Watch Dogs: Legion is an open-world, third-person shooter in which you can recruit anyone in London to your team to help fight back against oppressive forces. Watch Dogs: Legion launched on October 29th, 2020 for PS4, Xbox One, and PC.
The hook of Watch Dogs: Legion is undeniably appealing: Be anyone. Rather than playing as a single protagonist destined to save the world, your job in the third Watch Dogs game is to roam the streets of London and recruit as many NPCs as you deem necessary to create a resistance army capable of fighting back against the oppressive forces that control the city. On paper, this might sound like the makings of a compelling game, both narratively and structurally. But the problem, as they say, is that the game isn’t played on paper, and the area where this game consistently lacks is in the execution of its many, many ideas. You will spend a vast majority of your time in the near-future London of Watch Dogs: Legion doing one of two things: Scouting an area for a mission by hacking cameras and drones to get a bead on the baddies before you waltz in, or driving to a new location where you will be asked to do the same thing. The variety of ways in which you can tackle these missions is admirable. Some characters are better suited for barging in, shooting first, and asking questions never, while others do their best work hanging back and hacking their way through a facility without ever actually stepping foot inside. I can appreciate a game that rewards my patience and my ability to map out and execute a plan, but within a few hours of playing, these missions began to feel rote. The goal is almost always to reach a box somewhere deep within a building, pull the data from that box, and then escape without dying. It’s frequently possible to accomplish this by using a Spiderbot, which can crawl through vents, hack terminals, and maneuver more easily without being spotted, but the result is the same. The repetitive nature of these objectives might not stand out quite as much if the moment-to-moment gameplay was more enjoyable.
