Despite Ubisoft’s best open world to date, the main hook of recruiting anyone in the open world falls flat, and the PC version is particularly buggy.
Ubisoft wants its core gameplay hook, the ability to recruit anyone in the open world, to be the thing that makes you play Watch Dogs: Legion. Unfortunately, the mechanic wears out its welcome quickly. The more time I spent with the game, the less impressive it became, and the system’s rough edges became clear. The real reason you’ll stick with Watch Dogs: Legion is its incredibly vibrant London, one of the best open worlds I’ve explored in a video game. But buyer beware. The PC version of the title is littered with issues, making the console experience the preferable choice. Watch Dogs: Legion opens with attacks on key London landmarks that are pinned on the hacker group DeadSec. This pushes the city government to hand control over to a private military corporation called Albion. As the game unfolds, the player will uncover the mystery behind Zero Day, the actual perpetrators of the bombings, and how the villainous factions of London tie into them. Watch Dogs has always skirted around the edges of reality with its commentary on surveillance, but Legion dives in the deep end by adding a healthy dollop of oppressive policing. The franchise’s last game, Watch Dogs 2, was released around the time of the last U.S. presidential election, an event that has constantly reshaped not only my personal politics, but the state of the world, on a near-daily basis. The year 2020, as you know, has been a lot. I was hoping Legion would find something interesting to say, but topics that should be approached with a scalpel are instead tackled with a sledgehammer. The game has no tact and is never subtle, yet it insists on skirting around hot-button issues with the lighthearted nature that made Watch Dogs 2 popular. It doesn’t work. As Bagley, the A.I. companion that accompanies your operatives on missions, cracks jokes, you’re forced to take pictures of organ harvested corpses found in the middle of a sports stadium that has been converted into a concentration camp. In one mission, you’re required to navigate a spider robot through a mansion, only to find refugees kept as slaves, and when one begs to be freed, they’re instead executed in front of the other captives. Yeah. It gets dark. Yet the game never acknowledges the horrifying situations it portrays, which left me feel uneasy about the entire state of the games’ story. Legion wants to get serious, but it also wants to be silly, and it wants to feel relevant. The game fails to make these ideas solidify into a sensible story, or even theme. Legion lets you walk up to any London civilian and recruit them as a part of DeadSec. The idea at first feels novel, but it fails to justify its existence, and the lack of a main character becomes a problem as the game progresses. After playing the prologue mission, which starts off with a preset operative, the game gives a choice of 15 different randomly generated characters to choose from. You are provided their name, their profession, a single sentence on their background, and what tool or ability they come with. My choice was Marcel, a repairman with a wrench that provided additional melee damage. From the jump, you’re able to approach (almost) anyone on the street and recruit them to the cause.
