Watch_Dogs Legion Review

You will die someday, best make peace with that now.

This has all been quite the wild ride, following the Watch_Dogs series all the way from waddling infancy to where it currently sits now, and though I finished Watch_Dogs Legion nearly two whole weeks ago; the time since now and then has been spent unpacking the experience I had, playing other games and rediscovering some things. (Like how to love games again.) Because I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say that Watch Dogs Legion did potentially shake some fundamentals within myself that I really needed a second opinion to ratify. This was a game that utterly defied my expectations, expectations that started in one place and evolved somewhere else entirely so that what began as a seed grew into something white-hot and frothing until that growth obscured all else about the game. But in which direction did I lean? Well, that is what we're going to explore today.

When Watch_Dogs Legion was first announced, they did something which pretty much ensured attention out of my stupid brain by setting it in the city which I technically live within the purview of, and for which this blog is currently named (for the time being, I'm thinking of changing that name into something more general) London. Yes, the city of Big Ben, Buckingham Palace and the houses of Parliament. (All that nice stuff) Of course, this was by no means the first time that Ubisoft had ever stepped around this end of the world, Assassin's Creed Syndicate envisioned it's own version of practically the same playing space with their industrial take on London, and Assassin's Creed Valhalla takes place all across England, albeit in an even more ancient age. But for depictions of a somewhat modern London in a playable open space, this has to be the first game to do that since 'The Getaway: Black Monday'!

But of course, that was only the spice to bring in the punters. What was meant to allure the rest of the world was the brand new system which this new game was built around, a system which was clearly based off of the Nemesis System from Shadow's of Mordor; but the team couldn't admit that because the Warner Bros. Interactive developers who made Mordor recently decided to get possessive with their toys and filed to trademark the idea. (That's a whole rant I've already had.) What I'm talking about was the increadibly ambitious 'play as anyone' system wherein players could identify a completely random citizen wandering the streets of London, profile them using Watch_Dogs' signature 'profiler' mechanic, (updated now to show us their abilities and weaknesses alongside their fetishes and recent search history) save them in a recruit tab and then embark on a dynamically generated quest to unlock them as a playable character. Yes, that means dynamic and generated quests that enable the ability to play as a nearly countless number of 'unique' NPCs.

It was the flagship feature of Legion. The 'on-the-box' tagline that would suck in the dubious and alight the passions of the curious. Even in their announcement trailer, stuffed with an eye-wateringly ham-fisted and, somewhat bad taste, rendition of the poem 'First they came' to announce it; the idea of 'everyone is the protagonist' powered through the visuals. And then again in the gamplay trailer that featured everything from overly verbose swearing hooligans trying painfully hard to put on a 'genuine Londoner' accent to knobbly kneed old ladies who struggled to mount obstacles and had to use tasers instead of martial might to take down their enemies. Oh, and there was a very impressive gameplay sequence highlighting how diverse the playable characters could be, when we witnesses a 'gun-kata' skill expert who pulled off string of very cinematic up-close gun-fu takedowns clearly inspired by John Wick. There really was supposed to be an air of expansive diversity that would blossom into endless replayability potential; with the added spice being that a Permadeath mechanic would ensure each character would be a valuable and vulnerable asset that player's would grow attached to and protective of.

Based in the near future of semi-cyberized London; Legion follows the most abrupt and po-faced turn in the franchises' narrative yet, with London gripped on the verge of a dystopia thanks to the totalitarian measures adopted by a scared and corrupted government caught in the panicked mania after- yes, a terrorist attack. (Why is it that every time a game franchise comes to London, it's just so that they can blow up bombs in public? Did we as a country do something to piss of all game developers or something?) The NHS struggles for marketshare against an exploitative private healthcare firm, all Londoners are fitted with an Optik neck-piece that threatens to expand London surveillance to a twenty-four hour stalking of our personal lives by a shadowy government, the Met police are overruled by a private military contractor called 'Albion' that seize political power over the city under the guise of 'bringing stability back to London'. Oh, and despite all of that, in this universe England is very much still a member of the EU. Putting the kibosh on all those truly deranged 'persecution-complex-addled' individuals who really believed that Ubisoft created this entire increadibly ambitious game in less than a year so that they could 'stick it to the leavers'! 

Amidst all this chaos and carnage, the player would be taking the role of the local DedSec cell, which I guess cements these hacktivists as the protagonists of the series now. (Guess we're just ignoring how Aiden Peirce from the first game actively refused to work with DedSec.) DedSec London starts a grass-roots rebellion fuelled by the people of London joining up in order to fight back against the tyranny of the cage being erected around their freedoms. By exposing the corrupt and literally fighting for the innocent, DedSec has evolved from the kiddie hacktivists of the last game to genuine terrorist freedom fighters in Legion! (Quite the reframing of intent, I must say.) Gone are the pandering allusions to 'hacker culture' and the 'counter culture' scene of DedSec San Francisco. Here are the days of hiding in alleyways as murder drones scan the streets and military police beat citizens senseless in the streets hunting for members of the very resistance you stand with. It's a huge tonal shift and not one I'm all that opposed to. (Watch_Dogs 2's style always felt a little superficial to me anyway.)

In bringing this dystopian take on London to life I have to admit that Ubisoft did an exceptional job evoking this sense of being 'on enemy soil' for the entirety of the main game. (Maybe too good of a job, actually.) Albion personnel stop and search everyone whilst their drones constantly fill the airways above you and both can somehow spot and identify the player character if they happen to wander to anywhere too close to them. Full street-roadblocks manned with automatic machine-gun turrets and missile firing drones will automatically scan your affiliation to DedSec if you pass through them, necessitating players to weave around backstreets to avoid them. And the permadeath feature, which you can actually opt in or out of from the main menu, adds this tense layer of being a single mistake away from death throughout the entire game. Which creates this very oppressive atmosphere. In fact, I might go so far as to call it a little 'too' oppressive, at times.

Exploring a typically high quality Ubisoft depiction of London caught in the grip of a semi-futuristic secret dictatorship evokes a curious mix of nostalgia and tense dread. There's so many places I get giddy seeing depicted in pixels for how often I've walked there myself. (Mostly the walk-ways along the Thames). Whilst seeing the holographic AR Albion propaganda plastered on Big Ben from miles away in the same moment, reinforces this poignant feeling that 'someone is watching' at all times in this Cyberpunk-light imagining of the near, but slightly more advanced, 'Brazil' adjacent future. Which can rob some of the fun out of carelessly exploring the world as you might in Watch_Dogs 2 or the other Ubisoft titles. Of course, at least you can sleep easy without worrying about the Online invasions sneaking upon you whilst the player is anxiously avoiding Albion, because for some reason Legion's online features are separate from the main game.

That's right. Despite Watch_Dogs games of the past having lived around their online features so integrated into the main game that people still engage with them in both previous games to this day; the Legion team recognised that their vision of London would already be too much for the player to handle ontop of fighting off online invasion events so they've been moved out of the main game mode entirely. Which, of course, means that the online scene for this game dried up almost immediately, because Watch_Dogs never fostered an 'online-only' audience. One of the many missteps which start as a small seed and gradually grew into something of a startling omission for what is supposed to be the most ambitious Watch_Dogs games to date.

But I've spent a lot of time talking about the idea and concept and context around Watch_Dogs' world; all whilst I've avoided the gameplay talk, and there's a reason for that. When I jumped into Legion I wasn't quite expecting what I got in this department at all, and I wanted to simulate that feeling for you, reader. Because the general expectation of sequels is that the core gameplay experience is added onto and improved whilst the magic box around that core experience changes in the manner best suited to the new game concept. Maybe the themes could change, or the tone and setting; but for the most part you expect the feeling of playing the game to only improve as the game's identity becomes more definite and secure. You'd think that, wouldn't you?

What happened with Legion can only be described as; a simultaneous pullback in concept and push forward in scope. Every step forward that was taken with the tech powering the game in order to allow for the players to pick any NPC they want to be their main character for a particular mission in the story, that came at the cost of how neatly the past two Watch_Dogs played. In Legion you'll find the player character has no phone with which to interact with the plethora of apps the last two games based all their key open world interaction features around. (You can still 'Profile' NPCs, of course; but that's about it.) All hacks and weapons and summonable cars are treated as 'power-ups', which come as looked-in features of the particular citizen you recruited; and aren't earned by the player or bought with experience points. Oh, and every enemy in the game now has a health bar which needs to be whittled down to kill them like this is a live service, or something.

There are no convenient or world-enriching phone apps, and no way to play music during missions (which was a really fun Watch_Dogs 2 system I quite enjoyed.) You can't call the cops on civilians, or switch the traffic lights to cause crashes during chases, or even upgrade the arsenal of a character you've been playing as for a while. There are some overall team upgrades you can unlock over the course of the game by collecting 'tech points' hidden over the game world and rarely granted for completing some missions; but these offer general boosts. Such as the ability to hack bigger and deadlier drones, cause distraction hacks in certain environmental objects, disable enemy guns temporarily, and everything else that you could do in previous Watch_Dogs games off the bat. What you can't unlock are any new weapons for characters you've recruited beyond the underpowered 'non lethal' stun weapons that DedSec employs. Meaning that characters you've earned can't actually be individually invested in; they're as useful when you get them as they'll be 10 hours in. Which kind of misses the point of a 'permadeath' mechanic, wherein the amount of time and experience investment that the player put in is the same investment that should be on the line when that character is in danger. 

Hacking has been changed so that it's no longer a game of 'botnet' resource management, which brings about a single improvement and a whole host of headaches. For the 'improvement' this means that vehicle hacks are now costless; which is great because individually hacking the steering of NPC vehicles is one of those psychotically simple pleasures in life, as you remotely jacknife a bus into a busy lane like an actual monster, but Watch_Dogs 2 made that feel like a chore with that game's annoying resource costs, in Legion you can cause as many traffic accidents as you please. On the otherhand, Legion adds a cooldown timer to every hack in the game, which means that many stealth encounters end up trucking along at a snails pace as the player is constantly forced to wait around growing stale with mind numbing emptiness after they've just pulled off one hack and then have to wait the thirty seconds cooldown until they can pull their next hack. No more chaining together hacks to cause some huge chain-reaction explosion across the enemy lines in an almost 'hacker-Batman' style flair. Just cooldowns and wait times. It is miserable.

The sheer controls themselves also feel just bad. Much of the characteristic animation flair of the player character's moveset, when running, climbing, vaulting cover or even switching from one cover to another is missing in favour of a universal animation set which feels basic and character-devoid. (Which makes sense, given that the team where creating full animation suites for a boundless number of character archetypes. There was going to be concessions somewhere.) Shooting comes across about as weak as playing with airsoft pellets now that every enemy is a bullet sponge, most of the advanced enemies can even shrug off headshots. AI is so toned down that the team had to throw in active-camo shotgun troops who blindly charge at the player in order to force you not to just camp behind the same spot and wail from safety. And just pulling out a gun in general can oftentimes be an absolute death sentence simply because in every fire-fight you're struggling with the game's core systems just to desperately feel powerful for a scant second, or snatch that elusive snippet of actual fun.

I cannot believe it has come to this with the previously well formed franchise that was Watch_Dogs. But having quite literally just played through Watch_Dogs 1 and 2 mere weeks before Legion; there's no doubt in my mind as I say; the raw gameplay of Watch_Dogs Legion is the absolute worst in the franchise. They whittled down every dynamic flair of both previous game's combat and hacking until they collapsed into the arduous headaches they are now. Gang Hideouts used to be my favourite activity in Watch_Dogs 1, because of how robust, if simply, the stealth gameplay was and how great that gunplay felt. Legion's stealth is just about passable in that sub-standard Ubisoft way (You'd have thought the company would have developed a better universal stealthy framework by now, considering all of their games employ stealth to some fashion) and the actual nitty-gritty of the in-action gunplay is just honestly awful; they killed Watch_Dogs' best side activity! But what about the actual level design which made Watch_Dogs 2 so much superior than the first game, even if I think Watch_Dogs 1's gunplay is slightly better?

Legion follows Watch_Dogs 2's example to make the world of interactable hacking objects expansive; but it seems the raw design team were lacking in the creative intent of designing an open-approach in the way they handled situational encounters. In Watch_Dogs 2 you pretty much always felt in control of the way you approached any encounter the game presented for you. And that was because there was always a viable choice that felt catered for to feel fun. You could go in shooting and find enough well placed cover and shooting scenarios to have fun doing that. You might send in your drone to sneakily circumvent all the enemies and bypass the lock you were having trouble with, and endure the stealth section that challenge presented. Or perhaps you could just hack everyone to death and waltz in atop the piles of corpses your unfettered manipulation has wrought. In Legion, you'll constantly come up against roadblocks that insist 'you have to hack this in person', or 'you have to defend this area for a painful amount of time whilst we swarm you with annoying enemies'. You are constantly being told how you have to play, instead of being given the freedom to play how you want to. Which leads to painful, terminal, objective repetition.

But I've spoken enough about how it feels to play Watch_Dogs Legion; what about the narrative backing that gameplay up? Watch_Dogs has always struggled with how it wants to present that game's story, what with the more traditional presentation of the first title and the more gimmicky 'topic to topic' focus of the second game. Legion attempts for a balance between the two styles and what this game lands is, quite honestly, one of the worst paced narratives I've ever come across in a AAA game. I cannot understand how impressively bad this team was with how they offered plot threads and mission progression and stumbled to present an illusion of narrative progress. Now I'm going to try and keep this as spoiler free as I can, but it's going to be difficult as there's problems I want to talk about in just about every one of Legion's utterly jumbled plot threads. But if I do give away something, rest assured that you're only having a dogs-dinner of a narrative spoiled for you.

Firstly, there was a big hubub about the 'play anyone' mechanic once it was revealed that the NPCs have to carry narrative cutscenes by themselves. This is a problem given that every single NPC seems to be voiced by an actor who only seems as invested as a background character in a crowd scene. That is to say, none of the character archetypes sound great in cutscenes. Then there's the whole situation of one character starting a quest that another one carries on without a contextual connection handing off the character from one person to another. And is this a problem in the full game? It's actually one of the biggest killers of the pacing.

Because there is no main character, aside from the annoying AI 'assistant' Bagley, (Sabine is so irregularly in the game she might as well have been the wallpaper.) that means no character development, no meaningful character relationships, and no recognisable human connection between audience and character. I challenge you to care about literally any character in this entire game, and though the developers pull every hammy trick in the book to try and make you, such as literally playing sad piano music at the death of one of the only voiced characters in the game, it just comes across as laughably weak. Funnily enough the premium characters, all of whom you have to buy for real money, all have unique voice talent that actually put investment behind their role, making it easier to engage with the narrative on that base emotional level. But again, you have to buy them. (Which kind of makes it sound like Ubisoft are selling basic narrative quality Voice work.)

Now let's talk about bombs. Why are they such a common plotpoint in this game's narrative? I understand the psychological impact and symbology of a bombing and what that represents, as well as the very immediate effect it has in this story, but both along the course of the narrative and in the side quests I've seen the narrative come back to an impending bomb threat another four or five times! In fact, this game makes a habit of repeating plot points. Twice you get tasked with using your rooster of operatives to seduce a character in a romance scam; which is probably the least morally dubious thing this game tasks you with in the grand scheme of operations that DedSec undertakes. And if fumbling around with similar plot points sounds repetitive, just wait until you see the missions themselves.

No matter what you're doing, what the plot demands of you, the player is infiltrating an enemy area and hacking some station to progress the plot. Maybe there'll be a spider bot platforming section after the hack, and nearer to the end of that plot thread every single hack will start to send off an alarm which will require the player to 'defend the point' whilst the game drowns them in enemy reinforcements; even when in times when that actually doesn't even make contextual sense within the story. In fact, there's one mission in particular where you have to track down the personal device taken from a journalist so you can snatch the incriminating interview recorded on her tablet. Despite this being a piece of tech recently snatched less than hour ago and just haphazardly dumped on an Albion desk somewhere, the moment you hack that device a magical alarm goes off. (Wow, they hooked that to their alarm system quick; didn't they?) Then you have to stand there and do a 'defend the spot' mission, because that's the only way these developers know how to add challenge. Oh, and when you've acquired the file? There's no running away from the army you've amassed because then you have to review the footage on site using one of Albion's computers! Because I guess DedSec can't figure out how to install a bloody media player on their own devices! If you do leave the area, however; then the entire objective resets and you have to start downloading again from scratch. This game hates you.

As you progress through the game the story is designed to slowly peel away more and more layers of the conspiracy shackling the city of London. But because every 'chapter' lacks a narrative arc and significant conclusion, you never really get the sense that there is a developing investigation being headed by the player's group; instead the narrative plays more like a guide-free safari tour around the various factions that may or may not contribute to the overall connective goal unifying each plotthread. Ostensibly the character is driven by the goal of unmasking ZeroDay, the terrorist who framed DedSec for blowing up half of London, but most narrative arcs end with a slump. You dig into a cartoon mob boss, a crazy billionaire tech icon, and discount Rishi Sunak, (Or is Rishi discount Richard Malik?) only to come away with the empty feeling of no progress gained.

Red Dead Redemption 1 was criticized back in the day for having a narrative wherein the goal posts felt constantly shifting, such that the player kept amassing favour debt only to get stiffed on their promised reward. I felt that Rockstar deftly soothed this narrative flaw by disguising the scope of the gang, and John's true final target, so that the player did not suffer the fatigue of searching for a main villain that gets no closer to you until their 'chapter' arbitrarily kickstarts at the end. Persona games trail the players along a collection of chapters where clues and hints are unveiled along the way to point you towards a culprit, typically a side character you've come to know well. Legion tries both approaches, and fails at both. They try to throw in 'mini' bad guys at the end of their arcs to spice up the overall ZeroDay chase, but they all feel supremely one dimensional and unsatisfying to take down. Or should I say; more one dimensional than your typical Watch_Dogs character. And they hastily try to lampshade the final reveal; but considering the tiny cast of characters and the very obvious hints, the twist villain is a bit obvious. I mean, I literally guessed who it was before the first mission. But I can't go into specifics without spoilers, so let me instead hit you with a 'narrative disappointments' lighting round.

Legion repeats the infamous 'you are now the most wanted person in the city' plot-device that two also did in order to ramp up the 'stakes'; but seeing as how this has no gameplay effect whatsoever, just as it didn't in two, this cliché falls flat on it's face once again. Albion director Nigel Cass is constantly spewing his secretive evil plans in broad daylight in front of people who really shouldn't be in earshot or his even darker conspiratorial plans around his own grunts. Yet somehow he is supposed to be this super stone-nerved and buttoned-up political military figure who has cleverly and neatly paved over all of his closet skeletons. (As if.) The obvious twist villain at the end is one of those eye-rolling pastiche yawn stokers who spouts nothing but 'Reddit rhetoric' level philosophies without offering a single cohesive idea of how they got into this radical hole. ("I want to reset everything!", "But why?", "Oh poor, DedSec. Poor, unsuspecting, DedSec!"; is pretty much how every conversation with them plays out.)

Also, and this isn't so much a dig as it is a general narrative gripe; why is the hacker lingo so limp and hand-wavy in Legion? Watch_Dogs 1 kept itself impressively coherent for most of the narrative and 2 slipped into a light level of jargon that probably flew away from some less tech-savvy people (like myself) but felt at least an inch more authentic than their faux punk-rocker aesthetic choices. Watch_Dogs Legion sometimes feels written by a bad Sci-Fi Channel writer. "Whilst DedSec patched bugs, I wiped the Source Code!" boasts the main villain as they attempt a poor software-style metaphor for the events of the game in a 'You were doing what I wanted the whole time' kind of cliché. It just sounds like a tortured metaphor begging to die, doesn't it? That's what most every 'hacker style' line in the game sounds like.

The big finale literally copies the gameplay set-up of Watch_Dogs 1 where the remote controlled city tries to kill you, however because this game lacks any significant road hacks, that just means the odd car slightly drifts in your direction every now and then in a manner easily avoided. Oh, and I can't wrap up without voicing my most nagging gripe: the writers missed a huge opportunity to make Nigel Cass into a zealous, but pure intentioned, villain that challanges the audience's perception, merely by making so that he wasn't in cahoots with the main villain. A turn which would have incidentally made his compunctions and drives against DedSec correct, in a twisted manner. But that would have taken the slightest modicum of care from the writing team to spot that simple way to buff up the narrative. Not here, this is Watch_Dogs Legion; mediocrity is the passing grade!

Conclusion

In Conclusion, Watch_Dogs Legion is quite easily the worst Watch_Dogs game in the entire franchise. It plays the worst, the narrative is the most muddled and least effective, it's charm consists solely in the sassy AI Bagley who grows old very fast, the gameplay loop is repetitive and stale, the only tricks the game has up it's sleeves are the same it had when the game started and there's perhaps not a single three-dimensional character in the entire game. Except, maybe, Kaitlin Lau? She was alright, I guess. I went from being really excited to see Ubisoft's take on my home country, to dreading having to finish this absolute slog-fest of a Watch_Dogs video game as it dragged on and on for about sixty hours too long. Yes, it took me eighty hours to beat this bloody game and I hated the vast majority of that time. 

I don't rightly know what happened during the development process for this game, all I know is that a different Ubisoft division handled Legion (Ubisoft Toronto) and that I never want to play a AAA game they lead develop ever again. Maybe if they handled a smaller scale indie game with some innovative design concepts that would be interesting, but Legion was clearly more than the team could handle. They sank all their cards into a dynamic playable character system which feels just functional enough to be lightly played about with, but then they tried to build an entire massive game with that brittle base as a spine and the final product crumbles over itself as a result. I honestly do not recommend picking up Legion, even for it's innovative mechanics because they aren't utilised particularly well anyway. And my arbitrary grade may have started as high as B, but by hour 80 most of that 'good will' started to rot and I'm now coming away with a D Grade, below passing. Because taking in account all the polished and well done elements, but saddling them with the baggage of the far more numerous painful elements, the Legion experience will leave you feeling cold and emotionless. I don't know if an AI can die, like the game asks at one hilariously limp 'emotional highpoint' but it turns out my enthusiasm for a hacking themed open world franchise actually can. Thanks for that, Watch_Dogs Legion; I never want to see your face again.