Perhaps the only thing good Ubisoft Toronto’s fictional, near-future city of London has going for it is that it doesn’t have the coronavirus! However, it’s got its mind on a few other issues — mainly the fact that it’s become a military-run police state populated by cameras and algorithms watch your every move. Oh, did I mention there’s also a gang harvesting organs from the National Health System and an anarchist hacker group out to mess with everyone’s day? Well, there’s that too!
Watch Dogs: Legion is one of the most-hyped games of the year, and it absolutely deserves all that attention. On the whole, Watch Dogs Legion, much like CTOS, improves upon its earlier versions. But not unlike a data mining programming package put into cars, houses and street cameras, it suffers greatly from its overeager attitude.
The future feels like it’s right now
One of the things I’m quite enjoying about Watch Dogs Legion is that although it takes place in a 2020 London where technology has been allowed to flourish thanks in large part to the fact that there are no user agreements, while wonderful and futuristic, it’s mostly stuff that we already have — even if it isn’t quite at the level of detail, it is in the game.
London’s backwards streets are populated by self-driving cars that still cause accidents. Cell phones are only screens at this point. London is decorated by large scale holograms projected from grand projectors. Drones now handle everything from TV filming and delivery to full-on construction. It’s all rather fantastical but still rooted in what’s possible — which is key to the best speculative fiction!
Perhaps the best of this technology is Bagley. Bagley functions as one of two set in stone members of DedSec — the other being his programmer, Sabine. Oh, that’s right! Bagley is actually a modified version of Blume’s new A.I. virtual assistant. Think what if Janet from the “Good Place” were a crass-mouthed man from Bristol who resembled Stephen Merchant. Now that last part is just my own imagination because Bagley is simply a holographic blue Blume logo who drifts apart and comes back together as he speaks, but he is absolutely the best part of the game.
In the real world, A.I. assistants are still pretty static, and that’s what makes Bagley so fantastic. In a game where you can literally play as any character you happen to come by, you need a strong lead character who can keep things held together, and that’s Bagley. Did I mention he’s also quite strongly mouthed? I mean, he’ll call people a cunt enough to make Billy Butcher blush! He also shows little remorse for operatives who find themselves dead — speaking of which, let’s talk about Play as Anyone.
Play as Anyone
What I believe I should bring up first — and is likely the very reason you are reading this review — is the Play as Anyone mechanic.
Watch Dogs as a series, has come a long way from the days of playing as Aiden Pierce in the original game set in the Windy City — and nowhere is that made more apparent than in DeadSec.
In Chicago, DedSec was the hilariously named Council of Dads… I mean Daves… Yeah, those stern wankers who wore ski masks and didn’t work nicely with Aiden Pearce or Clara. In fact, they only really appeared in the end game and Bad Blood DLC. And even then, they only briefly worked with Raymond Kenny out of a need to when one of their own betrayed them. It’s quite possible that this partnership saved Aiden’s life, but they seldom did anyone any favours.
Flash forward to San Fransico, and DeadSec became a motley crew of personable-yet-dorky creatives and hackers working to separate authoritarianism from start-up bro culture.
In London, we are only briefly introduced to a few key members — bar one, who becomes our guide — of DeadSec London before we are tasked with building our cast of operatives.
So, does the Play as Anyone mechanic actually work? For the most part, it’s all well and good! Narratively, Ubisoft Toronto does a bang-on job of explaining how it’s become that DeadSec London is comprised of whomever you chose it to be. But when it comes to gameplay use, this is where things start to get rough.
Citizens of London are all boiled down to different combinations of the same core mechanics. Meaning that before long, you’ll start finding that characters become little more than a skill set you play well with and an appearance you find charming.
When you pair this with the perma-death mechanic that is optional, what you get is a revolving door of, “Well, it was nice knowing you!” It’s here where Watch Dogs: Legion grows to be too ambitious.
Welcome to DedSec
Although citizens have personal profiles, they are made up of little more than bullet points about their pasts and one-liners traded with your sassy, properly British Blume A.I. companion named Bagley. Unlike in something like, say, Mass Effect — where you develop relationships with a condensed cast who are gone when they die in the famous suicide missions — I felt little if any connection to my DedSec London Operatives. If they died — few did — I said to myself, “Well, that’s bullocks! I guess I’ll go find an attractive bloke with the same skills and have at ‘er again!”
Yet another negative — in proper Ubisoft fashion — is that the recruitment process is over-ambitious in that there are so many people to find and recruit. Still, only a handful of missions you can undertake to get them. For example, I’ve received many of my operatives by undertaking the same task where a friend of theirs needs a drug they aren’t getting. So I offer to help by breaking into the NHS server, locating a shipment, going to collect the ambulance it’s in and then driving that to meet the perspective operative. I fully appreciate that there’s only so much you can do in level design, but, the repetition hurts!
You only walk so that the Spiderbot can crawl
Well, let’s get back to positives, shall we? Watch Dogs Legion — thanks to the aforementioned Play as Anyone mechanic — excels at letting players pick exactly how they want to approach a mission. Go in with an operative wearing the situationally-required construction worker, medical professional, police or Albion uniform equipped, and you’ll be able to use stealth to avoid conflict. Take in a hacker, and you’ll find new opportunities for solving your problems using technology. Or just shoot everyone and hope you haven’t upset anyone you had your eye on recruiting.
However, there’s one unit you can almost always use that eliminates the need for a DedSec operative almost entirely: Tidus’ Spiderbot! After having been teased and thoroughly enjoyed during a mission in Watch Dog 2, the Spiderbot makes its full-fledged appearance in Watch Dogs: Legion.
While you can control drones and utilize an arsenal of tech abilities to solve your problems, the now miniature Spiderbot solves pretty much any situation. When fully upgraded, the Spiderbot becomes a fast and temporarily invisible monster of mass destruction that can perform the hacks and collectable pickups your operatives can. It can take down enemies using a non-lethal stun to the face. It can become a stun bomb by sending it running at enemies trying to shut it down and exploding in their vicinity if things go wrong.
And while I’m quite enjoying using the Spiderbot, my problem with it is that it almost seems more useful than my whole team of characters and slightly less annoying to lose! Because if it gets destroyed, I get another one as soon as my cooldown timer is done ticking.
Fancy new fisticuffs
Watch Dogs: Legion has completely altered the whole Grand Theft Auto kill, kill, kill mentality that has permeated the series throughout its existence. There’s a sort of morality system where the choices you make as to whether or not to kill someone determines how Londoners react to DeadSec. For example, kill the Albion agent boyfriend of a master hacker, and chances are she’s likely to hate DedSec. Meaning, you will need to do more to prove to her the cause is worth supporting. The game employs you with plenty of non-lethal ways to handle yourself. Surprisingly, it also delivers a hand-to-hand combat system of punches, kicks, counters, defence-breaks and dodges akin to Batman: Arkham Knight.
For a rather imposing shadow military that’s perfectly content with beating up random passersby on the street, Albion is quite relaxed when it comes to challenging you. So long as you don’t pull a gun, adversaries are highly unlikely to shoot at you. However, they still might choose to — especially when a drone has spotted you! Still, you’ll be aptly warned that a gun is about to be used by a red indicator announcing a gun is being pulled and from what direction. Most enemies will engage you in a brawl where the loser requires medical assistance and is thus out of commission for a short time. It’s a mechanic that has no business working as well as it does and feels quite foreign in the Watch Dogs universe, but it feels great!
Different setting, same story
Watch Dogs: Legion’s London is huge and consists of several of the city and surrounding area’s boroughs that you are tasked with liberating à la Far Cry 5 and any of the Assassin’s Creed games. The reward for freeing these boroughs is a special character who has a unique appearance and a better skill set. However, the process of liberating boroughs is an annoying mix of completing the same handful of tasks, meeting with a disgruntled local who suggests a way to free the people and then you go about completing an uninspired mission centred up a landmark in that part of town. This proved to be so unenjoyable that I have pretty much given up on freeing the boroughs at this point.
Future Benchmarks
Now, there’s probably something you are all thinking about discussing before we head off our own ways and that’s how Watch Dogs: Legion leaves things for the next generation of gaming. I’ve been playing the game on my PC which is currently running a 9th gen i7 and Nvidia 2060 and man am I starting to feel like I’m going to be left behind. While Ubisoft Toronto has promised that the experience on next-gen consoles will be optimized to ensure you can activate ray tracing, it’s clear that the PC version is meant to be enjoyed on the 30 series of graphics cards.
This is actually the first game I’ve played with Nvidia RTX lighting, ray tracing and water details built right into the graphics menu. Trust me, you want the RTX settings on — especially when it comes to how much rain there is in London! The amount of detail in the puddles leading up to parliament was insane. And the way my character’s skin glistened with a sheen of rainwater was a chef’s kiss moment. I have no doubts at all that this is how Ubisoft Toronto intends me to see London. Sadly, I was able to turn RTX settings to low playing in 2K with my graphics on medium, but I was still only hitting 20FPS. While a rainy day in Westminster was pretty to look at, it was way too slow! Since the Day One patch went live earlier today, I’ve been able to crank out a solid 30FPS with RTX settings on low and graphics on high while playing at 1080P. But I turned RTX off as I much prefer to play in 2K on High with a solid 30FPS.
Let’s talk about mechanical bugs that aren’t Spiderbots
While I can’t state enough how much I’m enjoying my time in London, things haven’t been all bliss. Until the Day One patch went live for reviewers, I had been dealing with a glitch where the audio of characters and collectables would fade in and out in large sections. This made it very hard to follow the story to the point where I’m considering restarting the game after this review is done just in case I’ve missed anything.
I’ve also had a number of glitches where things have failed to render correctly. I booted the game up one time and found that my character had quite comically become a floating gun and nothing else. During one Bare Knuckle Leauge brawl, an opponent lit a smoke and went to take a drag only to have it land in her nose instead of her mouth. I walked past a doctor on her lunch break in front of a hospital, eating from a very recycled looking box of fries that were floating above her hand.
In a world as big as this, I don’t expect perfect, but I do expect polish and that’s where I think delaying the game may have benefit Watch Dogs: Legion. We’re at a time where delays are now to be expected and to that degree, I would have rather waited another six months and seen all these small annoyances be addressed by the development team.
Verdict
Watch Dogs: Legion suffers painfully from what I like to call the “Curse of Conformity.” By that, I mean that it is far more significant than it needs to be — and overly complex. While Play as Anyone works, the characters the game uses to tell its story feel like the British spin-off of an American show. While the ability to choose how I approach missions has improved, there are more ways than necessary to solve problems, and some of them, like the Spiderbot, are overpowered enough that they more than do the trick!
As it drags on, you’ll find that it has the same things to say and do over and over again. I’m trying to think of a way to put this, and all I can really say is that you meet someone and he’s all like, “Hi, I’m Dave! Fancy taking down Albion with me? Great, steal an armoured car then! What, you did that already?! Why not do it again only this time with your old buddy Dave!” All this after I did the same thing recently with another guy named Richard. It all becomes a little mind-bogglingly repetitive.
This is all not to say I haven’t immensely enjoyed Watch Dogs: Legion. It’s visually and interactively ahead of its time in the way London was during the Industrial Revolution.
Quite similarly, it’s brilliance is hidden behind a fair amount of smog.
[A copy of the game was provided by the publisher for review purposes.]
