Watch Dogs: Legion review: A meaningless mob, with mostly merry mayhem

Hacky hacker tropes

The plot of Watch Dogs: Legion plays out like a grab bag of tech-dystopian tropes drawing vague inspiration from today's tech headlines. Name an issue that a technology ethicist has written about, and it's probably represented in one of the lightly intertwined storylines here. Ubiquitous surveillance! Digital blackmail! Digitized brains! Unaccountable, autonomous drone murders! AIs taking all the jobs! Weaponization of the news media!

Most of these subjects require a light touch, and there are a few instances where it's used (most notably in some of the insurrectionist podcasts found hidden throughout the map). But Legion's plotting much more often falls on the blunt side of the seesaw.

Characters are constantly going off on expository rants about just how bad things are in a society where your every action is monitored by paramilitary groups without any effective oversight. "Fuck... this is a dystopian nightmare, right?" one character in my game said, putting perhaps too fine a point on it.

Occasionally, the game tries to make vague gestures toward moral ambiguity, attempting to give the antagonists some believable backstory or motivation for their overtly authoritarian impulses. In the end, though, they always devolve into scenery-chewing villains, making cartoonishly evil pronouncements and baldly power-hungry actions. Any feints toward the ethical quandaries of balancing security and convenience with privacy and independence are pushed aside for the moral clarity of the "honorable" freedom-loving hackers of Dedsec against a set of unsympathetic antagonists.

Brilliant locales and dumb enemies

If you can get past the blunt plot motivations, though, there's some fun to be had in Watch Dogs: Legion's open world. This is a beautiful and detailed miniature recreation of London, thriving with life and full of interesting architecture to explore. One of the game's greatest joys is simply hijacking an (incredibly easy-to-steal) car and using the in-game GPS to drive to the next point of interest, taking in impromptu protests or creative government propaganda while listening to an excellent soundtrack ranging from classical music to modern British rap.

While the map quickly fills up with missions in true Ubisoft fashion, most boil down to the same thing: sneak into a secure facility, use your hacking abilities to avoid detection and/or take out the guards, then get to point X on your mini-map and use some magical hacking abilities to steal the next plot point.

These infiltration missions are hurt by some painfully bad AI. Enemy soldiers march dutifully back and forth in extremely simple patterns, often staring at random walls and waiting for you to sneak up and take them out. Other times they'll spot you and give chase for about five steps before giving up the search shortly after you duck behind a pillar (where you recover from gunshot wounds extremely quickly, robbing these scenes of much of their tension).

Armed guards will often inexplicably engage in some (extremely basic) hand-to-hand combat rather than pulling out a gun and shooting at you. Also inexplicably, they always seem too busy with this ersatz boxing match to call for backup or even yell for nearby help. And then there are the too-frequent situations where enemies just glitch out, getting stuck in structures or hovering inexplicably in mid-air without warning (Ubisoft says it has "a patch planned for November 9 that looks to fix a number of issues that some may have encountered").

Hacking magic

As in previous Watch Dogs games, your phone still feels like an overly powerful magic wand. With the tap of a button, it lets you distract or disable guards, set up explosive traps from afar, or just surveil the room ahead through CCTV cameras. Once you've gathered enough "tech points" to hijack an anti-terrorism drone and use it against your opponents, you start to feel a little bad for the opposition.

Don't get me wrong, it's often fun to feel like a techno-wizard who can single-handedly take out a well-guarded facility with a few carefully crafted hacks. I particularly enjoyed sneaking up on enemies with a vent-crawling spider-bot, or descending on them hilariously from above in a hacked cargo drone. And there are enough mini-games and collectible fetch-quests to keep a determined player busy for quite a while.

Overall, though, the game starts to wear out its welcome well before you run out of things to do. There's only so many times you can sneak into yet another secure facility, take out the same stupid guards, and engage in the same basic hacking minigames before it begins to get a little tiresome. And despite the game's best attempts to dress up the missions with a variety of tech buzzwords and character motivations, the overly blunt story isn't really enough to drive the action after a while.

In the end, the London of Watch Dogs: Legion feels a mile wide but only a few feet deep. What promises to be endless variety in character choice and hack-driven gameplay options quickly boils down to the repetition of the same-old gameplay and plot tropes.

The good

• "Recruit anyone" mechanic leads to an extremely varied cast of characters.
• Explore a beautifully detailed and lively recreation of London.
• Hacking powers make you feel like a powerful techno-wizard.

The bad

• Character motivations require a large suspension of disbelief.
• Overly tropey plot with scenery-chewing villains.
• Extremely dumb enemy AI plagued by semi-frequent glitches.
• Infiltration missions can start to feel repetitive.

The ugly

• Failing a mission by accidentally blowing up the ambulance I was supposed to steal.

The Verdict: Try it.