Watch Dogs: Legion Review

A magician who dresses like a high-tech pimp was the shot in the arm my playthrough needed.

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That said, I’ve yet to find anybody with some of the signature abilities of Watch Dogs 1 and 2; there’s no changing traffic lights, no calling in of police or gang members to attack a target, or city-wide system crash as far as I’ve seen. I missed them a bit, but I don’t mind Legion breaking out of the series’ habits a little. Speaking of which, the extremely arcadey driving is pretty thoroughly deemphasized – only a handful of story missions involve driving vehicles at all and police chases are trivial to avoid.

Legion is much more concerned with piloting drones, and there are a few obstacles courses you have to navigate with flying drones that are more interesting diversions from the regular gameplay anyway. Many areas also integrate the same power-flow puzzles from Watch Dogs 2, overlaying their rotatable nodes onto the real world with augmented reality and sometimes asking you to complete them while under fire. They’re rarely very tricky but it’s still a very clever approach to puzzle gameplay.The most interesting characters play substantially differently. You can use someone with lots of heavy weapons (like a military veteran) to shoot your way through most missions with relatively straightforward gunfights, or just about anybody can use cameras and tiny spider drones (fact check: they only have six legs, they are not spiders!) to reach an objective and hack it without ever physically setting foot in an encounter area. Alternatively, recruiting a member of the private police corporation and using them to infiltrate guarded areas plays like a Hitman game, since you can stroll through undetected as long as you don’t let anybody get too close a look at you. There are a lot of possibilities, and the intricate level design goes a long way toward enabling you to come up with different ways to approach most of the scenarios – including using the construction worker’s slow-flying cargo drone to bypass half a mission.

While characters don’t level up, there’s a selection of persistent upgrades that you can unlock that are applied to the whole group: improved drone hacking, faster pistol reloads, a personal cloaking device, that sort of thing. It does give you some overall progression as you go through the campaign, and I like how these are unlocked using Tech Points you gather by exploring the world and going out of your way to find during missions. It’s a good way to encourage you to investigate every area of the map rather than just racking up XP with headshots.

However, this leaves the money you earn feeling pretty useless, since it’s only used to unlock clothing options that have no impact on gameplay. Similarly, just like in Watch Dogs 2, the emphasis on non-lethal weaponry is puzzling because it functions pretty much identically to bullets and no one seems to be keeping track of how many corpses you leave in DedSec’s wake – that’s all just for us to roleplay as non-murderous vigilantes if we chose to, I suppose.

One of the most daring alterations to the typical open-world action game setup that Legion makes, though, is that these characters are all expendable, and that changes the way death works in very affecting ways. By default, getting shot, beaten down, or blown up in a mission sends a character to the hospital or prison and they’re unavailable while they recover or pay their debt to society, as represented by a timer on their portrait in the Team screen. But if you’re playing with permadeath enabled (as I did) the stakes of every mission immediately feel much higher than in any GTA-style game I’ve ever played.

In this mode, losing someone in combat means they’re straight-up dead and you lose access to their skills permanently. Sure, some of them are easily replaceable (every construction worker or guard has the same abilities, for instance), but the special characters are hard to come by. I’ve had some memorably close calls where I narrowly avoided death… plus a couple of losses I’d classify as “some bullshit,” like when my car barely nudged an explosive barrel I didn’t even see and instantly exploded (I’d have thought it was a bug if I hadn’t been recording the footage).

In general, though, it’s not too hard to stay alive if you’re careful. Your health recharges quickly if you can avoid damage for a few seconds, so even when things look dire a tactical retreat can save your bacon. A cheap upgrade allows you to do a free melee instakill on a bad guy every 30 seconds or so, which makes it easy to get out of trouble when you’re caught sneaking around (provided you’re not in a crowded room). And thankfully there’s barely any fall damage, because dying because you misjudge a jump by a few feet would be an awful way to go.

Even if you do lose some people, or if they’re randomly kidnapped off the street (yes, this happens quite a bit) don’t worry: it’s going to be fine. Yes, your game will end if you have no more agents available, but getting more isn’t hard and Bagley will frequently point you toward new elite types to recruit. More than that, I’ve found I’ve earned a fair number of recruits just by marking people I see who have potential for later recruitment (effectively saving them so you can do their recruitment mission later) and then happening upon ways to earn their loyalty almost by accident. For instance, you’ll occasionally see a character with a red icon over their heads identifying them as an adversary of someone you know, and eliminating them will earn you a new recruit.

Those aren’t the only connections you’ll spot: icons over random pedestrians’ heads will indicate that they’re related to one of your recruits somehow, either by family or friends or lovers. One time I came across an elderly woman with an icon over her head, and when I scanned her it revealed she was the grandmother of one of the characters I’d gotten killed, saying he’d died fighting for something. That was a nice little touch that added to the illusion of all of these NPCs being actual people.

Even with all of this, I often found myself wishing Legion had gone even further to differentiate these mortal characters, and given me real reasons to take people with negative traits. I’ve seen characters with the hiccups, who alert enemies around them to their presence, and even someone with a trait called Doomed, who had a chance to spontaneously die for no reason. But why would I play as them if they have no powerful skills to balance them out? I also craved the opportunity to invest in individuals and make them even more powerful, but also take a bigger blow if I lost them. In fact, there’s a whole world of roguelike design ideas out there that Legion only seems to scratch the surface of. In a year that’s included games like Hades and Spelunky 2, I’d have loved to see it push that envelope a little further.

Finally, a heads up that we’ve seen a fair number of crashes (on both PC and Xbox One – we haven’t seen PlayStation 4 copies as of this writing), so if you can wait for a few patches to smooth things out that might be a good call. Switching to DirectX 11 instead of 12 solved a lot of my PC stability issues.

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