Watch Dogs: Legion
PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, Xbox Series
How do you pick the perfect protagonist for a city as diverse as London? Legion’s answer is to let you choose, giving you the power to recruit anyone you see into hacker outfit DedSec, with different recruits bringing different perks (or drawbacks) to the team. It’s the one part of this hi-tech dystopia that feels brand new: you can cast what is – depressingly – the most multicultural triple-A game ever. Hated the young cast of the last game? Build an army of pensioners. Perhaps it’s more a triumph of production budgets, strong writing, and endless voice-acting sessions than a step forward for the genre, but it’s still incredible in motion.
It doesn’t take long to form a crew, and this Orwellian nightmare is initially the funniest sandbox since Saints Row 4. NHS workers commit stealth takedowns with defibrillators, your AI companion has a gift for a quip, and some of the language coming out of London’s NPCs (well, PCs) is frequently laugh-out-loud funny. We’re not often this delighted by a game calling us a wasteman.
But they’ve got nothing on our choice of words when we realise how little this evolves Watch Dogs’ best ideas, even dropping some entirely. To upgrade our abilities, we’re back to hunting for icons on a minimap – and Watch Dogs 2’s addition of earbuds and selectable music tracks is gone, Legion instead insisting you be in a vehicle to listen to a random selection of songs you can only skip through one at a time. That’s the only incentive to get behind the wheel as the authorities are unbelievably easy to evade. We’ve never felt more optimistic about living in a police state.
Texting guards to distract them and marking enemies with security cameras is fun, but it’s the same fun we had four years ago in San Francisco, and now with fewer variants. Pipe Mania-esque hacking is as asinine as ever. Repetitiveness sets in swiftly, not helped by the narrative becoming more self-serious and occasionally tasteless. At one point you talk a police officer out of arresting a criminal and into shooting them instead.
Guns remain the dullest part of a Watch Dogs game not starring Aiden Pearce. Clearly the game wants you to recruit an army with varying skillsets. But switching in uniformed recruits who can access secure areas is simply Hitman with extra steps. Recruitment missions are just long enough (and start to repeat sooner than you’d like) to put you off experimenting. And in a city where anyone is playable, character behaviours feel more generic than ever, leading to London feeling more like a blank thoroughfare than a real place to explore. Much has been sacrificed in service of making a brilliant central concept work, then – and yet it’s the very thing robbing Legion of any star quality.