WATCH DOGS: LEGION
Oscar Taylor-Kent sets his hacker phone to (electrically) stun
We only review finished games, so in Viewpoint we go hands-on with near-final code of a game that just missed our review deadline. Oscar Taylor-Kent jumps into the first four hours of Watch Dogs: Legion after putting many tens of hours into the first two games in the series.
Yes, I get a sinking feeling at Watch Dogs: Legion’s ‘cheeky’heavy Mockney slang. But for the most part this game recognises London’s diversity, and there’s a gleeful uncanniness to its representation of the city – I keep shouting “I’ve been there!” at the screen, whether it’s strolling through Embankment or riding a motorbike along the Thames’ public footpaths. Things like delivery drones whizzing overhead and holographic projections of National History Museum exhibits add a nice futuristic edge.
Less believable is the intense tonal whiplash. The game jumps from cheeky bants and comedy robot AI to themes such as slavery and the harvesting of undocumented immigrants’ organs at the drop of a Beefeater’s bearskin. This grimy future London is grim compared to Watch Dogs 2’s fun, vibrant San Francisco (which sent up the city’s startup culture marvellously), though there’s a glimmer of hope in the likes of our lively hacker friends like northern lass Nowt.
FUTURE PLANS
Legion seems to have more in common with the first Watch Dogs in terms of tone and mechanics. Some changes feel like a step back from Watch Dogs 2. For example, you’re no longer able to pop in earbuds as you stroll around the city (you’re limited to listening to music in-vehicle or hearing it playing in the world around you), nor are hacking hotswaps as readily available on the D-pad, resulting in the stealth being a tad more clunky.
There’s a reason for this less immediate fluidity, however. Here you have the option to play as many characters, so the game isn’t built around just one control scheme. Theoretically, anyone is a potential DedSec recruit, willing to help you liberate London from Albion’s high-tech control – as long as you complete their recruitment mission after profiling them.
Skills are all accessed via the D-pad, and some characters’ are customised – they might have the ability to access a spider-bot, access to handcuffs for detaining enemies, or the ability to use a wrench for melee combat. They could even have risk/reward aspects like being stronger at the cost of potentially dying at any time. And death means they’re gone gone. Forever. Get arrested or hospitalised? Then that character will be unavailable for a while, unless you speed up their release by recruiting a nurse, solicitor, or maybe a police officer. Though we will say, we don’t come close to encountering those situations playing on the default difficulty. Encounter it too often and it might become annoying; too infrequently and you might end up wondering what the point was.
FACE OFF
The scope of available characters has the potential to create interesting situations. One mission requires us to infiltrate a police station, so we stop off to recruit a police officer who can suit up, increasing the time it takes to alert guards in the area. Social stealth is a nice addition to the series, though we’ve yet to be sold on how much it really adds.
Not all playstyles are created equal: the equivalent to Watch Dogs 2’s RC Jumper, the spider-drone, can incapacitate enemies at a touch of r, making short work of some zones. Combine it with the rideable cargo drone that some characters can summon, and you can literally hover over some early exterior objectives and drop a spider-bot near the end, safe in the knowledge you’re unreachable. We love that you can clear areas just by hacking, but the lack of fluidity compared to Watch Dogs 2, and the overpowered nature of some of the new skills, takes away the feeling of finesse – though this could absolutely change as we tackle more complex missions.
We can’t help but miss Marcus and the rest of Watch Dogs 2’s DedSec. You can recruit pretty much any character in London, but because of that many feel flat. Marcus was a lovable, nerdy goofball who had to deal with unwarranted profiling as a black man in modern America – how are we meant to connect in the same way to a random former policeman who longs for “the normal conflicts between police and citizens”? Forging a connection with a character through play still requires us to care about them, and we can’t help feeling we could find another with the same skillset and not shed a tear, whereas the more interesting characters remain unplayable because they necessitate plot armour.
“WE HAD FUN HACKING THROUGH MISSIONS AS WE SAW FIT, BUT CAN’T HELP FEELING LIKE THIS MIGHT MISS THE HIGHS OF WATCH DOGS 2, AND ITS CHARACTER SYSTEM COULD FALL FLAT.”
We’ll have our full, in-depth review of Watch Dogs: Legion in our next issue.