PLATFORM: PC, PS4, XBOX ONE (REVIEWED) | RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
Not too long from now, technology will have advanced to the point where driverless cars are commonplace, “drone highways” populate the skies and cyber activists – or “hacktivists” – are more dedicated than ever to promoting their ideals to the masses. This is the future we find ourselves in when we boot up Watch Dogs: Legion, where the London chapter of notorious hacktivist group DeadSec is framed by a rival organisation for a terrorist attack that has destroyed huge parts of the city. With a ruthless government-approved private military running roughshod over the population in the name of law and order, your job as DeadSec’s latest recruit is to liberate London borough by borough, bring new members into the fold and ultimately get revenge on Zero Day, the group responsible for DeadSec’s misfortunes.
Along with the appeal of visiting a futuristic version of London, Watch Dogs: Legion‘s most intriguing selling point is the ability to play as pretty much any person you come across in the game. Scanning an NPC with your in-game phone will reveal their occupation, a few other facts about them and any special skills or abilities they might have. If they sound like the sort of person you could use on your team, have a quick chat – as long as they’re already in favour of DeadSec (and there are ways to change their mind if they don’t cooperate…), they’ll agree to join up if you successfully complete a quick mission for them first.
It’s quick and easy to swap between your team mates – “operatives” – to make full use of a wide range of abilities in order to regain control of the city. Drone experts, getaway drivers, street performers, spies, construction workers, magistrates, beekeepers (way cooler than you’d expect!) and countless other specialists are available, it’s just a matter of tracking them down… All operatives can be customised by changing their outfit, weapon skins and equipped gadgets. A simple upgrade menu allows you to beef up your abilities, with all upgrades being applied to every member of your roster. Keep an eye out for the collectable upgrade tokens and you’ll soon be jamming weapons, disrupting enemies, disabling drones and taking control of turrets all over the city!
Missions tend to involve driving to a location, figuring out how to get inside, then stealthily hacking your way around to reach an objective before making your way back out to safety. But if things go wrong and you find yourself under attack, full-on gunfighting is also a viable option. When you receive enough support from the people in an area, you’ll be able to take the district over by completing a special mission. These are possibly the most fun parts of the game, as they break away from the infiltrate / hack / escape formula by asking you to do things like use a spiderbot to climb the inside of Big Ben (well, the tower – Big Ben’s the bell inside, isn’t it), or flying a drone through obstacle-filled ducts and vents. Between those, the campaign missions, side quests and recruitment missions, there’s plenty to keep you going.
There are a few slightly less-desirable quirks, like how picking up a collectible automatically takes you to a screen within the menu when you’d much prefer the game to let you look at it later, waypoints not updating on your on-screen mini map when your objectives change (you have to faff around going into the main menu to set it up manually) and, maybe strangest of all, some bizarrely ill-fitting voice acting. Nine times out of ten, the voice that comes out of a character just doesn’t sound like it should belong to that person. With so many playable characters in the game, it would be unreasonable to expect every single one of them to have a fully fleshed-out voiceover, but it really can be quite jarring at times.
But none of this really affects how much fun the game can be. The campaign in particular has some fantastic moments, and it gets a lot darker at times than you might expect. There’s a chance that taking the “wrong” character into a mission might make things play out a bit differently than intended, which occasionally throws things off the rails a bit, but you’ll quickly get the hang of choosing the appropriate operative to suit your own tastes. Players are given plenty of entertaining ways to navigate the open world playground of Legion‘s London, and the overarching theme of everyone working together in the face of fake news, false narratives and conspiracy theories is certainly relevant to what’s going on in the real world today. All things considered, Watch Dogs: Legion is definitely something that should appeal to most Starburst readers, so it gets two hearty thumbs up from us!
