Watch Dogs Legion Review

Watch Dogs Legion developed and published by Ubisoft is now available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC and will later release on Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5.

Welcome to London, not the London you know though, in a heavily monitored futuristic post-Brexit, you’ll experience all sorts of chaos. Players will investigate a corrupt gang that has started selling human organs in the black market, Albion the new security agency spreading propaganda and performing violent acts on the citizens of London and who Zero Day is, the terrorists that framed Dedsec and almost took them down.

Watch Dogs Legion excited me from the very moment it was revealed for so many reasons, playing in London in the current generation, taking on any NPC in the game and using them as a playable character, more Watch Dog hacking and so much more. The recruiting system is where the game shines for me, and it’s not as simple as just adding someone to your roster and that’s it. Each NPC in Watch Dogs Legion has a life, if you use your deep profiler you can see the schedule of that person and it helps bring the game to life. The best thing about it though is a sort of nemesis like system, certain actions will turn NPC’s against you and make them unrecruitable, for example injuring them, killing a friend, family member, associate or wife/husband will turn them against you, it’s incredible and if you have permadeath on and lose a Dedsec member, it will also affect the above-mentioned people. Each recruit you go after usually has certain traits, sometimes gadgets and weapons and even vehicles that they can call in, though not all traits are positive. Some of the negative traits are spontaneous death, farting or hiccuping so that stealth becomes difficult and so many more interesting ones. The game gives you the freedom to make your own decisions on how you want to take it on and I love it. Often it’s said Ubisoft repeat the same old formula and in the past it’s true but with Watch Dogs Legion it feels like it’s going in the right direction to make these open-world games a lot more fun than previous titles. I liked Watch Dogs 1 and 2 and the hacking was great but I always got bored of doing the same old, and while Legion has several repetitive points that I’ll get into soon it’s just so much bigger and more complex than I first thought.

Watch Dogs Legion in some parts can get repetitive, it’s the same old hacking but in a more futuristic environment so now you’ll use these new systems like drones, auto cars and more to your advantage. I think my only complaint is that some of the missions to repeat quite often but I was way to engage in the game to take notice or get fed up of it, due to having so many different recruits with different stats and the permadeath risk (permadeath is optional) it just made it feel different every time. In a lot of games I never take them seriously I always like goofing around if the ability to do so is there and Watch Dogs Legion makes it feel like the world is your playground. The driving is a lot better this time as well, I was always put off by driving in the game but it seems to have been improved upon. The controls are smooth and easy to get used to.

London looks beautiful and is so close to the real thing, it’s amazing getting to see well-known parts and backstreets and just explore the heck out of it. I enjoyed in my first few hours just walking around the London canals which were beautifully detailed and so full of life. The design in this game is flawless, everything about it is just a joy and armed with fantastic audio and music, you’re in for a treat. The voice acting, well some is questionable mainly being due to modifications and what not but overall for the number of voices in this game I truly do feel you can let it off, I still found it hilarious running around as an old lady spy trying to be all hip and cool.

Verdict

Watch Dogs Legion was everything I hoped it to be, Ubisoft seems to be moving into a new direction of trying new things which were completely needed, their open-world formula was getting quite stale overtime but this one tried something new and proved that the open-world still has a ton more surprises waiting around the corner. If we can see more of this system expanded on then I cannot wait to see more. I barely ran into any bugs during my playthrough apart from one crash, Ubisoft is releasing a patch this week on the PlayStation 4.

9/10