Watch Dogs: Legion is the kiddie pool of political uprisings
Fascism is alive and well in America and honestly, not just here. It’s deeply seeded in many people’s cultures and homes where it requires force to fight back and no one can fight fascism alone. It requires strength in numbers. Yet sometimes, people become performative and are talking the talk but never walking the walk. Watch Dogs: Legion feels like that performative ally in this fight, never willing to speak behind its words and want you to feel like you’re doing good work for absolutely nothing.
I’m lying awake here after hours in the game, many hours that give the feeling “I don’t know where I’m at in the game but I feel like I’ve been playing forever” judgement. I’ve recruited so many different people, I’ve freed all of London from Albion’s rule, I saved a lot of people, yet why does it feel amounting for nothing? Normally, you’d have some kind of results by now with changes in leadership, freedom, something.
I only get a safe way out of fascism, fighting the London Mafia and the big bad tech corporation with them.
Watch Dogs: Legion is as vapid of a game I can describe. Is it fun? Yes, for a while. Is it interesting? Let me ask you, does a frozen pizza look appetizing on the front of the box only for you to cook it and it tastes disappointing? That’s Legion for me. It creates this big sense of urgency of rebuilding DedSec and taking back London, fighting fascism, and the police are put out of commission because of Albion. It has a great set up for you, this idea of recruiting people to help unite and fight to free London, but that’s all it is.
At first, you get immersed because there’s actual issues you’d feel exist, like rescuing someone from being possibly deported or stopping human trafficking deals by disruption but soon enough, you find yourself over and over again just doing it over. You however can recruit people by rescuing them in the middle of the street and marking them as recruitable, finding out they want to join because you saved them. It added enough for a while, then it just repeats over and over. These people you rescue don’t even feel alive, I ended up even recruiting two people with the same first name which wouldn’t be unusual if the name wasn’t Poorsche. I wouldn’t be surprised if I picked up two Brittneys, two Joes, two Carls, but no, that name. I’ve even stumbled on repeated outfits on multiple NPCs that it became harder to pull out two NPCs that didn’t look alike out of nowhere. I’ve seen some unique ones like this one, though never in my game.
It boils down to say that they try so hard to diversify with this ambition that it becomes so unable to see anything fully special and it’s recognized that, at the least, it potentially paves way for whatever to come next, but you can’t fully delve into it here. Especially when ultimately, everyone who gets injured or dies (depending if you put permadeath on) can be replaced by someone with similar skills. Right now, everything is a cutout of itself. The upgrades are minimal too, you get 5 weapons, the ability to hack drones, some neat gadgets (including the overpowered spiderbot), and other stuff like “deactivate a turret” for tech points you find in the city. It’s very much watered down from its predecessor who had a focused group of main characters and a big tree of development that really made you feel like you grew your skills over time.
To talk about one of the biggest issues in the game aside from the political apolitical stance in the game (talk about contradictory), let’s highlight the spiderbot. One thing briefly mentioned above is how the spiderbot is overpowered. I don’t even mean that as a joke, the spiderbot is probably the most overpowered thing in the game. You can do mostly everything with the spiderbot except open specific doors for the story and borough missions and take pictures. There’s even a turret version that’s vastly inferior but still usable, but the regular version can sprint, double jump, and takedown enemies with ease. That’s right, you can use the spiderbot to take out as many enemies as you want and while it’s not invincible, 60 seconds of cooldown is nothing compared to basically skirting enemy territory consequence free, especially when most hacking ports you need can be hacked by a spiderbot. So why bother ever risking a recruit’s life when you can spiderbot it?
This game empowers you but never rewards you functionally than a pat on the back and ultimately that feels more insulting. Missions give you either new recruits, tech points, or money of the bitcoin variety, the last one being inconsequential as you only need it for clothing or weapon skins. What does the game give you outside of that? Nothing. People are the most important and Tech Points are just as but nothing else. The worst part? There’s only one “real” side mission that’s not recruiting people and that’s to fight in a boxing club. You don’t even get worldbuilding or lore for it, just “nice job, fuck albion, i’m your ally now” out of 7 or 8 different voices. It’s unfulfilling.
The game’s story is one that absolutely takes the piss out of itself. I won’t spoil what happens for the sake of keeping things spoiler-free, but it refuses to take a stance for what it believes in. It shifts blame from one enemy to the next and it doesn’t want to make up its mind and just take the easy way out of the story’s conflict to one of the most forced left-turn twists that develops into nothing, just a unrewarding mess that doesn’t fix the actual issue at hand and doesn’t even fix its fascism problem that is known as Albion. The thematic theme of “taking back London” doesn’t hold up if we don’t even remove the main problem at hand, which if we’re going to put fascism in our video games as a threat, you can’t sheepishly pretend it’s just going to be fixed by cleaning up some big bad that don’t even address the issue at hand.
Outside of that, the game has other problems that include:
- removal of radio stations as we had in Watch Dogs 2, the stations limited to riding in a car and not even being selectable really, just a small playlist of songs that is hit or miss.
- no multiplayer mode on launch (it’s coming December 2020 but that says a lot that this is a option… on the main menu and yet…)
- Really bad crashing bugs on exit to the main menu (update has mentioned being this is being patched this week)
- A major bug that causes the spiderbug glitched into objects and cannot be removed (has to be recalled forcibly or game restarted if this is in the clocktower)
Overall, I give Watch Dogs: Legion a 5/10. The game is a watered down version of its predecessor that tackled its gameplay and themes a LOT better while Legion just sits in a shallow kiddie pool and acts like it’s a 12 foot deep. It’s never that deep and when it tries to, it turns it into another story that never sticks to their guns and pretends its no big deal.
