Near-future London waits to the ranks of DedSec’s self-made cabal of hackers, whether they know it or not. One minute they’re a banker meeting their boyfriend for coffee, the next they’re flying past tenements on cargo drones, hacking into the local mob’s surveillance system, or gleefully kicking a security guard’s teeth in. They populate Watch Dogs: Legion's streets, in a game which is ambitious, gorgeous, and limiting, usually all at once, with plenty of fun diversions but far less agency than its teasers and trailers implied.
For anyone new to the series, Watch Dogs: Legion is an open world action game which prioritizes hacking and stealth over outright gunplay. Cars, drones, locked doors, and even people can all be briskly abused with the handiest cellphone ever conceived, with most missions requiring breaking and entering into fortified locations with increasingly complex security. The core gameplay is more in line with, if anything, the 90s film Hackers, and a smash-the-system narrative posits the player as an unruly political dissident who can, as with the Grand Theft Auto series, also decide to just spend their time running over pedestrians while listening to a curated soundtrack.
Most every scripted mission in the game rewards stealthy navigation, copious use of drones, and simple but satisfying hacking mechanics. The overarching story is a strange beast with a confusing intro, a surprisingly strong second act, and a predictable finale of betrayal and chaos. Compared to Watch Dogs 2’s spirited characterization and entertaining critique of vapid corporate celebrity, Legion's plot is a definite downgrade, but it remains an entertaining campaign with memorable highlights.
Still, from its earliest teasers, Watch Dogs: Legion was always going to live and die on its spotlighted recruitment mechanic. Unlike previous games, the player this time is more so a conceptual representation of localized hacker insurgency faction DedSec London as a grander whole. There is no consistent protagonist voice outside of Bagley, an overly snarky but charming AI, and players can essentially inhabit any recruited pleb at will. This idea plays upon and even interrogates the power fantasy of AAA open world games, and early hours will be happily spent inspecting every single erby on a given street, bookmarking the best for later recruitment to the cause.
This brilliant glamor predictably fades, though, and while every character can be recruited, huge swaths of Watch Dogs: Legion's populace are obviously inferior to others. Some only bring disadvantages to gameplay, like triggering guards during stealth with flatulence or presenting greater weakness to physical damage. These same recruits may have their benefits as well, like a silenced MP5 or shorter cooldowns when hacking enemy drones, but why even bother with them? There’s always another with better attributes and gear and without the flatulent cost of their brethren, so the urge to keep digging to prioritize more worthy DedSec candidates never waivers. It’s a privileged, prejudicial, materialistic philosophy that contrasts with the game’s proletariat theme, and the dissonance persists from there.
Any Watch Dogs: Legion citizen may be inspected to reveal painpoints and stresses, then engaged to trigger a recruitment mission that’s usually straightforward, simplistic, and formulaic. Maybe they’re being blackmailed, or have a vendetta against a former employer, and maybe another will simply the party because their nemesis was mistakenly run down by the player’s motorcycle an hour ago. There’s a functionally infinite collection of these micro-missions to stumble upon, and while they’re rarely inspired or comparable to properly authored content in any other game, they’re fun to explore and resolve.
The issue here is that Watch Dogs: Legion clumsily bluffs a more articulate and elaborate simulation than what’s actually available to play. Way too many characters look eerily similar with their Mr.-Potato-Head-like randomization of facial features, and the same available abilities repeat ad nauseum. A hospitalization/arrest mechanic implies that DedSec operatives are always vulnerable, but the same 30-minute arrest punishment is prompted whether a single cop guns the player down or a SWAT team peppers them dead with shotguns and combat drones. A lawyer recruit’s bonus reduces arrest times but it’s hardly necessary, and turning on a permadeath setting just removes the aforementioned mechanics outright.
A lot of Watch Dogs: Legion’s faults seem like a matter of rushed production or insecurity with its premise. Certain Londoners may work for construction or the local mob, and Bagley insistently describes to the player how employee uniforms allow age to restricted areas. This is far from the truth, with any police officer DedSec recruit storming a precinct absolutely vulnerable to attack, so don’t expect to just freely run around a locked down building because that’s where a character spends their 9 to 5. This dynamic was obviously tempered to avoid making missions too easy - the game actually just delays awareness of a DedSec employee - but Legion's intention was to enable this kind of ease, and hobbling its disguise mechanic renders it useless.
Swapping to a new operative usually leads to a brief, inane cutscene of banter before gaining control of the next character. That’s because Watch Dogs: Legion prerecorded many versions of its script to for potentially diverse recruits, making countless conversations a clumsily delivered mix-and-match potpourri. Furthermore, causing a ruckus while fellow operatives are in the vicinity doesn’t prompt fellow DedSec-ers to band together, because their AI immediately reverts to that of the meek populace when not under player control. Each erby has a detailed personality viewable in their profiler, but they’re all just identical drones in practice, reacting to sudden violence or a careening vehicle like everyone else.
These aspects weigh upon Watch Dogs: Legion, but there are obvious highlights in spite of them. It’s still a thrill to solve a mission without setting foot in a restricted area, letting a spider drone weave in and around the view of pacing guards, hacking a door code from a nearby security camera while none’s the wiser. These are the moments where the Watch Dogs series lays its claim, and Legion has plentiful opportunities for the player to surprise themselves by accident or intentionally a bottleneck with an inventive solution unique to approaches the series allows.
Watch Dog: Legion’s best missions accentuate that inventive energy, but later story missions aggravate to repeated and unavoidable violence. It’s so demoralizing to choose a hack-reliant operative for a mission that bookends with scripted gunfire, and any resultant failure state seems wholly unfair (especially in permadeath mode). Additionally, while a tech point system provides a limited array of hack upgrades and a few pieces of gear, there’s no way to tangibly improve a recruit. If one of them has an assault rifle, it can’t be transferred to another, and a cryptocurrency economy is solely restricted to a marketplace of (ittedly cool-looking) cosmetics and clothes.
The takeaway is this: Watch Dogs: Legion is an ambitious simulation which reliably fails whenever players push against its boundaries. Like the cargo drones which grant them the ability to freely fly, it hits an invisible ceiling that prevents players from soaring above London’s skyscrapers. Ubisoft’s intentions to maintain Watch Dogs: Legion in its online life come December means its complexity has room to grow and evolve over time (and through paid season es), but earlier doubts about its actual depth seem sorely well-founded. None of its flaws dismiss its finest hours, its attractive presentation, or the established gameplay elements which separate this series from violence-first open world games, but the game is hardly an improvement on the previous entry, even with an inspired recruitment mechanic. Watch Dogs: Legion could have been a milestone, but it feels a little rushed and unsteady on its feet as it is. Maybe some time and TLC will secure its original promise, but for now, it remains a case of an engaging concept that stumbles in its execution.
Watch Dogs: Legion releases on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on October 29. A digital PC code was provided to Screen Rant for the purpose of this review.
