author: Michael Grygorcewicz
Intemperately devours games, movies, comics, books, TV series – everything that has a good story and doesn't run away. Also a fan of wolves, Metal Gears, brawlers, and buying old games he will never have time to play.
Watch Dogs: Legion Review - Safe and Polite Revolution
Legion isn't the revolution that it was advertised as – and I think that's good. While it's not flawless, it definitely is a satisfying representative of open-world action games.
This is my London, and you're not getting a bit
Apart from recruiting agents and hacking, Watch Dogs: Legion is a fairly standard representative of the genre. The map of London is riddled with missions, neighborhoods to liberate, optional activities and an overwhelming amount of collectibles – in addition to the development points mentioned earlier, we can also collect documents that expand our knowledge of the world or paint graffiti in designated places.
Surprisingly, the most interesting part of this set turned out to be liberating neighborhoods. The whole procedure is not complicated – we need to perform a few simple actions in a given region (destroy a designated target, rescue a hostage, hack something), and thus unlock a specific mission. And it was these missions, culminating in the liberation of a given area that turned out to be one of the most interesting in the whole game. One in particular stayed with me, the one in which I moved on platforms in the dark, with the only source of light being the drone I controlled. Cool and inventive.
It's a pity that such interesting tasks are generally few and far between in the game. The overwhelming majority of missions are based on just two ideas. As a rule, we need to reach the designated restricted area, bypass or eliminate the guards there, and reach the designated goal to hack it/ lift it/ save it. We always have freedom in realizing the goals, and this yields some cool diversity. However, the variety of available approaches doesn't match the sheer number of tasks, and we end up stuck in our patterns. The overwhelming majority of both main and side quests repeat the same patterns. Even Mafia III offered more variety.
The second overarching idea is definitely abused: it has us controlling a drone or spider, infiltrating different facilities and quarters. And that's about it. The missions in Watch Dogs Legion are overwhelmingly based on these two solutions. Occasionally, you may get a car race, fighting off waves of enemies, or the god old taking taking over of nodes – but these appear only in main missions, and there's definitely too few of them.
I can't really see why the game wasn't diversified more – especially when the game has all the right foundations. You can play darts in pubs, juggle a ball in parks. There are some courier side activities, made more thrilling by the bad guys chasing us. But they don't do anything particular – they're just there. There's untapped potential here – these elements could have been incorporated into the recruitment missions to diversify them slightly.
Casual stealth
Numerous hacking possibilities and the ability to control drones encourage playing Watch Dogs: Legion as a stealth game, but of course we are talking about a trivialized take on this genre, similar to Assassin's Creed. Enemies are stupid and easy to approach from behind, they quickly forget finding the body of an ally and return to the post. They seem to be able to call for reinforcements, but these arrive in limited numbers, so sending one drone after another and openly eliminating more opponents is a safe and sure way to solve problems. On the other hand, once someone tracks us down, everyone suddenly knows exactly where we are. Fans of Hitman or Metal Gear Solid are unlikely to find anything that would cater to their taste in terms of challenging stealth.