I was quite intrigued by the recruit anyone concept, but the way it works here is terrible. It makes no sense that you walk up to any rando and go, "You seem upset" and everyone's response is "You're DedSec right? Can you go destroy this box over here?". Every random janitor, cashier, stock broker, construction worker, whoever instantly identifies you as DedSec? Its that easy? Then somehow everyone has a convenient problem for you to solve that boils down to go to a building and destroy a box or download files from somewhere. And after you do like 3-4 recruitments, these missions repeat. Often sending you to literally the same location to do the exact same thing you did before, only with everything reset. And you do this one thing and these people are instantly ready to uproot their lives, join basically a terrorist organization and ready to commit major crimes for you including mass murder. They suddenly become loyal, hardcore DedSec members capable of hacking, sneaking, murdering with no issues and start recruiting for the cause. And we are not worried about just bringing in so many people on such flimsy reasons, never thinking that any of them could just go report us to the authorities?

Even if I can get over all this, I soon started questioning why am I bothering recruiting these people with supposed special skills? The quickest, easiest and most convenient way to do anything is to just go in, shoot up the place, complete your objective and walk out. There are no consequences for murdering large swaths of people at a time, the characters don't seem to acknowledge what they are doing. Shoot up a police station and follow it up with, "Yeah that was banging, mate!". So why would I not just select a character that is capable of combat rather than try to slowly walk through a facility as an Albion guard or something, or worse, someone who is only carrying a taser where you are forced into combat at the slightest thing anyway. There are so many missions that seem like you need to just sneak around and steal something, but then they are like, "Watch out, bunch of enemies about to attack you". Why wouldn't I have someone with an assault rifle for everything when this happens rather than some DJ who can stun people or something? There should have been consequences to killing people. I realize this is an issue in all the Watch Dogs games, but its a big reason why I disliked WD2 and specially this. At least in WD1, Aiden was portrayed as a loose cannon, accepting that he is a vigilante outlaw type and not pretending that he is just a hacker with a heart of gold just having a good time. Marcus' crew and specially the people in Legion just mass murdering people and then cracking "hilarious" jokes is so distracting.

I feel like the game's recruit anyone concept could have worked, if there was a main character with proper motivations and goals doing the recruiting. And not just recruit anyone for one 5 minute task and then shelve them for the rest of the game or something. It should have been something like you find someone you need that has a problem you could help solve. Solve that problem and in exchange they will do a one time favour for you using their special skills. Not just join these supposed secret underground hacker group on the flimsiest of causes. It would be cool if you needed to do this cause shooting up Scotland Yard has actual consequences, story and character wise.

WD1 is still by far the best because as ridiculous as the whole concept is, I could at least accept Aiden being a murdering vigilante. I wish the characters would take what they are doing in these games seriously, cause hacking everyone and specially shooting up hundreds of people should have some weight and not just elicit a "Haha how cool are we bros!" reactions from supposed hearts of gold hackers.