Watch Dogs Legions Review

 

Watch Dogs Legions Review

When the first Watch Dogs came out to a mixed critical reception but massive financial success, it was obvious it was going to get a sequel. Watch Dogs 2 fixed a lot of the problems with the original game by creating more interesting characters and scenarios. Now Ubisoft is trying the hackathon again with their newest entry Watch Dogs Legions. The newest entry is the most ambitious one yet but is it any good? Well, I have written this review for you to check it out!

At the moment Watch Dogs Legions is a few months old and I think a lot of people have forgotten it. So, to sort of spice up my ‘late to the party’ review, I am going to review the game then compare it to a game I think it should have taken more inspiration from, and then outline the direction in which the series should step. That way it is a bit more fun than simply a ‘hey, read my very late review to a game that is a couple of months old now’.

The big new addition to Watch Dogs Legions the ability to recruit anyone. No longer are the pedestrians on the pavement simply canon fodder to drive through when the road is looking a little crowded and you need to go fast, they are all potential protagonists you can recruit to your team. When exploring London you can see anyone’s job, weapons and abilities they have when playing as them. This can lead to some really cool moments. I had a recruit get arrested for attempting to break into Buckingham Palace, so I decided to recruit one of the beefeater guards so I could use their uniform to sneak in without rousing suspicion. It gives you freedom to decide which one of your agents will be the best person for the job however when you have a large team, you will find you will stick to a few certain agents because they have a few abilities which are just constantly useful compared to some others.

It is a really inventive use of non-playable characters in an open world game, because it almost puts the idea of NPCs on its head- what if this man on the street was actually playable- well now he is. Unfortunately, though it only lasts so long and once you have recruited a few members you will have seen a handful of the games recruitment missions and these are such a boring grind and extremely repetitive. These missions are randomly generate using some of the mission templates the developer had designed but there was not enough variety to keep it interesting. During my playthrough I had done the same few missions multiple times, and sometimes the setting of these mission clash with the setting of the main story missions. Once I infiltrated a base for a recruitment mission only to have to infiltrate the same base again 30 minutes later as part of the main story. Once I had a small party of operatives, I just stopped caring about recruiting more to Deadsec. The game also randomly spawns revenge missions which happen when one of the characters you were playing as injures a civilian who decides to get revenge and kidnap them. So not only do you need to sometimes do a recruitment mission to get someone to join your team you also may need to do randomly generated mission to maintain the people on your team. I found that if I just stopped doing these revenge missions, no one else would get kidnapped so I just stopped. Which is a shame because I did find a tonne of people with interesting abilities who I saved so I could recruit them later but just lacked the inspiration.  

Most of the story missions boil down to similar objectives as well. Steal this from the building, hack this computer, keep the area safe from enemies. You are given a choice between a stealth approach and a lethal guns blazing one and perhaps one of the most satisfying things you can do in Watch Dogs is use your hacking abilities to obtain the information you need in a highly secure location without ever stepping foot on the premises. A lot of the locations don’t have clear unique elements to their design to make them more interesting so by the end of the game I was just shooting my way in and out because it was much quicker. The more noteworthy missions do take place in famous London landmarks which make them more memorable because who wouldn’t remember taking the Tower of London or hacking the advertising in Piccadilly circus. London’s recreation within Watch Dogs Legions is something remarkable and it is clear that the development team did a tonne of research both into the place but also the Londoners currently living there and what are their interests. Once when I was a thirteen-year-old boy my dad took me for a tour of his hometown of Islington and once pointed at a bus stop and said to me ‘Son, this was the bus stop where I first got stabbed’. This bus stop is absent in Watch Dogs Legions, but the street is present and there is a bus stop on the other side of the street, which does show a high accuracy between the inspiration and the city Ubisoft have managed to replicate. The soundtrack features songs from British artists and the radio programmes, which you will hear repeated several times, do sound like what my London grandmother listens to. Perhaps the most surreal moment in the game was when I was merking up some drones whilst a virtual Stormzy is performing a music video on the imax in the background. It is just a shame that most of the interiors you have to infiltrate in the missions end up feeling the same.

So, Watch Dogs Legions ends up being a pretty repetitive open world game with an interesting premise and environment, but it let down by randomly generated missions which lack variety, so what could they do next time to improve from this? I think one of the best examples of an open world game having variety from this generation comes in the form of the prequel- Watch Dogs 2. I felt it differentiated itself from other open world games through interesting writing and characters, particularly in missions which were based of real-world new stories involving cyber terrorism and crime. Watch Dogs 2 excelled in its story’s themes and writing which made it more interesting than Legions. It had these missions which was basically like being a uber driver but there were so much better than what they had any right to be. One minute you are taking a livestreaming youtuber down a ramp for viral fame and the next moment you are taking a stoned man who wants to talk about race politics. I played this in 2018, I can’t even remember some of the missions in Watch Dogs Legions and I played it yesterday. I think Watch Dogs Legion is desperately lacking in some of these moments, but it must have been hard for the development team because so much of Legions content is randomly generated so had the potential to happen multiple times.

I think what they should do for a sequel is keep the ‘recruit anyone’ mechanics, because it is an interesting idea but create a lot of opportunities for players to approach mission in new ways. They need to create a lot more ways. Think about people and what they could do to come around these problems. Instead of recruiting the beefeater guard, could I have gotten a fashion designer to make a uniform for me. Could I have instead, broken into the guard apartment when he was down the pub and stole his uniform and showed up to work the next day instead of him.  It needs a lot more variety to get around these repetitive mission types as well as variety of locals to infiltrate. They should also make a few one-off missions that will show up in a playthrough but are inspired by recent cyber new events as these were the more interesting missions in Watch Dogs 2.

I am a fan of Watch Dogs Legions and I did enjoy my playthrough and experience with the series as a whole. The premise of Legions and running around London was really fun but it got boring after a few sessions with it. The reliance of randomly generated content is a shame because the game sorely lacks variety. I hope the studio comes up with more topical and have a wider assortment of missions next time.