Watch Dogs Legion Review (PC)

The Watch Dogs series has gone through some serious changes over the span of just three installments. From the original single-player game that focused on one character – Aiden Pearce, up until an open-world, sandbox game that puts all NPCs in front and center.

Watch Dogs Legion adopts a completely different formula compared to the previous installments in the series, in the fact that it allows players to choose the character(s) they want to play with. When Watch Dogs Legion was announced, Ubisoft promised that players will be able to recruit any NPC they see in the game can be recruited, and this time the French publisher actually delivered on that promise.

I have to give props to Ubisoft for trying to spice up its lineup of games with some fresh new ideas. Although making a game populated with such a high number of recruitable NPCs poses a challenge for any developer these days, I'd say Ubisoft did a decent job.

In Watch Dogs Legion you play “the people vs. the corrupt,” as you try to “unfuck” London after a series of bombings masterfully blamed on DedSec, the underground organization of hackers that has become the centerpiece of every Watch Dogs game.

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With just about every DedSec agent arrested, killed, or put on the run, it's up to you, previously a potential DedSec recruit, to rebuild the team and discover who's behind the terrorist attacks. The game starts unlike any of the previous games, as you must choose your first DedSec agent from about a dozen options, each with their own skills and loadout.

Then, you can choose whether you want to play Watch Dogs Legion with the “permadeath” option enabled, which means that once your DedSec agents are critically injured, they will be forever lost. If you decide not to go with this option, you will simply not be able to use your DedSec agents that are arrested or shot for a short while.

It's game over when you lose all your DedSec agents, but since London is a never-ending source of recruits, you'll never run out of agents. You just have to make time to recruit more agents because every time you want to add a new agent to your network, you'll have to complete a sidequest. You can have up to 40 agents in your team, but I find it more fun if I were to just “specialize” my network by recruiting only a certain type of people.

The fact that you can recruit anyone in London can lead to some crazy setups. For example, you can recruit exclusively old people and call it “Team Geriatrics,” or you can add only construction workers and have a … “Team Building” for a change. It's entirely up to you and that's one of the things that I loved about Ubisoft's “play-as-anyone” system.

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Unfortunately, Ubisoft's marvelous technical achievement has some limits, which become quite evident after several hours of play. Letting the AI handle all the variable permutations needed to create a character from the ground up is not such a good idea after all. For example, you can have two people that look exactly the same, or female characters with male voices.

Also, there's very little variation when it comes to recruiting missions. Every time you want to recruit a new NPC, the AI selects from a pool of predefined missions one that you must complete. The problem is that there aren't too many to choose from, so you'll end up completing the same sidequest many times if you plan to build a full roster of agents.

Many times in the game I had to listen to the same dialogues between NPCs after successfully finishing a sidequest. What saved it for me was the huge open world and the fact that I treated my team of DedSec agents as cannon fodder. I didn't want to, but the game kind of forces me to.

The recreation of London in Watch Dogs Legion is astounding, and I'm not just talking about the visuals and the places, but the atmosphere and the vibes are very much the same. Granted, Ubisoft depicts a futuristic, dystopian London, the similarities with the real London are there and no one can deny it.

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Story-wise, Watch Dogs Legion starts like a James Bond movie but the exhilarating pace deteriorates quite fast. Luckily, I realized that I was playing the game in the wrong way. You're not supposed to do too much sidequesting at the beginning of the game. Once I completed several main missions, the game finally started to pick up the pace again.

Even though the quirky humor might lead you to believe that the game doesn't take itself too seriously, Watch Dogs Legion is going to some dark places in the middle of it. Props to Ubisoft for not being afraid to introduce unusual themes in the game such as the idea of uploading one's consciousness to the cloud ruthless, or what the black market of human organs looks like.

I'd say that Watch Dogs Legion's story is more personal than anything I've experienced in the previous titles, which is somewhat in contrast with the totally not-personal “play-as-anyone” system. Despite the fact that none of the choices you have to make in the game have any consequences, at least you're given the illusion that you did the right thing no matter what you decide.

Story-wise, there are some good parts in Watch Dogs Legion, although, once again I feel that Ubisoft must stop playing it safe and hire some writers to upgrade the stories they tell from average to very good.

Visually, Watch Dogs Legion is a gorgeous game on PC. It's like it was made to demonstrate the RTX technology, although the game remains just as beautiful even with RTX off. My configuration enabled me to play in with the settings on Ultra, but if you don't have an Nvidia RTX 3080 graphics card, don't try this setting if you want to play in 4K resolution.

I had a few issues with the PC version where the game simply crashed on desktop where it would freeze my PC, but once I switched to DirectX11 I stopped having these problems. Apart from that, I didn't encounter any game-breaking bug as other reviewers did on other platforms, but my character did remain stuck in walls a few times.

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The Good

The Bad

Conclusion