What Watch_Dogs could have been

 

Watch_Dogs has something of a special rose tinted place in my heart. Not Watch_Dogs 2- no tint needed there, that game just slaps. Always did, always will. And definitely not Legion- that game was a complete miscarriage with all the tragedy and sadness perfectly preserved in the package. I'm talking the original story of revenge and... nah, it really doesn't get any deeper than a revenge plot, does it? I was going to throw in 'conspiracy' but I think the ultimate reveal is so exceedingly disappointing that it single-handily undoes all the conspiratorial build up the game dedicated itself to beforehand. That first game really was something, wasn't it? Maybe not a masterpiece, but not a disaster piece either. I wouldn't even call it an average game- but I would certainly understand pushback against calling it one of the greats. It was a game of significance, I think we call agree on that much- which is more than can be said for a lot of Ubisoft titles.

And I think a big part of that topsy-turvy state of being comes from the fact that Watch_Dogs is rather transparently a very ambitious game that bites it's own tongue so very often- but not often enough that you don't see the glimmers of what it once was shine out every now and then. I'll just say it straight, you don't pull out all the stops to make a third person shooter play that good unless you have big plans- and I'd go so far as to say bigger plans than what ended up on the disc. Of course these suspicions would have remained only that until my imagination was sparked by learning about the impressive Watch_Dogs 'Living City' mod which aims to achieve much of the latent potential it feels the game always had, albeit through the hands of 'modding' babes.

In many ways what the Living City attempts to do is make the world, missions and player experience more reactive to the narrative- not in that vague marketing way where random variables are tied to the odd player input- but in the really tangible way that the pulse of the city quickens and slacks with the pace of the plot in a manner that is true to the spirit that Watch_Dogs was trying to evoke, rather than just true to the lethargic principles of open world design that Ubisoft stick to like a holy text. Even simple things like restoring an apparently cut feature where hackers hunting for Aiden, the most wanted vigilante in the state mind you, would set up fake contracts to lead the player into an ambush- that kind of stuff contributes to selling the world.

Watch_Dogs was ostensibly built around the idea of the death of digital privacy in a world where the wrong people with the right tools can peel apart the world from the touch of a button on a smartphone half a block away. It's a world of false safety and paper-thin civility draped over a pulsing underworld of the cities worst- a world that Aiden is embroiled in. It should be dangerous, poignant, paranoia inducing and unrelenting- as you dive deeper into the guts of the beast and rile up even more of Chicago's filth. Aiden is built up as this one-man army taking on a city of corruption, collusion and collateral chaos. But in the base game, none of these ideals exist beyond the page of the script they're written on- and that's just not how you design effective works of art. Not in the gaming medium.

Watch_Dogs could have leaned into the consequence that was clearly supposed to be of some significance during that infamous E3 trailer. The way that people would recognise you and try to discreetly call the police, in reaction to the inherent violent actions the player could partake in reflected the human cost of a war waged in blood across residential streets. The fact that in the pursuit of vengeance in resolve to a very human reaction to loss, Aiden would divest himself from the average citizens he believed he was fighting for (to some degree) would reflect gorgeously upon the general themes of the franchise. Just as we surrender our security for the sake of security, Aiden surrenders his humanity in search of humanity. It was right there!

Whatsmore, all of this would have served better in making Aiden this tragic tortured character who never managed to get over the loss and guilt like Ubisoft clearly wanted him to be by the events of Legion. No, instead they just kind of jumped awkwardly to that conclusion without taking the small amount of effort to set it up, resulting in jarring discontent of story. In their version of Aiden, the only thing he really has to feel guilty about is getting Clara killed because he was a dick to her, only she was conveniently left out of his flashbacks forgoing that slight amount of guilt- I suspect because they didn't want to try and source her voice actress again. Ubisoft are just the kings of never following through and it ruins the potential of so many of their works!

Don't even get me started on the failings of the main narrative. Clara Lille, the female supporting character who never got a chance to develop into anything because Ubisoft killed her off in the third act for cheap pity points before she got the chance to become a character important enough to where that death would mean something. Imagine if they killed off T-Bone in Watch_Dogs 2- a character they actually developed! Imagine how people would have felt about that! But no, in this 'brutal world' of vigilantes and corruption the story never has the courage to go that one step further- and perhaps that was what led to the franchise giving up on that angle and instead going the 'rainbow attitude' route for the sequel.

Watch_Dogs had potential to be a very different side of the Ubisoft formula- doing away with the gimmicky nature of it's style and showcasing just how well this style of development can reinforce themes and plot. Instead it became a disappointment, then a redemption too late and finally a disgrace upon game design as a whole. At the end of the day I'm starting to think that the idea of Watch_Dogs wasn't the problem, and I still find the whole 'Aiden hate' to be deeply routed in ancillary distaste for Ubisoft that somehow manifested itself in generalised protagonist bashing. The problem was a lack of conviction. Maybe some day we'll get something similar with the right hearts leading the project to show us the true face of what Watch_Dogs could have been.

Watch_Dogs Legion Bloodlines Review

Round 2

So I had my issues with Watch_Dogs Legion. That much is pretty obvious. If you mosey on over to my main game review you'll see my very many colourful thoughts on the breadth of that game, everything they were trying to do and the many ways in which that game fell absolutely flat on it's face. But when I bought the Watch_Dogs Legion 'Gold edition', that package came complimentary with the game's own prequel DLC in the form of Bloodlines, and I thought it only fair to cover. It may strip all off the flagship 'play as anyone' features from the game, and instead focus on a fan-favourite pairing of previous game protagonists in a smash-cut of a narrative; but is there perhaps something salvageable in the absolute wreckage of a package that the Watch_Dogs game present? Is there anything good in the game's blood? Also, why is this DLC called Bloodlines? I can only think of one possible reason and it's a pretty weak one.

Bloodlines is a prequel to Watch_Dogs Legion, set before the fall of the original DedSec London and the eventual rise of it's successor. It follows, career-fixer and part-time vigilante, Aiden Pearce, the protagonist of the first game, as he finds himself travelling to London for a job that brings him careening back into the life of his nephew, Jackson Pearce. The very same nephew he fought to save all the way back in Watch_Dogs 1, now a full grown and fully voice acted adult, who he hasn't seen since sending him and his mother away in the twilight act of that very game. Throw in the middle of that awkward reunion a megalomaniacal tech mogul's son teetering on the edge of a breakdown of his own orchestration and a mid-game cameo from a suddenly deeply sad 'Wrench'; still dressing in the punk spike and mask garb he did in his twenties despite the fact this man is in his forties at this point; and you have perhaps the best snippet of content within the entire Legion package.

This entire game is pretty substantive, probably counting for eighty percent of the time I actually liked playing Legion during my eighty hour torture. It's set in the exact same play space as the main game, but their London lacks a lot of the really obtrusive world elements that get in the way of general exploration and environmental enjoyment. (No auto-spot patrols or missile-mounted roadblocks and an actual proper fast travel system using TFL) Several of the overly used restricted areas from the main game get reutilised again, which is annoying, but Bloodlines does throw in some variety to shake things up with a few brand new locations and even some slightly more interesting mission objectives beyond the archetypal two that the main game loved so much. You'll still be either sneaking into a place or holding off waves of enemies for the most part, but there's some optional time trials thrown into the mix, as well as a totally expansion-exclusive robotic enemy that has a unique manner of fighting. You have to overload it's system (best achieved with non-lethal electric weapons) and then smash the weak point once it exposes itself. (Gameplay variety? I would never have expected it in my Watch_Dogs Legion!)

Much of my nagging problems with the way that Legion plays is still very much present; the clunky shooting controls and general lack of animation fluidity can't really be helped in a single DLC; but there are few mitigating steps taken by the developers to salvage a smidge of enjoyment out of the raging dumpster fire that is the core game. For one, Wrench and Aiden are loaded with enough special abilities to make them play pretty distinctly, shaking up the gameplay diversity and making combat just that inch more dynamic feeling. Aiden specifcally has an ability where his gun damage buffs and stacks during reloads provided he taps reload again at a certain moment, similar to Gears of War, which mitigates the painfully annoying enemy health bars that the main game suffers from. Also, low and behold, this game provides special side mission rewards wherein you can unlock new weapons an equipment for your character! Genuine meaningful advancement so that the player character can feel like they're becoming more powerful and interesting to play? Wow guys, you almost made this close to the standard of a typical Watch_Dogs game!

The narrative delves into the very many inner conflicts that Aiden has lived with over his long decades as the Vigilante, up to the point where now, in his fifties, the man really has nothing ahead waiting for him in life until he can properly confront the demons of his past. It's a fluke that forces the man to reconnect with his Nephew, and the process of them getting to trust and rely on one another is done in a suitably natural and ingratiating manner. Jackson wasn't really much of a character in the first game, and more of a 'child in peril to up the narrative stakes', but here we see Jackson represent the promise of a new smarter generation primed to be better than their forbearers were, on which Aiden comes to rest the burden of his guilt for the life that he's lived and choices he made. Oh, but did I say: Confronting your guilt? But that can't be done subtly in a Ubisoft product, now can it? Not at all, no! Instead we've got to invent some dream hopping brain reader device for no other reason that to satisfy one of the most tired and over-used clichés of every modern Ubisoft game- the prolonged drugged dream sequence! (Oh god, how I did not miss you!)

As Legion had no central characters, their iteration of this dream sequence cliché was drab and largely forgettable, instead focusing on the life of one of the side villains, Skye Larson. In Bloodlines we get to dive directly into Aiden's head as Jackson (Yes, we play as Jackson randomly for this section. There's no real reason to control Jackson here; Ubisoft just really wanted this scene to happen.) and you walk through the Pearce childhood house as you explore and unpack Aiden's unaddressed trauma over the murder of Lena which kicked off this whole franchise so very long ago. Conceptually this is somewhat touching and interesting, if ham-fisted and strangely exclusionary. By which I mean, Lena appears to be the only thing in his life that he has regret over, besides his general murders which he kind of feels bad about too. (Not bad enough not to pick up killing again the second after the DLC is over.) There's no talk of anyone else he's hurt over the years like his sister Nikki, Jackson himself or, hell, what about Clara Lille? The girl who got herself killed before Aiden had the chance to forgive her for her part played in Lena's death? Or, I don't know, how about the thousands of people who's blackmail material he carelessly leaked to the whole world at the end of Watch_Dogs Legion in a move which that game, somewhat erroneously, portrayed as a triumphant win? Are we just pretending that any information we don't want hitting the public is immediately vilifiable? Because I have a problem with that characterisation! (But I have to point out: yes, I did immediately recognise the PT hallway during the dream sequence. Nice reference game there, Ubisoft. Half point.)

Wrench has himself something of a personal arc too, which is not something I thought I'd been saying about a mascot character who was more style than substance in Watch_Dogs 2. Legion's Wrench is a couple of decades older and has accumulated a ton of baggage in that time, to an extent that his characterisation here is surprisingly fleshed out and vibrant compared to his only very lightly explored pervious iteration. I found a really 'human' and identify character in this Wrench who bought a personable and involved element to the antagonist of this DLC where it was otherwise missing in the shoes of Aiden. I think his special abilities kind of sucked, relying too heavily on Legion's pair-backed hacks, but I enjoyed seeing his very human, and somewhat depressing, life splay itself out. Also, I did not know that Jordi Chin and Wrench would make such a fun double team; their dialogues were genuinely humorous, I was pleasantly surprised.

Overall, Watch_Dogs Legion is a much more traditional take on the Watch_Dogs formula in a narrative and gameplay that strips all the innovative tech that the main game relied on and instead focuses up a a narrow lens story with acts and arcs and character motivations. And it's the best content in Watch_Dogs Legion. Every the hammy boss fight as the end was at least fun to overcome, if not to actually fight. Still, the raw controls are just annoying to wrestle with and this DLC doesn't hold a candle, in terms of gameplay, to previous Watch_Dogs games, but if you were like me and endured the entirety of Legion until you found yourself spiritually scarred to the point you couldn't even remember why games are fun anymore; Bloodlines might just be the remedy to remind you what enjoyment feels like. Still, it's not worth the price of the Legion main game just to play through, even for the overall story revelations (of which there aren't very many) so I do not recommend it. And even on it's own merits as a standalone campaign, compared to the other Watch_Dogs it's still largely a disgrace to consider it a follow-up, so I will award this game no higher than a C- Grade in my arbitrary review score system, one third of a grade above failing. This still hasn't convinced me that Watch_Dogs needs to be continued as a franchise, but at least I can smile again.

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.

Watch_Dogs 2 Review

 Hack the world!

Watch_Dogs 2 is one of the very first games I ever spoke about on this blog of mine for my fears and expectations upon a game that I quite liked back in the day when it was first unveiled upon me. Since then I have actually gone through the effort of playing through it once before, to completion, on Xbox; and this was actually my second time playing the game with a great emphasis on what it does in comparison to Watch_Dogs 1 and how I feel about it, as well as a look upon the narrative. What I hope to do here is set up a baseline for how I think the Watch_Dogs series should have propelled from, because I will say now that from a base mechanical level, the promise of what Watch_Dogs presented fans is increadibly better realised with Watch_Dogs 2, more so than it was with 1. Before this game I could understand if the Watch_Dogs franchise was a staunch one-and-done; but afterwards, the team would have to be crazy not to go back for another. (Which they did, Legion will have it's day for review.)

Firstly I have to say that Watch_Dogs 2's San Francisco is a million times more interesting of a locale than their Chicago, and I think the first game did a decent job bringing a realistic metropolis to life there. But from the very first trailer the Ubisoft folks made it clear that Watch_Dogs 2 was targeting a more colourful and punky heart for their hacker-centric vision of the Watch_Dogs universe that embodied all of the visual aesthetic flairs indicative of the Internet-raised counter culture movement. I'm talking popping clip-art, pulpy comic frames (for some reason), geek references and disobedient  but not violent colour schemes that rely on your Purples and greens. San Francisco, with it's large green hills, sloping streets and sunny disposition better fits such an environment. But the hand-shake goes more than skin deep.

San Francisco has Silicon Valley, the tech investment heart of America where fledgling techie nerds go to watch their dreams pulled apart before their very eyes in a field every bit as competitive and unforgiven as the starlet's Hollywood. It's know to be flooded with investment money, tech company head quarters, pretentious gullible hipsters who suck up any trend that's sold to them as a 'life style', and being one of the cities of America pricey enough to live in have gentrified itself clear to the city limits. In otherwords, San Francisco is literally the perfect place for a technology trend conscious Hacktivist propagating franchise like Watch_Dogs to set itself within. And perhaps that perfect synergy of location and concept impassioned the developers to really hit the nail on the head with their concept because the raw hacking in Watch_Dogs 2 is the deep dream I always wanted the first game to be.

As opposed to the contextual and very deliberate manner in which the world of Watch_Dogs 1 was set-up to facilitate Aiden's hacking antics; Watch_Dogs 2's San Francisco was clearly designed from the wire-frame to play together in such a way that empowered the player's attempts to play around with it. It's like the difference between an Assassin's Creed target set-up and a Hitman target set-up. In Assassin's Creed the team are focused on making the very basic elements of the world work, you have very obvious approaches to the target and not a great amount of options once you get there. Hitman travels into the complexities of routines, synchronised AI packages that can be effectively turned on their head without breaking the game, innumerable opportunities and creative ways to reach your target and a endless toolbet of methods once you get there. Watch_Dogs 2 maybe isn't quite at the level of IO when it came to mastery of concept, but they're a damn sight closer to that end of the spectrum than the Assassin's Creed end.

In Watch_Dogs 2, hacking allows you control over everything the first game did and more. (And not just because this game gives you the ability to hack cameras behind walls so you don't have to camera hop anymore.) Now you can influence the actual direction of vehicles to send them speeding down the alleyway by themselves or careening out of the hands of the driver, a very free-form way of creating opportunities for yourself to shake off pursuers, clear a busy highway in the middle of a chase or just barrel over a troublesome area guard you otherwise can't approach in a stealth scenario. You can actually hack civilians on the street to do more than just steal their back accounts or play voyeur. Now you can distract any citizen with a contextual window phonecall or, if you unlock it, you can falsify an arrest warrant and send out a police report or gang hit on anyone in the world, (A cruel prank, perhaps, but completely judgement-free now that Ubisoft removed their garish morality bar) which highlights another strength of this game.

The world's AI has been completely overhauled with a range of reaction and interaction both within and outside the control of the player, resulting in a level of open world in-game life I hadn't felt since San Andreas. I never thought I'd dish out such high praise or comparison for a Ubisoft open world, but credit where credit is due; Watch_Dogs 2 does an incredible job making you feel like a mouse pulling apart gears in a clock already rife with rodents. Citizen react differently now, with some coming up to fight you if you piss them off with the new subtle emotions system, and the new enemy AI system is capable of reading combatants other than the player, so when you call an enemy hit on a restricted area, those guards will go to war exclusively with your call-ins creating a dynamic opportunity for distraction. Elegant, rewarding and it works so well!

Speaking of smoothly integrated systems, Watch_Dogs 2 also overhauled the way that online worlds speak to each other, in a manner that also slides in and out. (Provided you have good internet. The stuttering told me pretty definitively whenever my world had a visitor.) Other online players will just slip into your world space without any interaction from them, allowing you to go and team-up with them or just pass like ships in the night. Of course, hacking events and death match encounters are still very much on the table, as well as a bevy of very functional, if basic, multiplayer missions you can take on with an online rando if you so please. And, just like with Watch_Dogs 1, you can still expect to find a surprisingly active community on the PC version. Even today.

The raw gameplay controls are also a area of supreme improvement for the team, ironing out a lot of the movement quirks that Aiden had and making the new protagonist, Marcus, more agile and less sticky to cover. He has a non-lethal stun-gun always equipped allowing for less-violent options at all time for the conscious, and he has a very unique takedown in the form of a pool ball with a bungie cord wrapped around it. Designed to be more 'homemade' and 'resourceful' than the retractable baton of the very brute-force and efficient Aiden but, much as it sounds when you just compare the two, the ball is far more violent. (I seriously have to wonder if Marcus gives brain damage to the people who's head he smashes open with that pool ball.) Marcus has a more dynamic free-run mechanic which has a greater range of surfaces it can launch from and stick to and a greater pool of animations to cover that transition, although the system can be a little overly forgiving at times and have Marcus launch several feet further than he should. It's still a 'paired animation' system however, which means you can't have Marcus backflip off the side of a building unless the game can work out a surface for him to land on at the otherend. (Unless you find a ramp. The game will happily let you kill yourself off any ramp.)

But here's a very strange take from me, even though I recognise that Marcus plays better, and even that the shooting itself feels better, from a very personal level I actually prefer Watch_Dogs 1's gameplay. Perhaps that comes with a genuine disposition towards Watch_Dogs 1's theme, but I find the more clunky, but simultaneously earthy and rigid, gameplay better suited the experience I wanted. Snapping from concrete blocks and wooden slabs with hard running animations whilst bullets strike around you just feels more tense when you lack the mobility to easily run away or climb somewhere the AI will have trouble targeting you. Additionally, Watch_Dogs 1 lacked a lot of the enemy types that Watch_Dogs 2 has, which meant that pretty much every weapon was a deathly instrument. In Watch_Dogs 2, armoured enemies can become absolute sponges even for automatic weapons, which can make gunfights in the late game feel like an absolute chore that demands headshots or nothing. Oh, and I think the developers removed the ability to 'disable' an enemy with a leg shot, which sucks because I really enjoyed doing that so I could later saunter up to the wounded foe and... (Look, i'm a bit of a sadist, okay?)

Entering into the main story, one of the first things I noticed was the character dialogue which seems to walk the very tight line between geeky back-and-forth and 'how do you do, fellow kids' levels of cringe. I can totally understand people who absolutely hate every reference to pop culture this game makes simply for the presentation through which they exposit it. Perhaps this is best exampled actually in the first mission, wherein Marcus has to hack his way through a Blume substation in order to remove his own name and details from the ctOS 2.0 system. When he makes his way to the servers we can hear the members of Dedsec commenting on his progress in the background, and Sitara makes the comment "Nobody's got that far, it's like the secret cow level." Now I think this is an objectively bad line, made simply to acknowledge the existence of Diablo and convey pop awareness. But it's really up to the personal standards of the individual whether this is simply a dud of a line, or an inherently objectional attempt at referential humour. Because I'm more forgiving, I can call this a miss in a script with a few very-light referential hits, but if you hate this kind of writing... then I'm sorry for the game you're going to have to endure.

Pretty much from the get-go Marcus is a more personable and charismatic protagonist than the angst-filled Aiden Pearce; always brimming with personality and enthusiasm for his activism and geekiness. I do wonder if he's a little too cool to be considered 'one of the outcasts' like Dedsec seems themed around, but I understand Ubisoft's approach to make a hard-to-dislike front man through which we can see the world of Dedsec. I do wonder if he's just a little conceptually safe of a hero. Well written and even better performed, mind you; but from a conceptual level he doesn't take a lot of character risks. His arc is very standard, really just following him slowly becoming a leader (although more through the rest of Dedsec's refusal to lead rather than any actual assertiveness on his part) and nothing more substantive than that to be honest.

The framing of the narrative is a lot more freeform than traditional open world narratives, a direction that Ubisoft has become increasingly more praised for leaning towards as it better suits their structure of world design. For Watch_Dogs 2, you're basically told that in order to oppose the new ctOS 2.0 which bloomed after the catastrophic role out of ctOS 1.0, (Which Aiden and the gang turned into silly putty throughout Watch_Dogs 1) Dedsec, through you, needs to target various tech-company partners of ctOS and expose the ways they're exploiting Blume's systems to the detriment of the people; typically through shenanigans which, quite often, shape up as being more pranks than serious activism. (Although you get the chance to go full cyber-terrorist in the late game, don't worry.) With this it might seem that this campaign is going to be totally devoid of personal character attachment, but whilst there certainly is a lot less personally driven connection, even after the midgame twist which attempts to establish some, this narrative isn't devoid of it.

Marcus, for example, was personally effected by ctOS' overzealous profiling systems when it flagged him as a potential threat and preblocked his access to opportunity. Of course...in a way the system was absolutely correct in marking him as a threat, because he goes on to become an FBI most wanted cyber criminal so... actually, everytime in the narrative that Blume attempts to forge something incriminating on Marcus (which happens on three separate occasions because the script writer had a good idea and they weren't letting it lie) the details are eerily on point. They accuse him of terrorism, which he does partake in remotely. Being a public danger, that might be more related to player's actions rather than Marcus' but again, tick. Even him being on the no-flight list seems warranted; I don't think I want a man who could, and just might, crash the whole plane with the press of a button on my flight.

I do quite like the decentralised structure of the narrative where mission threads are tied together only by the organisation you're targeting rather than an overall plot, although that does make it so that the only difference between side missions and main missions is the lack of a cutscene leading into side missions. Also, a lot of the time it can feel like you're somewhat scattergun in your approach, which works well for depicting the actions of a hacktivist collective seeking to shift the tides of public opinion, but less so for building an overarching narrative with a central villainous puppet master behind events. Watch_Dogs 2 does have one of those, but he's so generically designed (in a manner absolutely fitting who he is, though. He's supposed to be interchangeable with any number of top knot wearing Silicon Valley 'yogi's) that you remember his hipster face better than his name. Which is probably the case because the game doesn't even say his name until the second act, when you first meet him your character merely refers to him as 'Blume CTO'. The first time anyone says 'Dusan' I had to forcibly remind myself they were talking about the same guy.

This structure of game also suffers, in my mind, from feeling a lot like Dedsec is a very childish and prank-driven collective, not least of all because their central San Fransisco team is run by a bunker of teenagers. In Watch_Dogs 1 Dedsec was this mysterious and enigmatic faceless organisation which haunted the broadcasts around Chicago. You never got to really see what they were doing or meet them, beyond one encounter with the mask-wearing 'Council of Daves', who were said to be their leaders; but their presence was a shadow on your shoulder for the entire narrative, utterly inescapable. This shift in direction delineates them into a much less imposing social-activism collective with quite a large chunk of ludonarrative dissonance when you take into the account the amount of killing that Marcus in particular performs in order to pull off what are essentially pranks. He breaks into a movie studio with potentially lethal firearms in order to steal a fancy movie prop car and take it for a joy ride; all because the movie studio released a trailer for a bad looking film in which the villains were a badly disguised satire of Dedsec. (Thin skin, much?)

Satire is actually something of a running theme along the disparate plot threads of the game, although unlike with GTA, Watch_Dogs 2 targets very specific real-world parodies to make fun of, which simultaneously makes them more directed by narrowing the scope and opens the opportunity for these plot threads to grow more cringey as they age like milk against the rapidly shifting world. One such hack targets Martin Shkreli, the pharma bro, with a scheme based of his real life purchase of a one-of-the-kind Wu-Tang Clan album. Another mirrors the Sony Pictures emails hack, one attacks Scientology, one where you 'SWAT' someone, (I literally can't remember why) and there's even on mission where you hack into ctOS controlled ATMs and play god with people's back accounts because... actually, I don't even know why you do that last one. What kind of activists screw with ordinary people's livelihoods and call it fun? I mean I don't mind doing that in the game, but I'm inherently amoral; Dedsec are clearly presented as the unimpeachable good guys throughout this narrative, just like Ubisoft always do.

As you perform these hacks and complete missions and side content, you'll earn this game's version of EXP currency known as 'followers'. That's right, you're an influencer. At the beginning of the game it's established that users who follow your antics and start to download your app will be lending their processing power to Dedsec in order to allow them to... well you see it lets them... their hacks get... better? Looks, it's an attempt to add context to the levelling and ability improvement system whilst providing a bare basic justification for the unfocused questlines the game frames itself around. I appreciate the attempt, inelegance be damned, and thus find the RPG-light system acceptable, if still devoid of intrinsic depth and fulfilment. I at least wanted to go down the unlock tree to get certain power-ups, because hacking in this game is so fun and free-form.

It was as I was approaching about the midgame that I started to notice a problem that wasn't inherent to me when I started playing the game, and it was around the stealth. Now Watch_Dogs 2 improves a lot on the first game when it comes to the range of tactics available to you in stealth, namely through the RC Jumper and the Drone. (Ubisoft was really big into drones at this point; every one of their games had to have a drone in it somewhere.) The drone gives you air coverage but no interaction, and the Jumper remote car allows you to enter small spaces in the environment and finagle your way to key points in the environment that you need to interact with. Like the new Blume wall-stations that are a reoccurring road-block to progression you'll find scattered throughout the world space. The RC Jumper pretty much makes it feasible for you to infiltrate a building without ever stepping foot in it at all, with minimal risk because even if you are spotted, enemies have a hard time pinning the rogue RC car on an infiltrator in the neighbourhood. (They typically just try to smash the car.)

But around the midpoint I started to realise that the RC Jumper wasn't just a cool alternative to in-person stealth activity. I think it was implemented in order to try and patch an stealth system that the team broke. Watch_Dogs 1's stealth works pretty much as you would expect, AI routes and stealth takedowns, functional and fun. Watch_Dogs 2 has that basic front, but the AI has this bizarre hive mind so that if you pop out to shoot any enemy, unless you kill them the very second they spot you- their acknowledgement of your existence is instantly broadcast to every enemy in the area. They don't need to open their mouths and say anything, merely know that you're there. It makes stealth increadibly annoying as it eliminates all margin for error; which is made worse by the fact that silenced weapons can set off guards too. (I don't know why the team decided to get realistic with silenced weapons not being silent.) It all comes together to make in-person stealth feel too fragile and not fun to risk with.

By the late game, at the start of the third act, you get you're absolutely proto-typical moment where the bottom falls out from Dedsec and it feels like the team have lost everything. It turns out your enemy was one step ahead and a lot of your followers were actually bots this whole time! Marcus becomes a wanted man (like he should have been this whole time for the amount of actionable crimes he's committed) and the team of teens teeters on the edge of falling apart completely. The thing is, I don't buy it. Any of it, really. Least of all the public suddenly turning on Dedsec and calling them liars. Why? No literally; what has Dedsec lied about? Do people think they intentionally inflated their own follower count with bots? Because even if they did, why would the general public care one way or the other about the follower numbers of their favourite hacktivists? I thought that number was only important to the team for leeched processing power? It's a very clunky aspect of the game that was introduced only because the most basic list of the three-act structure demanded it. But it was an excuse for T-Bone to intersect himself into the narrative, so there's that.

T-Bone has pretty much no real purpose in the final act of the game beyond introducing the idea of the Bellweather, Blume's predictive behavioural algorithms they use to manipulate the will of the public by subtly influencing the flow of data. (It's literally just Arsenal Gear from Metal Gear Solid 2; well done Ubisoft, you copied Metal Gear.) But the narrative does become more focused and progressive during this third act and as such some of the operations have really memorable set-piece moments. The FBI arc is almost all really fun siege-style missions and the Congressman penthouse infiltration from the E3 trailer, whilst unnecessarily filled with contextually out-of-place exposition, (You'd have thought they would have rewrote it after it served it's purpose as an E3 set piece) is still a big and badass mission.

And then there's the robot spider. I guess I have to apologise a little bit for my raging about the wasted development time of Watch_Dogs 1's digital trips, because it came home to roost with the giant war spider robot from this one Watch_Dogs 2 mission. I'm not sure if we can say all of that development was justified for this one set-piece; but it is one absolutely sick set piece moment where you can crawl up walls and fire mounted miniguns as a giant metal spider. Which kind of makes up for the final mission of the game being an absolutely boring by-the-numbers infiltration with a tiny enemy rush at the end. I seriously don't know what Ubisoft were thinking to have the final mission be so dull after all that ramp up. It was seriously a let down for me. 

Summary

 Watch_Dogs 2 is one of those classic instances where the sequel improves upon the original in just about every single way with the exception, in my opinion, of tonality and story. I know that Ubisoft were very much still trying to find their voice with Watch_Dogs 2, but I can't help but wonder if they ended up taking the easy route instead of the more interesting one. Some of the punky anti-establishment flair can feel synthetic and performative, and the hacktivists angle of the characters really highlights the dissonance between the freedom of the gameplay and the staunch moralist values that Ubisoft insists on promoting throughout their properties. Still, I'd be a fool not to acknowledge that Watch_Dogs 2 corrects most every major mistake of the first (even if it does make it's own new mistakes) and thus is finally worth my implicit recommendation alongside the arbitrary rating of B- Grade in my scaling list. Now all that's left to see is if Watch_Dogs' return to grit in Legion is as far a step forward as 2 was for 1. Early impressions- I'm not exactly positive it is... (Update: The review isn't coming. After 8 hours of play Legion decided it didn't want to run for me anymore. I've given up on it.)