Watch Dogs: Legion – Review

Ubisoft has always been kind to us over the years and we have been good little children right before the holiday season, so we were very happy and eager to accept our review copy of Watch Dogs: Legion. We have reviewed the first two games in the past, with the first one being a bit too basic at times and the second one being a massive step up compared to the first one. This time the series heads towards another direction with the ‘recruit everyone for your army’ gameplay and this felt like one of the most original ideas in a long time, in the somewhat oversaturated gaming industry. While GTA-like gameplay still remained, we were very much hooked from the beginning.

Story

We are taken to London in the near future where there is word of an attack on the Houses of Parliament. DedSec is sent to investigate the matter and discover that a hacker group by the name Zero Day is planning this attack. While your first operative dismantled the bomb in a true 007 fashion, there were apparently more bombs planted around London at key structures, which then also went off. In the aftermath, DedSec gets blamed and labeled as a terrorist group, and the city falls under the management of Albion. DedSec is pretty much inactive because of this, and after several months London has turned into a police state where AI guards everything that happens. From there on out a spark of the rebellion is lit, and a random new person becomes the new hope for DedSec.After this it’s a matter of recruiting more and more like-minded people to join your cause.

The story is nicely brought at a fairly slow but appealing pace. There’s never a feeling of urgency, as you can waddle around freely and recruit as many people as you like before you actually dive into the story properly.

Graphics

At the doorstep of the new generation of consoles, we had to make do with our PS4 Pro to try out this newest installment of the Watch Dogs series. The game looks decent but it has a lot of issues that are quite common for Ubisoft titles. With the huge cast of characters you can recruit, every single one of them looks fairly unique, but this also means that the finer details aren’t always taken care of. Some characters have a lot of jagged features and some even have you counting the polygons. Nonetheless, it’s easily forgiven considering the number of available characters in this game.

Outside of the character models, we get to behold the different environments, and these actually look quite spiffy. While a lot of clutter is repeated and the car models are limited, they look a lot more crisp and clean than the actual characters. Overall, the world has the proper vibe to motivate you to keep exploring.

Sound

The sound design is actually quite impressively handled, and then we mean mostly the voice acting portion of the game. The backdrops are nice as well, but it’s the amount of voice acting that steals the show in this title. As you have a massive cast of characters to recruit, they all need to be able to interact with each other as well, as you can pick what operative you play as, and you can then start conversations for new missions and/or new recruits. While some dialogues may be short, they are still implemented and there are many of them to listen to. Of course, a lot of characters will have been voiced by the same people, it’s still quite an impressive feat to accomplish.

Gameplay

Watch Dogs: Legion is classified as an action-adventure title, albeit in a sandbox environment. You’ll be building up the resistance in London in the fairly near future. You’ll constantly go from point A to point B to complete missions, attract new characters to your cause. The gameplay itself consists out of hacking all technology around you to infiltrate buildings, take out enemies or simply for fun. Other than that it follows the typical layout of a GTA game, albeit with the option to complete missions shooting everyone in sight, or handling it stealthily. There is some variety to be found, and some missions require you to swap to different team members, things are somewhat repetitive after a while when playing. We did enjoy enlisting every possible old person we could find, but even so, things never become that expansive, other than driving around looking for new members or to complete many identical missions. You can of course spice things up by turning on the Permadeath mode, where your operatives are really dead if they die in the game, making things a bit spicier.

The game, even in its fully released form, does have a fair number of bugs still present. Some missions don’t track or take ages for them to show up on the map, you can get stuck behind doors, there are clipping issues, and other random bugs that hamper the overall enjoyment. While these are often little and completely harmless, it gets annoying when you are stuck behind a door for two minutes simply because you cannot jump. Also, we haven’t been able to exit the game normally, without it completely crashing.

Conclusion

Watch Dogs: Legion is a great entry for the franchise and is probably the best as of yet. While there are still some rough edges to be found, the game is an amusing sandbox experience with the addition of being able to create your own private army. If you’re into a GTA experience, but also like hacking, sneaking around and changing characters a lot, this one will keep you occupied for many hours to come.

Ibuki

View My Other Posts

Aspiring ninja.

Related Items

Earl vs. the Mutants – Review

PC, Reviews

Undisputed – Review

PC, PS5, Reviews, Xbox Series X/S

LEGO Horizon Adventures – Review

PC, PS5, Reviews, Switch

Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered – Review

PC, PS5, Reviews