hile the original looked bland and was a solid pass, Watch Dogs 2 pleasantly surprised me. I loved the character of the city, the openness of the mission structure and how you could complete entire missions with just hacking. Missions were puzzles that required wit to pull off without letting a bullet leave your barrel.
Watch Dogs: Legion really showed promise. Having travelled London thoroughly for 2 weeks in 2018 I recognized a lot of the city and it felt pretty darn 1:1. Not only were most of the major landmarks there but they often involved unique missions. Like a drone battle over London Eye, or a platform sequence with a spider-bot through Big Ben, or sleuthing through the catacombs or infiltrating London Tower, a rearmed fortress. But eventually this initial novelty wore off and the story, well... I'd tell you if I could remember. Your cell is destroyed at the start and you need to recruit a new DedSec to fight off the Orwellian private military tech company that the government is bending over for their security tech. That's about it. Zero memorable characters. Except the ones you create yourself.
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| Who is this dude? |
Here's where the game shines in some ways. Recruiting characters is the best part of the game as they all come with unique abilities that can be used to approach missions in different ways. Some favourites include the Spy, a middle-aged British woman that can combat roll, use a G36 and knows kung fu. The bee keeper. The graffiti artists with their paint bomb and paint gun. An anarchist with a baseball bat. That's it, a bat. The list goes on. The issue here (when it works and you don't get cheated and lose your characters or progress due to bugs) is characters are all surface level. The upgrade tree is cool but I really wish it catered to individual archetypes more and allowed you to invest in them more instead of a overall legion tech tree. Especially when you end up using the same gadgets on every agent most the time. Character upgrades would have made the instadeath truly shine. Investing precious time and resources into a character only to see them perish... ugh. Imagine seeing your DedSec grow, through the continued sacrifice of it's agents, a legion as you will. While you continually get invested and despair as agents perish. But I don't care. Agents have no investment factor and if they die you can just go find and pull the same type of agent of the street. No consequences. This highlights an issue in Ubisoft games. They just lack depth and appeal to a mainstream audience; but they still try to be hardcore. They're Tom Clancy espionage and action games from an optical perspective, but when you dig your hands in you don't really find much. And that's a HUGE issue. You appeal to an audience that expects one thing and gets another. Assassins Creed has made attempts but mostly relies on bloated RPG mechanics. I've steered clear of Far Cry since 3 (only playing 4 because I bought it on special). The one exception over the last decade was Rainbow Six Siege. Which was likely done by a ragtag team with little faith from the higher ups that it would succeed. I common occurrence in the industry, small teams creativity surprising the money-makers terrified of risk. Hearthstone is one such example. I would really love to see some actual depth added to these games. Maybe even a hardcore mode which they've proven they can do. The Division 2 should have been the survival DLC mode of 1. Far Cry 6 should be a base liberating, rebuilding and management game as you work to build up the resistance through a logistical and tactical metagame (Dragon Age Inquisition did this really well). Enemies can take back bases if poorly defended. Maybe you have named agents and special operatives. A true Guerrilla warfare experience unlike Far Cry 6 that both keeps the great Far Cry formula pure, innovates and adds to it. Watch Dogs Legion could have been no different.
The punk rebel vibe of London is a welcome fit. But I feel like they could have injected more substance. You need to liberate London district by district and when you do you're rewarded with a strong specialist agent. But London has no visible changes. I wish we'd see riots, rebellion, art, etc coming back to the streets. Taking a page out of the underrated Pandemic's Saboteur (RIP). Set in WW2 occupied France the entire game had a very stylish black and white filter, with Nazi reds. Once you liberate an area colour returned to that part of the city signifying the defeat and Nazi oppression being washed out. The darkness was gone and life had returned. Districts could have had mini-conflicts on the edges and you could have even added a persistent mode that required city management as the antagonist operates to take back districts. After the final resolution of the game and credits roll, in the end-game people are happy as they clean up the aftermath that comes with revolution.
In the end the game's biggest selling point became it's weakness. Besides the myriad of bugs of course. My character was lost or bugged out several times and at this point I put down the game for good. While it kept the variety of the mission structure from the second game, the lack of depth and focus made it a hollow experience overall. This isn't a game I'm going to pick up again, and now I want to play Saboteur or Watch Dogs 2....
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