Each one has their own personality that comes through in the fully voiced lines they deliver during the game's many cut-scenes and mid-mission conversations. These characters aren't just interchangeable ciphers, either. Forming a team where a college professor and chess champion can fight for the same goals as a cockney-speaking construction worker (who takes out enemies with a giant lug wrench) feels refreshingly cosmopolitan, especially as one character gets immediately called in to help when the other fails. My Dedsec cell looks like a true melting pot of London society in terms of race, gender, and even class. Once you can accept that premise, though, this conceit creates a veritable explosion in the diversity of character choices in the game. Once again, you just have to suspend your disbelief more than a little bit to buy into the game's core concept. Sure, there are some potential recruits whose backstories provide them access to special skills or high-octane firepower-uniformed officers, for instance, can walk around sensitive areas without being instantly noticed as out of place.īut even the most out-of-shape, underskilled schmoe on the street still has to have the basic ability to perform the stealthy infiltrations and complex hacks that form the basis of the game. You also have to accept that the random assemblage of average citizens you recruit are ready to immediately become the master spies, hackers, and counter-mercenaries needed to take down this entrenched fascist system. My first Dedsec operative was a bit out there. You can go up to literally any random person in the game, push a button, and start a completely unprompted conversation about potentially violent overthrow of the system. That recruitment process, as presented in Legion, requires the player to suspend more than a little bit of disbelief. As one of the last remaining members, it's up to the player to recruit new members to Dedsec and fight back against Zero Day, Albion, and other tangential criminal and government groups in their orbit. Dedsec, the "good guy" hackers from previous Watch Dogs titles, gets framed for the attacks, leading the city to grant sweeping police state powers to mercenary mega-firm Albion in the name of "security."ĭedsec's membership is quickly decimated by deportations and killings under this new regime.
Watch dogs legion review series#
Things start off with a literal bang when a terrorist hacker collective known as Zero Day sets off a series of massive explosions around the city.
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Legion takes players to a version of London that has been utterly transformed in the well-established techno-dystopian near-future of the Watch Dogs universe. Still, Watch Dogs: Legion earns points for weaving together a coherent open-world game where no one is the protagonist and everyone is the protagonist at the same time. The results of Ubisoft's ambitious attempt are a little sloppy at points, and it doesn't fix the open-world genre's problems with repetitive quests.
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Then along comes a game like Watch Dogs: Legion, which aims to blow up that dichotomy with a simple question: what if practically every non-player character could become a protagonist? This unwieldy phrase has become a ubiquitous term of art that highlights just how limited we are in most games by taking the point of view of a single protagonist (or maybe a small team). Links: Amazon | Epic Games Store | Official WebsiteIt's interesting how video games take a phrase like 'non-player character' for granted.
Watch dogs legion review windows#
Platform: Windows (reviewed), Xbox One, PS4, Stadia PS5 and Xbox Series X (coming in November)