Watch Dogs Legion hit at a weird time, releasing for PS4 just a few weeks before next-gen consoles launched, with a free next-gen upgrade available once the new consoles were out. The ambitious new Ubisoft title almost begs for next-gen, allowing you to recruit literally any NPC in the sprawling London map to become a playable character (can we still call them NPCs at this point?). But despite the power and capabilities of the PS5, Watch Dogs Legion feels stuck betwixt console generations, unable to ever break free of that traditional “Ubisoft open-world” formula despite its novel concept and advancements.
At its core, Watch Dogs Legion is a Watch Dogs game. The general open-world gameplay, hacking, and gunplay will feel familiar to anyone who’s played the past two games. What’s new here is the idea that London faces a not-so-farfetched dystopian occupation, so the hacker resistance group DeadSec needs to stir the pot that is beginning to boil within the city and recruit citizens—anybody and everybody—to rise up against the evil corporation Albion.
Each citizen has different skills that can either aid in gameplay or benefit your resistance team. Medical characters might drop the amount of time your characters spend off their feet after an injury. Someone in law could lower jail times for captured resistance members. Still others will have skills like faster hack times, bonuses to abilities, and improved combat skills. Some even have mixtures of positive and negative abilities, like a fighter I recruited that was a “glass cannon,” dealing but also taking more damage.
I would have loved to see the more varied traits played up a little bit more to create an incentive to seek out and recruit members of the team based on the missions you were about to undertake and how you wanted to complete them. While there’s a little bit of this element at play, it’s not nearly as strong as it could have been. You can realistically play through a good majority of the game as one single character, using the DeadSec-wide tech and upgrades, and largely ignoring specific bonuses you might get from certain characters. It would have been cool to see certain abilities or tech locked off from certain characters, forcing you to engage with the recruitment system a little bit more to build a team in harmony with each other.
Personally, I found that playing with permadeath mode on made this “play as anyone” feature far more engaging. Building up my “legion,” as it were, felt a little like XCOM with permadeath on. I had far more investment into who I was bringing in, who I was sending out on missions, and losses held a much bigger impact as I lost crucial skillsets that certain characters might have.
Narratively, Watch Dogs Legion is painfully on the nose, while at the same time being exceptionally bland and sterilized. It’s got definitively political roots—you absolutely can’t have a game about a resistance against an oppressive authoritative force without it being political—but it never really dives deep into the real issues that would cause and come from such a political dystopia. Watch Dogs Legion tosses around words and phrases like “fake news” and “oppression,” utilizing them more as topically relevant buzzwords than meaningful messaging. It has the opportunity to say a lot, but doesn’t really end up saying much at all; Perhaps not all surprising from a company with a track record for unprolific games rooted in shallowly palpable but underutilized political settings.
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