Watch Dogs: Legion Review: The Reasons To Skip It Are Legion
Watch Dogs: Legion Review: The Reasons To Skip It Is Legion
"As Ubisoft presents its best open world yet, the main gameplay hook falls flat."
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Fantastic open world
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Pleasant fight
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Fun new traversal options
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Recruitment hook does not work
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The story is a tonal mess
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Too easy, even in the most difficult case
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The PC version crashed frequently
Ubisoft wants its core gameplay hook, the ability to recruit anyone in the open world, which is what makes you want to play Watch Dogs: Legion. Unfortunately, the mechanic's reception is quickly exhausted. The more time I spent with the game, the less impressive it got and the rough edges of the system became clear.
The real reason you stick with Watch Dogs: Legion is because London is incredibly vibrant, one of the best open worlds I've explored in a video game. But buyers watch out. The PC version of the title is littered with issues, so the console is the preferred choice.
That's a story
Watch Dogs: Legion begins attacks on key London landmarks tied to the hacking group DeadSec. This forces the city government to turn control over to a private military company called Albion. As the game progresses, the player will uncover the secret behind Zero Day, the real perpetrators of the bombings and how the vicious factions of London bond with them.
Watch Dogs has always passed the edges of reality with its surveillance commentary, but Legion delves into the depths by adding a healthy pile of suppressive policing. The final game in the franchise, Watch Dogs 2, was released around the time of the last US presidential election, an event that changed not only my personal politics but the state of the world almost daily. As you know, 2020 was a long year.
I was hoping Legion would find something interesting, but subjects that should be tackled with a scalpel are tackled with a sledgehammer instead. The game has no tact and is never subtle, but insists on getting around hot button issues with the light-hearted nature that made Watch Dogs 2 popular. It doesn't work.
As Bagley, the A.I. Companion who accompanies your employees on missions, jokes, you are forced to take photos of corpses found in the middle of a sports stadium that has been converted into a concentration camp. In one mission, you have to navigate a spider robot through a mansion only to find refugees who are kept as slaves. If anyone asks for release, they will instead be executed in front of the other prisoners.
Yes. It's getting dark. However, the game never acknowledges the dire situations it represents, which has troubled me about the entire state of game history. Legion wants to get serious, but she also wants to be silly and feel relevant. The game cannot solidify these ideas into a reasonable story or even a theme.
A mechanic's recruit misses the mark
Legion lets you go to any London civilian and recruit them as part of DeadSec. The idea initially feels new but cannot justify its existence, and the lack of a main character becomes a problem as the game progresses.
After playing the prologue mission, which starts with a preset agent, there are 15 different randomly generated characters to choose from. They are given their name, profession, a single sentence about their background and the tool or skill they come up with. My choice fell on Marcel, a mechanic with a wrench that dealt additional melee damage.
From the jump you can approach (almost) anyone on the street and recruit them for the cause. I say almost everyone, because around 75% of civilians actually had the “start recruiting” popup over their heads at some point. I'm not sure if this was a bug or if the game only allows you to recruit a certain number of characters at a time. Still, there are enough people that I didn't believe Ubisoft falsely promoted the mechanic.
You can verify recruits by examining the same information that was displayed during the initial recruiting post prologue: name, occupation, background, and skills. Depending on their feelings about DeadSec, you will have to complete a side quest of varying difficulty in order for them to join. As soon as this is the case, you can switch between employees at any time.
The campaign sometimes assigns you to recruit a specific employee for a mission. For example, you need a construction worker to gain undetected access to a construction site. The game also marks the card with recruits who bring more unique skills to the table.
The majority of employees play the same game.
While character swapping is new at first, you'll quickly find that it's too shallow. London's civilians are randomized, but the variety seems limited. I have often met people with the same haircut or beard as the character I played. I even met a recruit who had the same face as Marcel, but with a darker skin tone. The random visual and vocal matches mean characters don't always have meaningful voices.
Worse, the majority of employees play the same game. There are a few exceptions. My spy character had a handful more combat animations than the rest of my crew and the ability to spawn an Aston Martin car with missiles and camouflage. Mostly. However, I could have swapped one of my recruits for another and it wouldn't have made much difference.
My construction worker could call in a cargo drone to climb on top of the city and fly through it, but there were enough of them soaring through the sky as they are. I also gave a belly laugh when a staff member – an elderly woman – performed a flying spin kick to incapacitate a heavily armored Albion guard.
The more hacking and combat upgrades unlocked for your crew, the smaller the differences between your recruits will become. It's hard to imagine that the game would play any differently if it only had a single protagonist.
I could have swapped any of my recruits for a different one and it wouldn't make any difference.
However, one main character or several protagonists would have served the story much better. We could have connected with them in ways impossible with the casual recruits, and a message beyond "fascism is bad" could have been gleaned from history.
The game tries to anchor you with its supporting characters, including the often amusing A.I. Bagley, however, they're a poor substitute for a consistent main character.
London is the real star
I'm disappointed with Legion's story and the surprisingly thin operational mechanic. Neither is noticeable. However, if all you want to do is jump into a Ubisoft-style sandbox, Watch Dogs: Legion is the company's best accomplishment yet.
Legion's London version is a joy to discover, especially for someone (like me!) Who grew up in England. You can meet other employees you recruited during the exploration and select members of the public will be highlighted if they are in any way related to a recruit. Although by and large I am lukewarm to recruiting someone, I do appreciate that touch.
If you just want to jump into a Ubisoft sandbox, Watch Dogs: Legion is the company's best accomplishment yet.
With ray tracing on, the reflections in puddles or on the side of a double decker bus gave the world a texture I'd never seen in a game. It's dirty, shiny, and cozy at times, depending on which part of the city you are in.
The cargo drones that you can use to fly around the city add a new level of verticality to the game and offer new ways to enter a restricted area. This is a welcome addition as entering restricted areas accounts for 90% of Watch Dogs gameplay. That said, using a cargo drone was sometimes like playing the game in easy mode, as the server or other target I needed to access was often on a rooftop.
The game is played by the feeble-minded enemy A.I. The city is littered with Albion drones and guards, and yet I was able to create a lot of chaos without looking out of the fluff. And when they caught me in the act? Ducking around a corner or two quickly turned her awareness display from assault red to confused white, and within 30 seconds the chatter of giving up chase would get through on the radio with little effort on my part.
Hard mode doesn't make them smarter, just more deadly. There's also a permadeath mode in which an employee who dies is gone for good. With all that said, the game never felt challenging.
PC performance is an issue
My ability to enjoy Legion has also been impacted by significant PC performance issues. I tested the game on my new LG CX OLED TV. The game ran in 4K at high settings and activated ray tracing at a desired speed of 60 frames per second (fps). However, it would inevitably crash, be it a few minutes after the game started or half an hour. A Ubisoft representative told me to make sure I had the latest GeForce drivers and check the game's technical requirements.
I actually had the latest drivers installed which I reinstalled for security reasons. While I didn't have the Nvidia RTX 3080 graphics card that asked what settings I wanted to run it at, even the most demanding games I played before Watch Dogs: Legion ran without any problems at even higher settings and higher frame rates. Plus, the problem wasn't a bad average frame rate. I would enjoy a steady 60 fps and then the game would crash and force me to restart.
I eventually reduced the resolution to 1800p which seemed to help, but this is not normal behavior for a game. Worst of all, I ran the game with its patch from day one. A console hotfix will be released on October 30th, while a more robust second patch for Squash performance issues will be released on November 9th. Hopefully this will fix the problem.
Our opinion
Watch Dogs: Legion is Ubisoft's most ambitious entry in the series to date, and while it doesn't disappoint like the first Watch Dogs, it feels aimless. Exploring London is a good time, but the game is never challenging and the story makes very little sense.
Is there a better alternative?
Yes. Watch Dogs 2 is still the best the series has to offer. If you're looking for a newer game, you might be waiting for Assassin's Creed Valhalla to be released about a week after Watch Dogs: Legion launched.
How long it will take?
As with any Ubisoft open world game, you have a lot of side quests to complete. With goals associated with recruiting new members, this is taken one step further. The campaign lasts around 20 hours, but if you stick to the main story.
Should you buy it?
Legion's recruiting hook doesn't produce any results, and performance issues make this a leap for PC gamers.
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