about it. The world, the gameplay, the systems. But the story turned it around for me for the most part. So it’s hard to recommend this. If you do get this, just go in with tempered expectations.

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Game & Developer Information

Developer Website: Ubisoft Toronto
Developer Socials: Twitter
Publisher Website: Ubisoft
Publisher Socials: Twitter
PSN Store Links: £59.99/€69.99 Europe / $59.99 North America
Trophy Information: 50. 1 / 2 / 22 / 25

Watch Dogs: Legion: Launch Trailer | Ubisoft [NA]