Watch_Dogs: Legion

International hacker collectivist DedSec has been blamed for a series of terrorist bombings that have ripped through London, killing hundreds. The British government has called on private security company Albion to replace the Metropolitan Police and stop further attacks, but the capital is now a morass of security checkpoints, heavily-armed guards with no accountability and constant drone surveillance. DedSec is regrouping with a new mission: to clear its name and expose those responsible for the bombings. But it needs new recruits...

Watch_Dogs: Legion is the third game in the Watch Underscore Dogs series from Ubisoft. The series has, to date, made an entertaining fist of its premise, which is basically being a Tesco own-brand version of Grand Theft Auto with worse driving, combat and storytelling, but the entertaining ability to hack the world around you. This gives the player some control over the environment, allowing you to remotely open gates, take over turrets, seize control of drones and wrestle control over passing cars and send them flying into a river, if you want.

Legion is the third game in the series and introduces a potentially very interesting and powerful idea: the game does not have a set cast of major characters as such. Instead, it allows DedSec to recruit literally any passing character off the street. Using the traditional Watch_Dogs device of scanning each passer-by's mobile phone, you can quickly discover their political leanings, sports team affiliations and medical or criminal history, working out if they'd be a good recruit for DedSec or not. Sometimes the recruitment systems is as easy as asking, "Wanna join DedSec, bruv?" and sometimes it triggers a mission where you have to do them a favour, like rescuing a family member who's being intimidated by thugs or deleting evidence about their criminal behaviour from a server. The only constants are Sabine, the sole survivor of the original London DedSec cell from before the bombings, and Bagley, a powerful AI that has been subverted to DedSec's cause and serves as your omnipresent "man in a van" assistant.

This initially sounds amazing, and for the first hour or so of the game it was as I had to undertake a series of missions with an elderly pensioner, which lent things a rather different vibe to the usual well-trained, young protagonists who feature in video games. After a while I'd built up a small team of what felt like everyday people, but I found myself defaulting to Myrtle, a late-twenties Irish construction worker who could legitimately enter many of the city's no-go security areas thanks to her job ID, and was impressive in hand-to-hand combat thanks to an unfeasibly massive wrench that was her signature weapon. Most impressively, she could at any time summon a cargo drone which she could use to get around the city and reach the tops of buildings, which a non-drone-equipped operative might have to go through a laborious infiltration mission to achieve. Myrtle became my default protagonist as I set about liberating London's boroughs early on, a surprisingly easy task which you can knock out in a couple of hours and unlocks a whole set of new, more powerful recruits. I did find myself swapping in Rosalind, a spy with a silenced armour-piercing pistol and a mildly ridiculous car with a built-in missile launcher and cloaking device, for missions that required heavy combat. When she got arrested on a mission, I instead deployed Ayodele, a formidable ex-hitman with a varied weapons arsenal. However, even Myrtle remained a viable character through to the endgame.

This signature feature of the game therefore ended up being both impressive but then undercooked: you'll probably find yourself defaulting to a small pool of 3-4 hyper-capable characters and ignoring everyone else. The game does offer up an ironman mode, so if a character dies, they die for good (and Legion's save game system is pretty much limited to saving on shutdown, so there's no easy way to do over missions if things go south), but it's easy to replace even hardcore combat agents with 1:1 replacements even if they fall on a mission. The game is also rather straightforward even on the hardest difficulty, so that's not a major obstacle.

Combat and stealth are functional rather than attractive. As usual for the series, setting traps and luring bad guys into them is a great way of thinning out the ranks from afar before you engage personally; many missions actually allow you to complete them by just using your spiderbot, a remote access drone which can merrily scurry through tiny vents to reach areas humans can't reach. The spiderbot is ridiculously capable, and after you've upgraded it, it can switch on a short-burn cloaking device and knock out enemies with an electrical discharge. I'd estimate I completed around 50% of the missions in the game using the spiderbot alone whilst the operator sat well outside of the mission area, almost impervious to detection. The game does try to make things a bit more challenging than Watch_Dogs 2 by only giving you a spiderbot and not an aerial drone as well, but there's so many passing aerial drones you can take over at any second, this really ends up not being a limitation at all.

However, the lengthy time spent carefully infiltrating enemy locations or hacking your way steadily to victory with a low body count feels a bit redundant when you can often shoot your way to victory in a fifth of the time. The first two games in the series encouraged you not to murder every security guard and police offer in sight, pointing out these were often ordinary people doing their day job. However, in Legion almost all areas are defended by either Albion security guards - whom you see punching pensioners on the street and arresting innocent people for no reason on a regular basis - or by the enforcers of Clan Kelly, a criminal gang engaged in people trafficking, slavery, gun-running and drug-dealing. This removes a lot of the moral nuance of the earlier games and gives you the green light to wade into areas with all guns blazing, especially as your characters in this game are hardier than Marcus in Watch_Dogs 2.

Legion's portrayal of London is excellent. The city itself is well-depicted, with major landmarks all present and correct but also many individual buildings, pubs and even flower stands. There is some compression - where there are five parallel residential streets in a row in reality, there might be one here, and Liverpool Street Station is bizarrely missing when the surrounding tube stations are correctly present - but overall Legion effortlessly becomes the single finest realisation of London in a video game to date.

More of a mixed bag is voice acting and writing. Not having a central protagonist or even a cast of protagonists is a major handicap. Procedurally-generated missions where you have to save one of your recruits who's been kidnapped have your character awkwardly saying, "We have to save our friend!" rather than their name, which sounds okay once but not five or six times through a mission. It's hard to see how this could be overcome, with apparently tens of thousands of name combinations and around twenty different voice actors with several versions of the script for each mission and cut scene, but it does add an artificial air to proceedings. The acting is mostly fine from the actual named, recurring characters, but many of the protagonists feel off, with extremely generic lines delivered in ways that don't always make sense. It turns out having an effectively infinite pool of characters with potentially infinite personalities makes voicing and writing for them in a reasonable timeframe impossible.

The game is pretty solid, but it does feel a little wanting in content compared to Watch_Dogs 2. That game gave you an absolutely massive list of optional activities to take part in, including car, kart and drone racing, and Uber-driving. None of these are present in Legion. Watch_Dogs 2 also had a more interactable environment, allowing you to blow up gas mains under the street to deter pursuit, change traffic lights to create chaos and frame people, even police and security, so they get carted off by the law and thin out enemy ranks before you engage them. None of this is present in Legion, either. Watch_Dogs 2 also had a fairly well-developed mobile phone you could interact with, playing with apps and watching news channels. Mobiles are still in Legion but are extremely limited in their use.

Watch_Dogs: Legion (***½) is a mixed bag, but ultimately enjoyable and worth playing, especially for its excellent depiction of London. The significantly reduced amount of content compared to its immediate forebear is disappointing, and the "play anyone" idea is an absolutely brilliant one which falters somewhat in the execution, but this kind of experimentation in the AAA space is rare and should be applauded, even if ultimately it doesn't entirely deliver on its promise. The game is available now.

Watch_Dogs 2

More than two years have passed since Aidan Pearce and the hacker group DedSec exposed the flaws in the ctOS computer network that had been given oversight over Chicago, creating the world's first "smart city." Unfortunately, the supercorporation that owns ctOS, Blume, was able to spin the defeat as a test run and has since gone global, with more cities joining the network. The San Francisco branch of DedSec uncovers unusual activity in Blume's local office and recruits a new member to help them expose the company's latest malfeasance.

The original Watch_Dogs (2014) was an interesting but heavily flawed game, taking the Grand Theft Auto model - an open world city which you can run around in, completing missions and side-activities to your heart's content - and adding elements to it derived from the Deus Ex series of cyberpunk video games, such hacking, stealth and multiple solutions to any given problem. It had a few distinguishing features of its own - such as using a real city rather than a fictional one and the idea of manipulating the open world itself to help you - but ended up feeling a bit over-familiar and under-ambitious, weighed down by a cliched, grim main story and unsympathetic characters.

Watch_Dogs 2 is very similar to the first game, but it feels like Ubisoft have carefully made note of the criticisms of the first game and carefully thought them through in developing this sequel. The game is Watch_Dogs with most of the rough edges smoothed off, new and interesting ideas added and an altogether lighter air adopted that makes the moment-to-moment gameplay far more enjoyable than the preceding game. The game is still flawed but it is a much slicker, more compelling package this time around.

The first good thing is that the game just drops you straight into the action. No introductory cutscenes laboriously establishing your character and his motivations, instead you find yourself standing outside a data centre belonging to Blume as unseen allies talk you through the process of infiltrating. You quickly discover that your name is Marcus and you're a hacker trying to join DedSec. Within a few minutes you're trying out your abilities, learning how to deal with guards and completing your first mission before being thrust out into the world, ready to proceed with the story or just cruise around doing side-activities. The game refreshingly puts few barriers between you and actually playing it, which feels joyously rare for a AAA open-world game these days.

The game also improves on the original by giving Marcus a discernible personality. He's a hacker and a geek but also a chilled out dude. Aidan Pearce's moany whinings are nowhere to be seen and it's fun to roam around the virtual San Francisco with Marcus. He also has a fellow bunch of DedSec members helping him out and they're also enjoyable to work with (DedSec is more front-and-centre in the game, unlike the previous one where Aidan was more an ally of theirs rather than working for them directly): confident street-artist Sitara, deranged punk Wrench, tech worker Horatio and the gifted, on-the-spectrum Josh. They're a great bunch of characters with discernible personalities and some reasonably solid writing backing them up which manages to overcome the "hacktivist" clichés. A couple of Watch_Dogs characters do transition over later on to provide a bit more connective tissue to the first game, but foreknowledge of the original game is not required.

The game's real star is San Francisco and the (somewhat condensed) version of the city in the game is a triumph. Roaring around the Bay Area by car, bike or boat is a genuine pleasure, much moreso than the somewhat morose Chicago of the original game, and Ubisoft have been unexpectedly generous in how much stuff there is to do in the game. You can race eKarts, bikes and drones; you can act as a non-copyright-infringing Uber driver, with some of your random passengers unexpectedly sparking off side-quests of their own; you can meet up with supporters of DedSec with intel on what's going on, which can also transform into elaborate sequences of missions; you can also go hunting for an enormous number of collectables, ranging from the trivial (new car paintjobs and outfits) to the extremely useful (cash drops, new abilities and upgrade points). You could happily spend a couple of dozen hours just doing this stuff rather than following the main story.

The main story, though, is surprisingly fun. Blume has joined forces with a bunch of Valley tech companies (and not quite as on-the-nose 1:1 versions of Facebook and Twitter as you might expect) to use the information from ctOS as a way of making money from the government, military and law-enforcement agencies by essentially breaching international law and the US Constitution. The primary antagonist is Dusan Nemec, a Blume executive with a truly offensive man-bun hairstyle. Dusan is initially a tough opponent, constantly one step ahead of DedSec, but as the hackers expose and halt his plans and build up a picture of his allies and resources, it becomes a more evenly-matched battle. Watch_Dogs 2 improves over its predecessor by established the stakes and the abilities of everyone involved and (mostly) plays fair in how it advances the story. Refreshingly, at no point are you taken prisoner, inexplicably allowed to live and have to escape, which is a Ubisoft cliché by this point.

Missions usually involve Marcus being sent to a location, which he has to hack into or gain information. Some missions do require Marcus to be physically present, but a surprising number are wide open and you can approach them by several means: direct combat which is usually the hardest option (Marcus is nowhere near as tough as Aidan was in the first game and can die from a couple of bullets), stealth or remote hacking using radio-controlled vehicles. Marcus gets an RC car early on which can pick things up and hack things through a hardline, as well as later one a quadcopter drone which can only hack things remotely but can fly and reach high places much more easily. Missions get tougher as the game proceeds, but Marcus also unlocks powerful new abilities. Particularly enjoyable is the ability to frame enemies for crimes on the spot or put out a contract on them, effectively calling in police (for the former) or gang members (for the latter) to attack your opponents on your behalf. An impregnable fortress becomes rather more pregnable if you send in police and SWAT forces first to apprehend half the security force on trumped-up murder charges (or, more disturbingly, real crimes that you expose).

This kind of ability raises some ethical questions about DedSec's power: you can also get the police to arrest any random passer-by on trumped-up charges, for example. You assume that they'll be released once the police realise they've been hacked but it raises some questions about the group's honesty that the story itself also touches on, but never really answers. Your group's fury at discovering the extent of Blume's violation of privacy feels a bit rich when you've just had the living statue in the park arrested purely for being annoying.

The darker side of this is something the game doesn't even attempt to address in the story. Nothing is stopping you, as Marcus, from strapping up with some heavy machine guns and wading into each mission and massacring everyone in sight: security guards, police, even civilian workers and passers-by. You can remote-detonate gas mains in roads, blowing up cars and killing innocent people. You can drop explosives from your drone into crowded shopping areas, arrange drive-by shootings of random office workers and trigger a full-scale gang war which can escalate into total mayhem with dozens killed in the crossfire. But the story will never, ever acknowledge that you've done these things. DedSec remain the plucky underdog searching for the truth and protecting the public and Marcus is the chipper fighter for freedom, no matter how many people he's killed that day. This disconnect between potential gameplay and story (especially given Blume's desperation to discredit DedSec) is fairly nonsensical and the only way I could resolve it was by adopting a non-lethal playthrough using a stun gun (and, later, stun shotgun) and using takedowns to knock enemies out rather than kill them. Unfortunately, the game doesn't really acknowledge this approach either. Even worse, the game seems to reach to stun shots the same way it does to machine guns, with SWAT teams responding with excessive force in trying to murder you despite you not having actually hurt anyone.

This is where the game's weaker elements kick in. Combat is generally poor. Cover is far too sticky, resulting in more deaths from fighting the cumbersome interface than from actual enemy tactics (trying to get the game to detach Marcus from cover when a grenade lands at his feet is a challenge in itself). Stealth is also poor: enemies can spot you hiding from very unlikely positions and enemies are telepathic, so if one spots you, all of the bad guys in the area know where you are with laser-like precision instantly. With combat and stealth being underwhelming, the game seems to be pushing you to using hacking for almost every mission and it's by far the most rewarding (not to mention amusing) option, but it does feel like Ubisoft missed a trick by not removing the head-on combat option altogether and forcing you to rely on your wits instead.

There are other gameplay elements which are odd. The ubiquitous Ubisoft Tower of Knowledge, which you have to unlock to detect all the available activities in a given area (a common element in their Assassin's Creed, Far Cry and Watch_Dogs franchises), is oddly missing, but feels like it should be present. Not only are radio towers and satellite dishes frequently present in the game (now occasionally serving as download points for collectible information), but there is no way of flagging this information on the map. You have to physically drive or walk around and hope you pass close enough to an icon for it to appear on your map. I get why they did this - they wanted to avoid the maps covered in points of interest you then tick off like a robot in their previous games - but with no alternative method in place of finding this information, it just makes the task of locating all these items more laborious. I finished the game with numerous collectibles left incomplete just because there is no way of identifying them, which is weird.

These negatives are annoying, but certainly not a deal-breaker. The story is solid, the characters likeable, the actual game world is overwhelmingly impressive (and will bring back pleasant memories of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, something that Watch_Dogs 2 seems to lean into on occasion), the side-activities are hugely fun and the power the game gives you to impact on the game world and manipulate the factions and infrastructure to your advantage is genuinely original and interesting. Open-world games are becoming a bit of a tired genre these days, but Watch_Dogs 2 avoids most of the negatives and delivers a very enjoyable experience.

Watch_Dogs 2 (****) is a sequel which takes the original game and improves on it in every single way, as well as bringing more humour and fun to the franchise. Stodgy combat and weak stealth let down the choices somewhat, but the remarkably fun and engaging hacking mechanics do make up for this. The game is available now on PC, X-Box One and PlayStation 4. A sequel, Watch_Dogs: Legion, was recently released.