Watch Dogs: Legion Reviews
Watch Dogs: Legion‘s beautiful London and its array of recruitable denizens make it one of the most enjoyable games of the year.
Watch Dogs: Legion is a hacking good time and a great addition to Ubisoft’s technology-based saga.
A disappointingly tame vision of a near future dystopia, that represents a perfectly competent use of the Ubisoft formula but falters in its attempts to add anything new to it.
Playing (pre-release) on Xbox One we experienced a chuggy frame rate and several crashes, but our experience on Xbox Series X has been smooth as butter. More than that, London rendered on next-generation consoles is pretty as a picture, with beautiful lighting effects that include puddles on its wet roads that perfect reflect the city and its gorgeously overcast sky.
What you end up with is an experience that shows a ton of promise, but ends up being entirely average. It's hard to call Watch Dogs Legion a bad game outright. It's a serviceable, if traditional, open-world game with a boring story and novelty mechanics that play out better on paper than in execution. The PS5 version makes expected improvements to visuals and load times, but isn't a standout example of a "next-gen" title.
Watch Dogs: Legion is incredibly ambitious, but the play as anyone system needs a little more work. The story suffers from the lack of a central protagonist, and it's hard to get attached to any of your characters when the character models and animations are stiff and robotic. Still, there's a lot of fun to be had in futuristic London.
Watch Dogs: Legion is a departure from the typical Ubisoft brand, and it's better for it. The play as anybody system just works, there's a lot to do, and it's unabashedly political in a way that feels important in 2020.
Watch Dogs: Legion pushes current-gen hardware to the limit, and suffers for it.
Ubisoft is known for making great open-world experiences and Watch Dogs: Legion is almost that. With a darker storyline and a wonderfully re-imagined London that is the star of the show, the third entry into the franchise feels as if it’s slightly matured from Watch Dogs 2. The new ‘play as anyone’ mechanic is innovative but sadly soon becomes redundant. Numerous bugs and glitches also mar the overall experience. Having the game crash several times and losing about 20 minutes worth of progress each time is not something that should be happening with a big-budget title such as Legion. Even after downloading the latest hotfix, crashing issues still persisted. This will likely be fixed with more patches later on down the line, but it will still be disappointing for those who purchase the game on day one. However, if you can keep a stiff upper lip about some of the bugs, you’ll have a lot of fun with Legion. Even if someone does end up calling you a twatwaffle.
Ubisoft Toronto's 'Play as Anyone' system results in the publisher's most unique open-world game in years. Just don't take it too seriously.
Watch Dogs Legion's innovative 'play as anyone' gimmick gives a fresh twist to the open-world template
I haven’t played a game as odd as Legion in a very long time. Unlike the glossy, beautiful, but samey open-worlds that have dominated the genre in the past few years, it is ambitious, imperfect and unashamedly weird. To me it’s a fascinating, flawed, well-intentioned experiment in what a game can have to say, and how it can say it, while still conforming to the established fun-first template of an open-world action game. London’s landmarks are all here, from the Tower to the Eye, but rather than reducing the city to a pretty backdrop for generic madcap violence, it lets you find your own fun – or even your own meaning – in what you do there.
My gripes really stem from the place of being a fan. Anyone entering Watch Dogs: Legion looking for a by the books open world game is going to find a lot to enjoy. There are small puzzles to solve, plenty of collectibles, lots of missions and I would say the shooting and driving are the best this series has ever been. Fans of the series like myself however will be disappointed by the lack of enjoyable characters as well as stand out missions and story beats. With how close Legion is releasing to Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla and Immortals Fenyx Rising it feels like Watch Dogs: Legion was left to fight for your attention and your money with less money put into development. I would recommend both Watch Dogs 1 & 2 as well as plenty of other Ubisoft experiences from the last few years before Legion at full price.
Watch Dogs: Legion is a far more palatable experience on PS5 thanks to its vastly-improved load times and splendid visual upgrades. The only real technical gripes are that there's little in the way of DualSense implementation, and the framerate, while steady, hasn't been upped. Its base problems of open-world fatigue and messy storytelling are still problems that can't be so easily fixed and still remain a significant barrier to enjoyment. It'll give you a dazzling trip to London, but you wouldn't want to stay there.
Watch Dogs Legion might look and run better than ever on PS5, but that means little when the game itself struggles to break the boundaries of mediocrity. This next-gen version remains unchanged from its PS4 counterpart as far as gameplay goes, so the boosted performance does little to hide the title's underlying issues. No matter how well it runs, Watch Dogs Legion needs to sort out how it plays.
Ubisoft's hacker title shines on Xbox Series X.
Watch Dogs: Legion starts with some really intriguing background ideas, ideas that try to dig deep and to leave us with many more questions about the near future. The overwhelming control of a state willing to know everything about its citizens, however, does not prevent a few uncertainties about the gameplay, a sore note that prevents the game from shining as hoped. However, it remains an enjoyable offer, ready to satisfy the taste of lovers of the genre.
Review in Italian | Read full review
The takeaway is this: Watch Dogs: Legion is an ambitious simulation which reliably fails whenever players push against its boundaries. Like the cargo drones which grant them the ability to freely fly, it hits an invisible ceiling that prevents players from soaring above London’s skyscrapers.
On the one hand Watch Dogs: Legion is a revolutionary game with ambitious open world and thousands upon thousands of characters, probably created by some kind of neural network. The gameplay is fine, and if you love original Watch Dogs, you will feel right at home with this new title. But on the other hand Legion clearly lacks a strong narrative lead.
Review in Russian | Read full review