Watch Dogs: Legion Review
“You got a license for that phone?”
Watch Dogs: Legion marks the third installment of what I refer to as the “magic-wand-phone stealth/action/adventure” game series. The first game follows the story of Aiden Pierce, a rogue hacker trying to take down a gang that killed his niece. From there, we get Watch Dogs 2, which upends the dark nature of the first game in favor of something a bit more comical, whimsical, and lighthearted.
You play as Marcus Holloway, another rogue hacker who was framed by the ever-present CTOS system for a crime he didn’t commit, and proceed to hack the world with the techy hacker equivalent of the Scooby-Doo gang. Watch Dogs: Legion, however, tries to blend the two genres, tying the game up with a bow labeled “Play As Anyone.”
Normally, I don’t buy games the day they launch. I’ve known too many people to preorder things and get burned upon launch, like when Assassin’s Creed Unity and the PC launch of Batman: Arkham Knight both turned out to be glitchy messes.
However, the one concept that made me want to buy on day one was the ability to play as any NPC. Instead of following a normal game structure where you have a single (typically male) protagonist, you can play as anyone in the game world of Watch Dogs: Legion, aside from a few key narrative characters.
Through the course of my playthrough and my recollections of experience with the game, I wanted to find out if Watch Dogs: Legion is worth the $60 asking price.
The Story
Watch Dogs: Legion takes place in a near-future version of London, which has effectively become a surveillance state. Cameras and drones are everywhere and after the main hacker group DedSec was framed for a series of terrorist bombings in the city, a private security company, Albion, was hired to control the masses.
Your job, as a member of the DedSec group, is to fight and hack your way into Albion, take down some crime rings, and figure out who coordinated the bombings in the first place to reestablish DedSec’s good name. You do this by recruiting NPCs to DedSec after profiling them with your aforementioned “magic wand phone.”
The “Play as Anyone” Mechanic
Each NPC has their own unique set of skills, personalities, and assets to help in the fight against Albion. By acquiring the “Deep Profiler” perk on the upgrades section, you can go deeper into each NPC’s life, tailing them at certain times of the day or helping them accomplish some goal so they change their opinion of DedSec.
Once an NPC has a positive opinion of your group, you have the option of recruiting them and gain the ability to play as them, unique dialogue and skills included. Although you can recruit anyone, including members of enemy factions, it has its limitations.
You can only recruit 15 NPCs before the game tells you your roster is full, meaning you can cut and add members as you find better replacements. Or, if you have permadeath turned on, you can intentionally kill the NPC you don’t want anymore.
Profiling NPCs gives some brief information about their job, their income, access to certain facilities, and potential weapons they have. You’ll find some valuable NPCs in your playthrough with access to great weapons, vehicles, or disguises, and you can find NPCs with no skills or have traits like gas, hiccups, or limited mobility that affect their stealth.
Just because you can recruit anyone doesn’t mean you should.
Issues with Playing as Anyone
In my playthrough, I ended up recruiting a bunch of NPCs whose skills I thought I’d need later: a barrister to get my team members out of jail quickly, a paramedic to speed up the recovery process, a bare-knuckle boxer to help with combat. But the thing is, I rarely ever used these characters and ended up switching between two that I had a liking towards — Keela Kennedy, a construction worker with access to a massive construction drone and a pipe wrench for melee combat, and Anthony Browne, a Jamaican Albion employee with a retractable baton similar to the one Aiden Pierce used in the first game.
When you have a game where you can play as anyone, it’s hard to get attached to characters or build a story out of them. I found myself sticking to Keela primarily because her voice was something consistent I could hear in the story compared with constantly switching NPCs.
While the NPCs have modulated and randomized voices to appear as though each one has their own unique background, sometimes the randomization can be jarring. Twice in my playthrough, I came across NPCs that had voices that didn’t match their appearance or age at all. The first was a young woman with the voice of an old woman, and the second was a white woman with an Indian accent.
When you recruit an NPC, you’ll hear the same dialogue given by your character when accepting them into your group, which takes you out of the illusion that the person you’re playing as isn’t an NPC. It reminds me of Skyrim when you’d repeatedly talk to an NPC and eventually you’d get one of two dialogue responses, “Need something?” and “Hmm?”
Gameplay and Other Issues
The developers at Ubisoft must have had a passion for drones and spider bots because half of the main missions and a lot of side missions have you using those tools to complete them. In fact, it’s impossible to complete certain sections of the game without a drone or spider bot, so the game provides you with access to those things even if you don’t have one equipped.
You use spider bots and drones to access places you wouldn’t normally have access to, like vents into a building or windows to fly through. The spider bot and drone can also perform limited combat abilities, taking out enemies either through an attached gun or by crawling on their faces and shocking them unconscious, like a face-hugger from Alien.
Gameplay revolves around your chosen NPC of the hour sneaking into and hacking different locations for incriminating data, as well as engaging in combat with enemies. At the beginning of the game, your AI assistant, Bagley, tells you that DedSec only kills as a last resort, which doesn’t quite add up to what you can do, including recruiting someone with access to a grenade launcher, LMG, nail gun or hacking a turret to shoot live rounds at its allies.
Compared with the other entries in the series, it feels similar enough and easy to get into once you’ve memorized the control scheme, though it still doesn’t feel right to reload with the triangle button on PS4. Enemies pull no punches, and if you get cornered, you’ll likely die within a matter of seconds.
While I was able to complete the main story, I wasn’t able to complete certain side missions because the game kept glitching either during or after I performed the required actions to complete the missions. Hackable objects became unhackable and a bare-knuckle boxing challenge became moot after the screen wouldn’t advance after I knocked out the final contestant.
The two currency systems in the game seem arbitrary and shoehorned in. The first, ETO, is a cryptocurrency that can be used for buying clothing and serves no other purpose. In previous entries, you could buy vehicles to access as well as clothes, so it made more sense to have a cash reward at the end of missions. I purchased clothes maybe 4 or 5 times in the game and had over 70,000 ETO by the end of my playthrough.
The second currency, Tech Points, can be collected by finding hidden areas and picking it up. Tech Points are used to upgrade your hacking abilities and weapons arsenal, making them extremely useful but strange given you have to explore to get them rather than earning skill upgrades through a traditional experience points system. I forgot about tech points and upgrading my abilities about halfway through my playthrough because I had unlocked all the hacking abilities I needed.
Final Thoughts
Watch Dogs: Legion is a game with an interesting “play as anyone” core gameplay mechanic, but it falls short of what a successful game like this could be. Jarring voice lines that don’t match the character, a variety of playable NPCs, consistent glitches on certain missions, and a strange obsession with spider bots make this game feel like a quick holiday season cash grab from the studio that brought us Assassin’s Creed.
That being said, I admire Ubisoft for their endeavors to create a game where every NPC is playable. It’s the first of its kind in the gaming industry and is limited by the technology and game development cycles of our time. We’ll likely see other games come out that run with this concept and create something far more convincing as technology progresses but in its current state, it’s a gameplay gimmick that has its pros and cons.
Watch Dogs: Legion isn’t worth the $60 asking price or even the $50 asking price I got from purchasing it at Walmart. It is a game worth exploring for the concept, but with the glaring issues it currently has, it isn’t worth a try until it goes on sale with the upcoming DLC included.
