Watch Dogs: Legion Review

We have to give Ubisoft credit for actually pulling it off. The core pitch of Watch Dogs: Legion, that you can walk up to any NPC in London, scan them, recruit them, and play the rest of the game as them, isn't a marketing lie. It works. We spent an hour playing as an elderly beekeeper who solved problems with a swarm of robotic bees and an SMG. It's hilarious. But once the novelty wears off, you start to see the cracks in the foundation. Because the game has to accommodate any possible character saying any possible line, the dialogue is completely interchangeable. The emotional stakes hit zero almost immediately. Previous protagonists Aiden Pearce and Marcus Holloway had their flaws, but they had motivations. Your random recruits in Legion feel like action figures bumping into each other. The gameplay loop suffers from the same dilution. While characters have different traits, a construction worker can call in a cargo drone to ride, a spy gets a silenced pistol, most missions devolve into the same basic stealth/hacking/shooting encounters regardless of who you bring. The AI is alarmingly dense, making stealth trivial once you figure out its blind spots. What does work is London itself. The recreation of the city is stunning, and turning on Ray Tracing on current-gen consoles transforms wet streets and neon signs into eye candy. Driving around a dystopian Piccadilly Circus while listening to British punk rock is a vibe. Legion is an interesting failure. It pushed open-world systems forward in a way few games dare to, but it forgot that we need a reason to care about what happens when the shooting stops.