Watch Dogs Legion Review

Watch Dogs Legion is just more Watch Dogs 2 or many of the Ubisoft open world games that have enemy camps litered all over the map. I'll start with the story and then the gameplay. I have less to say on this title than WD1 and 2.

The story is not that great and in some ways even more sub par than Watch Dogs 2 was. WD2's story in spite of all how weak the writing was in that game at least made me feel something, apathy for sure but it was something. Legion on the other hand is basically just a bunch of loosely connected sub plots with barely much that ties them all together. With the whole, "play as anyone" system the game has, it's hard to get connected to any of the characters you play as since so many of those characters share the same dialogue lines. The whole plot has you investigate a group called "Zero Day" which framed DedSec for bombings they didn't do but the former is barely even in the game to make a geniune impact or do much to get me invested in beating them.

The actual sub plots themselves lack investment from me since they are just a bunch of dull standalone stories that loosely connect to the main plot. It's basically a "villain of the week" with an overarching big bad that barely does anything, I was honestly paying attention to the story maybe about 50% of the time.

The late game twist is so laughable and poorly put together, I am amazed it got put into the game at all, there is too many lapses in logic I would have to accept in order for me to accept it. Like what was Sabine doing while she was guiding the DeadSec member you were playing as in the prologue?

Good things about the story is that Bagley and the character interactions with him are entertaining enough to listen to. Bagley's character is one of the better things about the game's story since I like AI characters in any story so I have a bias for him already.

I also like some of the attention to detail to the playable characters too. Like for example, I primarily played as a Jamaican construction worker for much of the game and she spoke with not just an accent but also used the various slang words they tend to use as well and I found that to be an impressive since the developers didn't have to go to that extra mile but did anyway.

Now the gameplay, and to best sum it up in that it's basically Watch Dogs 2, where the game is basically, "infiltrate area, do objective, then exfiltrate" but to Legion's credit, the AI is much more forgiving and they don't spot you nearly as fast as WD2 does, and you also get stuff like an invisible cloaking device and you also get melee combat options all though with the latter, with many of the characters I played as, it was a game of, "try to get into a fist fight, then guns out and start shooting".

The cloak I discovered later in the game did come in handy and there is a pretty lengthy cooldown and you can't use it after a takedown so it does feel somewhat balanced.

There is also a bit more use of car chases in the main story by comparison to WD2 which is good, all though not as much as WD1.

Like WD2 however, the game can be very montonous, it is still very much what I described earlier, "infiltrate, do objective, exfiltrate". There is a bypass puzzle here and there but that was also in WD2's style.

Now, the problem is that there is vast amount of empty spaces in between mission objectives, where WD2's world wasn't too big and there was lots of fast travel, Legion has lots of travel time in between main mission and objectives and the game can feel like a good 40% of it is filler. I used the cargo drone to get to most of my objectives and you can tell the game's techical side is struggling to keep up with cars barely moving when so high up in the sky.

Another issue is that since the game is very repetitive, that means much of the game's challenge is spent doing forced action segments during missions you can supposedly play it stealth and dying over and over to damage sponge enemies, I lowered the difficulty to easy to get past these parts faster. To WD2's credit, there was much less forced action segments by comparison to Legion.

The "play as anyone" system is a big gimmick. It's basically a game of, "recruit 1 or 3 characters you like, stick with them and with permadeath off, die enough times to get back to playing as the characters you like". It makes game overs more tedious if anything.

You play 5-6 hours of Legion and you played a good amount of what the game has to offer.

Overall, if you like what came before and the games Ubisoft has made up until now, then there is stuff to like here, but at the same time, I am just lukewarm on that kind of design and I still think Watch Dogs 1 is the best.