Watch Dogs: Legion, the latest title in Ubisoft's hacktivist video game franchise, is as innovative and creative as you want it to be. You can use the full extent of your weapons, gadgets, drones, and hacking skills to turn London's streets into your personal, interactive playground. Or, you can rely on a handful of powerful—perhaps overpowered—tools to blitz the game. At first, I attempted the former option, but as I continued playing, I leaned more heavily towards the latter. The most powerful tools, it turns out, are also the ones that are fun to use.
The dystopian premise of this game is that a massive London terrorist attack has resulted in Albion, a private military company, locking down the streets and subjecting the citizenry to authoritarian rule. Police brutality abounds. (You can intervene, at your own peril.) Heavily armed foot soldiers patrol every corner. Drones enforce a surveillance state, and most mundane tasks, like auto travel and retail, are now automated. Accordingly, there is unemployment, homelessness, and crime, which has given Albion even greater leeway to maintain "law and order" at any cost.
You, the player, are DedSec, a hacktivist group that was falsely blamed for the initial terrorist attack, and aims to clear its tarnished name and free London from Albion. Outside of a disembodied AI voice named "Bagley," who instructs you in your mission and processes the data you steal, Watch Dogs: Legion has no central protagonist. Instead, you are tasked with recruiting your player characters from London's general population. Every NPC in the game—even the cops and stormtroopers that try to kill you—can be recruited to your collective effort with enough persuasion.
At any point, you can scan a passerby with your phone, which will pull up a thorough history of the person's employment, opinion of DedSec, family relations, and any recent run-ins with the law. The person's profile may also highlight a number of unique perks. For example, a person with a 6G phone plan may have faster hacking/download times. A fitness trainer might have more resilience or more powerful punches. On the other hand, an older person might not be able to sprint, or a famous person might attract unwanted attention on a public street. A player can choose to work with competent professionals or struggle with a ragtag band of misfits. You can also turn on Permadeath; if a recruit dies, he stays dead. Lose all of your recruits, and the game is over.
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To recruit someone, you complete a task for him or her. It usually boils down to sneaking into a building and stealing data or deleting someone's outstanding debt. He or she will join DedSec in return. You can only use one recruit for a single mission—the idea being that you'll choose an amateur athlete if the mission might require you to throw hands, an elite hacker if you need to turn drones against one another, a professional dancer with a "light step" if you need to sneak around, or a spy if the mission calls for a car and a silenced gun.
Or at least, that's the way it's supposed to work. The way it actually works? You quickly discover that the AI is a bizarre mixture of dumb and hypercompetent. On one hand, they walk directly into booby traps. They are easily distracted and misled by environmental cues. But should they happen to spot you, they become miraculous, inhuman sharpshooters that take multiple machine gun hits and shotgun blasts to die. Gun and hand-to-hand combat is overly cumbersome, to the point that even if you have a recruit that specializes in it, it's best avoided.
Instead, you might decide to cheese your way through most encounters. Behold, the most powerful character in the game: the humble construction worker.
I've also equipped my construction worker with a fully upgraded spider drone, which can accomplish the vast majority of hands-on tasks. Check out the below clip of me summoning a Cargo Drone with my construction worker, flying to a hard-to-reach collectible, retrieving it with my spider-drone, and then flying away. I didn't even have to get off the Cargo Drone. In the rare event that you want to get off your flying platform and actually do something, you can kill a building's entire security detail with your spider drone, so long as you're patient. Then, walk into the building right through the front door, unencumbered.
I spend more time as the spider drone than as any other "character." And fortunately for Watch Dogs: Legion, the spider-drone is the best thing about the game. It moves better than a human and is very 1:1 responsive to the player's controller input. It can jump higher than a human, move faster than one, and it can perform a sick-looking takedown by attaching itself to an enemy's face. And once it's fully upgraded, it can turn invisible for several seconds, which makes stealth killing even easier.
I would have loved to play a game centered exclusively around this little drone, and for long stretches, I did. But the game would force me to flip a switch by hand, or get to a different location entirely across town, and I'd have to go back to playing in a vast (but ultimately empty) open world. There are side activities like bare-knuckle boxing and soccer, but are merely diversionary—fun, but shallow. The clothing customization options lack variety, and the locations to buy clothes also lack character and interactivity. The driving is adequate and serviceable, but only that. More and more, you'll find yourself putting the car on auto drive rather than driving yourself, or simply Fast Traveling between landmarks. It's not like GTA V, where you willingly drive around for its own sake and pleasure.
It's in the shadowy hallways, maze-like vent corridors, and the Splinter Cell-esque obstacle courses inside the buildings, that the game finds its rhythm. And if you pick up this game, you'll find yourself upgrading your technology to make those fun parts more frequent. In theory, this game purports to be a massive open world with a whole lot to do and many approaches to doing it. In practice, Watch Dogs: Legion is a much smaller world that does only one type of gameplay well. But to its credit, that one type of gameplay is very well-implemented, very engaging, and very fun.
