Watchdogs Legion happened to be the first from the series that I’ve played. If I had
to describe it, it’s an open-world where all of the missions and interesting bits occur
within specific buildings or city blocks. You can play as whoever you like, and all
of the characters you recruit off the streets have different perks and weaknesses. Missions
typically involve reaching a certain spot within a secret underground base of some sort,
and you do so either by physically entering the building, or by using drones, cameras
or spiderbots. Normally the best approach requires several of these.
I really got a Deus-Ex vibe from this game, though the humour in this game is more tongue
in cheek. Both these series are based around a horrifying direction that future technologies
might choose to go, but while in Deus Ex, the corporations have more power than the
government, in Watchdogs, the people have more power than those corporations!
I have no doubt this game knows how ridiculous it is that your character can casually hack
anything they please using their phone, from road blocks to the cars themselves. Some games
get bogged down by trying to explain themselves, but Watchdogs is happy just to let you roam
a world where everybody is one mission away from being a master hacker, ready to take
on a corrupt government! It takes it in its stride, smirking all the way. And the game
isn’t shy of cracking some literal jokes either. Some of these jokes are laugh out
loud funny. ‘That’s one criminal scraped. Now, let’s
give their friend a good scraping too! And then maybe their MUM! No one will be left
unscraped. NO ONE.’ …but most, if you’re English, you’ll
hear, nod to acknowledge you heard it, then never speak of it again.
I liked the setting. It was refreshing to play a game set in London and they’ve done
a great job of making it look RIGHT. The raytracing may add nothing to the gameplay, but it turns
out that a city with all its reflective windows everywhere is a great place to use the technology
and the novelty of checking out the reflections didn’t tire, even as I approached the end
of the campaign. The game has a very open, very airy feeling
to it. It’s like the opposite of Half Life Alyx in a way- that game forced you down claustrophobic
corridors and through small gaps. But Watchdogs lets you run around the tops of skyscrapers,
lets you dive off the tallest of ledges, and letting you ride transport drones to grant
you a level of vertical freedom that few games dare offer.
I’d almost say the game is TOO generous. It opens up to you early on, and I remember
asking ‘is that it’ when I saw how few gameplay features there were in total. But
the beauty of this game is in familiarising yourself with all of them and in choosing
the BEST one for the job. Even if it is quite forgiving and will let you limp through, using
the poorer choices as well. For instance- everybody you recruit has different
abilities and perks. This is to encourage you to choose the right operative for the
mission you’re setting off on. But I didn’t bother doing this- I got a few agents early
on and stuck to them, since I found their suppressed weapons or automatic rifles to
be handier than some niche hacking perk or unique melee attack, which is what most people
seem to get. I don’t regret sticking to just a few people, actually- I grew rather
fond of those few operatives as the game progressed. Enough that I didn’t mind occasionally rescuing
one of them if they got captured. But yeah, the item and agent nuances were things I didn’t
notice until later on, by which point I knew enough about the game that I didn’t need
to exploit it fully any way. The missions you do are mostly forgettable.
They’re just an excuse to visit a certain location and to engage in the gameplay loop.
Most of these are a generic case of ‘breaking and entering’, but from time to time there
are one-off missions which try something different. Like one where you command a drone so small
that you can explore the inner workings of a processor, or ones where you get your main
gameplay stripped away, forcing you to make do with what little it gives you to work with.
All in all, there are a lot of places to visit, and a lot of missions to complete, but I feel
like the game could have done a better job of separating them into separate ‘genres’,
like the different characters in GTA do with their missions.
And I also think it would have been cool for the game to have ‘built up’ as it progressed,
unlocking more powerful characters, and bigger and better missions. The game gives you too
much too soon, then it’s a case of grinding through all this content to the end. Maybe
it does get harder, but I didn’t notice it. They could start by adding levelled zones
to the city, where some areas are challenging even at the end of the campaign. As it is
you’re just dashing about all over the place and the regions of the city have no significance
other than to slow you down by forcing you to travel across them in one way or another.
In a way, I feel Watchdogs Legion is too much of a good thing. The missions all remind me
of the greatest moments in Deus Ex for me. The Palisade Bank, for instance- there must
be a dozen places in this game which are exactly like that. And I LOVE the Palisade Bank from
Deus Ex. It’s hard for me to describe what it is about these scenarios that I enjoy,
I think it’s the novelty of being somewhere I shouldn’t be, about outsmarting the enemies
and security systems, and about feeling in control of a situation that, when I stop and
look at it, is actually really dangerous for me to be in. And while I’d love to give
specific examples in Watchdogs where it all came together and ‘clicked’ for me, I
just can’t because I’d end up describing the bit of wall I was hidden behind when this
dawned on me, or how I was marvelling at the sun shining through a window when all these
gameplay mechanics came together in a fleeting yet beautiful way.
So yeah, the game as a whole is ‘solid’ but not spectacular, but there are moments
here and there where I realise that it’s exactly the sort of gameplay that I want from
a game. And in those moments I suddenly remember that I’m really enjoying myself. But I think
the impact of these occasions is lessened because Palisade-Bank style heists are ALL
you do in this game. I ended up taking it for granted, grinding through high-security
bank after high-security bank, simply to progress further in the game.
The tools you have at your disposal are POWERFUL. The spiderbot can be used as a ‘spare life’,
since it can do almost everything your character can. Your character can also hack dangerous
drones and they’ll mow enemies down for you. You can jump between CCTV cameras as
quickly as you please, mapping out even the biggest of under-ground lairs in a matter
of seconds! And there is one type of drone that you can stand on as you fly it about,
which proves to be even more powerful than you might think it is. Considering that many
missions involve reaching the rooftops, you can cut all this off simply by flying across
London on a drone from mission to mission! It’s a novelty for a game to give you this
much power, but it ultimately undermines the gameplay by simply being a bit too powerful.
I commend the game for avoiding combat. Killing people isn’t a big part of this game- it’s
more about punching people, or tazering them, or avoiding combat entirely, which helps distance
Watchdogs from the GTA series, which it will no doubt be compared to. That being said,
you CAN still shoot people, and once you get automatic or suppressed weapons, it’s all
too easy to bypass the clever traps and espionage by simply storming the objectives, all guns
blazing. I ended up doing this to save a few minutes a mission, the lives of guards be
damned!
Having now finished the game, I don’t feel too tempted to revisit Watchdogs Legion any
time soon. I’ve had my fun from it, and looking back can recall some specific moments
and locations which conjour up fond memories for me. The game is a good choice if you want
a casual experience that lets you jump in and out of missions in a matter of minutes
with no major lasting repercussions. It makes you feel powerful, and it touches on the aspects
of games like Hitman and Deus Ex that I love those series for. Watchdogs Legion is a solid
sandbox game. Its setting is a refreshing break from all those American-themed sandbox
games. And it nails the feeling of London for me, being a refreshingly open and airy
environment to explore. But there’s not a lot to do once the missions are over. The
world is just a shell, with only the most basic of gameplay on offer. In other words,
the quality of Legion’s world sits slap-bang between the excellent, convincing, living,
breathing world of GTA 5… and that of Cyberpunk’s.