Watch Dogs: Legion review – Would YOU like to be the protagonist next?

Watch Dogs: Legion is the latest entrant to Ubisoft's hacking open-world franchise. Now, if you've watched any of the teasers or trailers for this game, then you know that the biggest change, and probably the USP for Watch Dogs: Legion is the ability to play as literally anyone. The protagonist is whoever you're controlling at the time. That's pretty crazy, but did they manage to pull it off? Unfortunately, not really. Read on for the full review.

Story

Watch Dogs: Legion’s story puts us right back in DeadSec, the same organisation that we were part of in the last game. This time around, we’re being framed for blasts around London by another group called Zero-Day. As a result, law enforcement have been given the shoot-on-sight order for known DeadSec members, while doubling down on surveillance around the city. So what’s the solution here for DeadSec? Simple, let’s recruit some civilians off the street, give them high-tech gadgets, and have them break into high-security areas for DeadSec. While the idea behind play-as-anyone is really cool, the execution is pretty terrible. From a story perspective, there’s little to no incentive to actually play as anyone else. When you try to recruit anyone, they ask you to do them a favour and that’s it, you can now play as them, no questions asked. They’re now willing to die (or rather, go to jail) for DeadSec. Now that’s from a story perspective. Even from a practical, gameplay perspective, there’s little reason to go out of your way to recruit anyone. Most of them essentially have the same skills. You can hover over potential recruits to see what skills they can offer. Even unique skills, like construction worker cargo drones are readily available everywhere, so you don't really need them to summon one for you in most cases.

Now, since the game has no fixed protagonist (only the supporting characters are fixed, eg, friendly neighbourhood A.I, Bagley), the lines used for everyone are pretty generic. They feel extremely forced and leave you cringing. You simply couldn’t imagine two people ever conversing like that in public. Overall, the writing and dialogue is pretty horrible, and while the story has a few good moments, it is pretty disappointing. 

Gameplay

Watch Dogs: Legion has all the tricks you picked up in Watch Dogs 2, with the hacking and disabling of tech, hijacking drones, using your own little gadgets for surveillance and remote hacking etc. Then there’s the cover-and-peek gunplay when stealth fails you, which it will. Driving is a bit icky, we don’t quite know what’s going on there but it doesn’t feel right. The entire game is essentially a gameplay loop of breaking into places, hacking things and then walking out. The map of London is divided into boroughs. And in order to fully liberate them or put them in rebellion mode against the suppressing overlords, you’ve gotta complete the required tasks. Which is what we described above. Break in, hack, or steal, or whatever,  get out. This gets boring very fast. Each DeadSec recruit has abilities that can come into play when you’re doing certain things, the idea is that you should switch to the optimal recruit before taking on an activity, however, the difference is usually so minute it doesn’t really matter. Like we mentioned before, this is where the practical aspects of play-as-anyone falls flat. There really aren’t any key recruits that you should be on the lookout for that are harder to acquire or anything like that.

The only aspect of gameplay that we did enjoy were the parts where you control the Spiderbot, oh and the hacking mini games. They were the only things that broke the monotony of an otherwise dull gameplay loop.

Graphics and audio

At least the game looks nice, it has that going for it. This is an accurate representation of London, so if you’re someone who’s familiar with the nooks and crannies of the city, you’ll probably appreciate the game more. Of course, there’s a coating of Neon “paint” on the city to highlight the modern technology at play, and of course, there are a lot more drones flying about. The game apparently has long loading times on the PS4, but we didn’t seem to have any issues with the game on PC and got a pretty smooth 60 fps on high graphics with our Radeon 5600 XT.

We’ve already mentioned how bad dialogue in this game is, other than that, no issues really. You can tune into the radio while driving to listen to popular music by British artists. That’s about it.

Conclusion

Watch Dogs: Legion is the most disappointing entry to the franchise. While play-as-anyone helped hype the game up, it’s also the most disappointing feature about the game and falls flat on its face for various reasons. The boring and repetitive gameplay loop doesn’t help either. The only good thing about the game is its detailed representation of London.

SKOAR! – 6/10

MOAR!

Developer: Ubisoft Toronto
Publisher: Ubisoft
Platforms: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Series S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Google Stadia, Microsoft Windows
Played on: Microsoft Windows
Price: 3,999

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Manish Rajesh

Manish can usually be found fervently playing video games of all kinds or… no wait he’s pretty much always playing games View Full Profile