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Now that Cyberpunk 2077 has been pushed back a bit again, Watch Dogs: Legion is the best alternative if you are looking for a high-tech game world. Ubisoft made some eccentric choices for the game, do they work out well?
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In a hands-on preview, we started working for 4 hours with Watch Dogs: Legion at the beginning of October. Our opinion was then quite divided. The fact that Ubisoft tries something different deserves all the praise, but at the same time we were concerned about the repetitive aftertaste. In the meantime, we were able to work extensively with the final version of the game and we can make a final judgment.
2020 has not immediately been a “happy happy joy joy” year and Watch Dogs: Legion does not give it a cheerful touch either. The game is set in a high-tech dystopian London that is in a post-Brexit depression. After bombings of terrorist organization “Zero Day”, the finger is wrongly pointed at hacker group DedSec. It’s up to you as a player to rebuild DedSec from the ground up and prove your innocence. However, it will not be a sinecure, because the private military group Albion is called in to put things in order. Residents cannot take any step without it being logged by the government. DedSec wants to do more than prove their innocence, they want to free London.
Choice stress
When you start out with Watch Dogs: Legion, one of the first things you need to do is choose a character. It sets the tone for the rest of the game. The “unique selling point” of Legion is that you can use anyone you see as a protagonist. In short: any resident of London (which, by the way, is very beautifully and accurately depicted) can become your protagonist. The idea is that every person is unique, and those unique skills can be used cleverly to complete missions. For example, you can recruit a construction worker to fly around on his drone, while recruiting an Albion agent is just a good way to infiltrate hostile areas.
You can have about 40 people on your team, but before we knew it, we had finished the game with the same three characters. As long as you don’t die in the game, there is no immediate reason to recruit additional “operatives”. A possible reason for recruiting someone is to have other weapons. It is not possible to equip an existing character with other weapons. All weapons are personal. We personally found this a less fun element, because it felt more like a drag to switch characters purely because you want a different weapon. If you want a muffled machine gun, you have to look for an operative that has it. In the “tech tree” you can unlock (and upgrade) four non-lethal weapons that you can use for all operatives. The other skills you unlock within this tech tree also apply to all of your team members. This includes the ability to lure enemies to a trap or the remote deactivation of a turret.
In practice, however, you will use melee more often than the non-lethal weapons. When an enemy spots you and you aren’t holding a gun, the enemy will simply use their fists to try and take you out. In practice, you will often fall back on melee combat when you are spotted. A nice added value as this ensures that your entire mission is not immediately ruined when a certain enemy spots you, but the combat could be a bit more challenging and interesting. The current system consists of killing and hitting, and in fact there is not much you can do wrong. Compare it with the combat from the original Assassin’s Creed.
In our preview we already stated that we held our heart to this experimental system of storytelling. With most games, a lot of time and money is invested in developing a protagonist who is loved and with whom the player builds a bond. It’s not just that opinions are so divided on The Last of Us: Part II… Ubisoft made a gamble by not focusing entirely on developing one rock-solid protagonist, but letting the players choose the protagonists themselves. Respect for the guts, but unfortunately we have to say that this system does reduce interest in the story. Fortunately, there is Bagley, your virtual assistant clearly programmed by a hilarious programmer. The character adds the necessary touch of humor and playfulness to a generally quite depressing theme.
Uninspired missions
Watch Dogs: Legion is packed with content. First of all you have the story missions (which are again divided into multiple ‘chapters’) and standard side missions, but besides that you also have the recruitment missions to add new people to your team and the “uprising missions” that allow you to unlock rare characters by to inspire London residents.
As in previous iterations of Watch Dogs, you get to choose how you approach missions. For example, you can recruit a soccer hooligan and take on the missions with brute force, or you can play it carefully and recruit a spy to complete missions in stealth. The choice is yours, but when you choose raw power you will have the missions behind them and you may get little or no satisfaction from them. Stealth is undoubtedly the most fun way to approach the missions. You often call on your trusty remote-controlled “Spiderbot” to explore the environment and hack servers.
Whatever playstyle you choose, over time you will recognize a theme in the missions. Most of the missions consist of infiltrating an area and hacking a certain server there. The puzzles where you have to divert a network route to unlock the network, some players will also be thoroughly tired by now. A greater variation in the available story missions was certainly allowed. The Uprising missions are a nice change. In these kinds of missions (for example climbing Big Ben with your Spiderbot) you inspire the inhabitants of London to resist the oppression. Unlike Watch Dogs 2, you don’t do that directly to increase your follower count, but you do unlock a rare character that you can recruit. The missions are completely optional, but skipping them would be a shame.
Many of the story missions also push you in a car to drive from one point to another. The electric cars are a nice addition, but the miserable way in which the cars can be driven make absolutely no pleasure rides. It soon feels more like a drag than a fun intermezzo.
Technical shortcomings
For a game set in a high-tech society, the game itself is not a technical tour de force. Graphically the game performs below par (especially the facial animation and characters) and the difference with the colorful Watch Dogs 2 could not be greater. The now almost typical glitches with open world games from Ubisoft are also present. There are even reports of consoles overheating from the game. Let’s just say it’s not a bad idea to wait a few weeks before playing the game.
However, it must be said that this is a “corona game”. The game was largely developed from home, so in this exceptional situation we are more likely to condone such technical shortcomings. Provided the team tackles them in the near future.
Step back
Watch Dogs: Legion cannot be compared at all to Watch Dogs 2, but that makes it just a bit extra sour. Watch Dogs 2 impressed with its GTA V-esque approach (a sunny setting, charismatic characters and a vibrant game world), so it’s a shame to see Watch Dogs: Legion take a step back in many ways. The world feels a lot ‘dead’ and you even have fewer options (for example, you can no longer hack traffic lights). The Watch Dogs 2 skill tree that effectively unlocked useful abilities has also been scrapped for a fainter decoction via the “tech tree”. In Watch Dogs 2, you were also more encouraged to complete side missions, as they helped build your follower numbers, while in Watch Dogs: Legion you don’t feel any urge to play the side missions. If the recruitment system did not exist, the game was already a light version of Watch Dogs 2.
Furthermore, the game in the standard difficulty setting is actually too easy. At the start of the game you do have the option to enable permadeath (once you start the game you cannot enable this function anymore) and we absolutely recommend that you enable this. It makes the game a lot more exciting, and it also gives you a reason to use the recruitment system more often. Without a permadeath, you may be playing with the same three characters all the time. The poorly developed AI also doesn’t help to make the game more challenging. Often you can just walk around an enemy in an arc and you can exploit the drone of the construction worker to quickly (and unseen) avoid countless enemies to travel to your objective. Are you seen? Then you use the simple melee system to take out enemies without them raising the alarm. If your mission is to “escape to a safe area” you can even just let your character die. Then you choose another character that spawns in a safe area and you have completed the mission. Not successful, but you will not be punished for it. When a character dies, you can no longer play with this character for a certain period of time. By recruiting an ambulance driver, for example, you can shorten this time.
Conclusion
Watch Dogs: Legion may add a unique twist to the franchise, but it takes a pretty big step backwards compared to Watch Dogs 2. The game lacks the charisma and lightheartedness of Watch Dogs 2, so you don’t feel the need to do much invest time in the game world. Fortunately, there is Bagley, your virtual assistant, who can regularly put a smile on your face with his humor. Still, Bagley can’t avoid the missions starting to feel repetitive over time.
Obviously, you shouldn’t run to the store to buy Watch Dogs: Legion right away (the team can still use the time to get rid of the initial glitches), but once the game gets a bit cheaper you will definitely have fun in high-tech London. However, don’t expect too much from the recruiting system, because in the end it’s little more than a gimmick. Once you have a few people on your team and the novelty is off, you will most likely play with the same 2 to 3 characters over and over again. Don’t forget to enable permadeath to make the game a lot more interesting.
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