Our thoughts on one of the last big games to arrive before the PS5 and Xbox Series X are launched.
If you’ve ever played a Watch Dogs game before, then you know it is a series that has struggled a bit with its tone. The first game, released in 2014 and set in Chicago, followed a hacker trying to get revenge following the death of his beloved niece. It was, to put it nicely, a bit of a bummer. The 2016 sequel, set in San Francisco, went too far the other way, with a group of zaaaaaany hackers pulling pranks around city, the lightheartedness clashing hard with the gun fights and pedestrians you’d run over as you make your getaway.
The new entry is set in the not-too-distant-future version of London (so amazingly recreated that it is actually kind of staggering), following a series of terrorist bombings that have been blamed on our heroes at underground hacktivist group, DedSec. It is up to you to recruit more members to your group, preferably those with a wide-ranging set of skills, and get to the bottom of the bombings before the London police arrest or kill all of your hackers.
Setting the game in London is a clever move, already well-known for being the city with more CCTV per square meter than another place on the planet, and setting it against a nervy government group outsourcing their security needs to an over-eager tech conglomerate, which then tries to actively find potential criminals before they’ve even committed a crime… it is all very sci-fi of the now, topical and prescient, fantastical yet believable.
There are well-orchestrated side-missions involving recruits losing their jobs due to automated systems, or a lack of access to medicine due to price hikes from the private pharma companies. There are interesting gameplay mechanics on offer, from the permadeath option which will kill off one of operatives for good with no chance of respawning them, forcing you to find a replacement. Or there are easy ways to mess up a recruitment, like accidentally damaging the delivery they’ve asked for, and then that’s it, they’re gone, no longer interested in joining your group.
The police in the game are a constant threat, as are the ever-present security drones. If you stand too close to an officer attempting to arrest a pedestrian, they’ll soon turn their attentions to you. If you try to hijack a car on the street in front of the security drone, they’ll chase you down and call for support by nearby squad cars.
London really feels like a living, breathing city, perhaps even more so than the sandboxes we’ve played in Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption, with the different boroughs offering up a varied landscape, and the skyscrapers and apartment complexes all offering multiple ways to complete your missions. Want to go in all guns blazing? Go for it, but you’ll be inviting a lot more attention to yourself. Wanna go the quieter route, with your own hacked drone, or spider-bot, or just some old-fashioned sneaking? That’ll work too, but you’re going to need a lot more patience to figure out the constantly morphing puzzle box of not being noticed.
For the most part, it all coalesces into a great experience – the incredible presentation matched with fun, unique gameplay and vibrant setting, with an important and timely story… except when it isn’t.
Yep, that seesawing seriousness comes up again, and we’re left asking ourselves how we’re supposed to feel about the plot. Should we just shut up and have fun? We can do that, but the story REALLY seems to want us to take it super seriously, only to undercut it with some absolutely off-the-rails, bonkers subplots.
There was talk prior to release that this game would cut to the bone, going in deep on Brexit and xenophobia and the modern culture of politicians using fear to control the masses, but instead it is more a flesh wound, unlikely to leave a scar.
It isn’t a dealbreaker, and neither or the sometimes glitchy mission advancements, which want you to perform things in a Very Strict And Precise Order or the mission progression just doesn’t react properly, but they do sometimes take the shine off what is otherwise a hugely impressive and entertaining gaming world.
Watch Dogs: Legion is released on PS4, Xbox One, PC, and Stadia on Thursday, October 29, and will be available on Xbox Series X/S and the PS5 upon those consoles’ release dates.
READ NEXT: A full list of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X games available at launch
