Watch Dogs: Legion Reviews
Watch Dogs: Legion is Ubisoft’s third attempt to make the open world/hacking combination work, and despite containing a few interesting ideas, it falls flat just as quickly as the others.
It sells a London where you shoot rockets from a drone into the London Eye and then unlock the "Lambeth Defiant" rewards. A London where you can recruit and control everyone on the street, but can't reach out and touch them, or talk, or interact in any way that isn't knocking them out or shooting them in the head. A London where the city fades to background noise as you drive from waypoint to waypoint, and then stealth, and fight, and shoot, because there's nothing else to do.
Watch Dogs: Legions should’ve been an interesting game due to its “recruit everyone” nature. But for that to work it needs a city that properly reacts to the players’ actions. Sadly, the dystopian London is nothing but another theme park for you do what you want. It lacks proper context and is too afraid to tell a story that isn’t as safe as possible.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
While Ubisoft presents its best open world to date, the main gameplay hook falls flat.
It's difficult to escape a sense that the game's ambition far outstrips the number of unique people it can plausibly render.
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.
Where the action comes alive is in the leaving behind of bodies altogether. Most missions involve breaking and entering, and the thrill lies in the absence of any breaking.
Watch Dogs Legion is yet another open-world game like other Ubisoft's games, full of great ideas, but in action, they don't have enough depth and don't perform well in general. A soulless world with poor level designs and exhausting missions make a graveyard for the series's real potential.
Review in Persian | Read full review
Watch Dogs: Legion is a promising step for the franchise in so many ways, continuing to push further away from the over-the-top seriousness that was present in the famously dull original title. While Ubisoft has certainly aimed for some interesting mechanics to provide the player with exciting prospects and new ways to tackle the gameplay, mission variants are almost non-existent, offering the same tired format that is a plague on the open-world genre. Combine this with the uninspired narrative and downright terrible performance, and you are left with a game that, while at times offering some fun chances for freedom in gameplay, does nothing to justify a full-price purchase.
Watch Dogs: Legion is a disappointing follow up to Watch Dogs 2, no lessons have been learnt and despite enjoying the sights of London as a local, repetition in mission design coupled with dialogue feeling like a poor Guy Ritchie knock-off leaves a lot to be desired.
Watch Dogs: Legion offers a solid game principle that knows how to entertain - at least temporarily. A free narrative is deliberately created here, which could playfully offer undeniable new opportunities, but narrative balances on a fine line between emotion-free narrative structure and individualizable adventure. In this breakneck balancing act, Watch Dogs: Legion loses itself in a sober, generic narrative that, due to its pale character drawings and the playful omissions that accompany them, was never really allowed to keep up with its predecessors. Thanks to interchangeable characters, an unbalanced skill system and redundant game elements, Ubisoft is only marginally able to continuously exploit the potential behind the new unique selling point. Instead, the hacker IP gets lost in a jumble of well-intentioned but half-baked game approaches that ultimately fail to prove themselves on a motivational level. The manifold solution options as well as the tricky level structures should, however, at least provide for entertaining gaming fun. Despite the new approach, Ubisoft simply doesn't risk enough to really step out of the worn out, playful structures of its predecessors and burden the game principle with a little more relevance and "unconsumption". But as the saying goes: "He who does not dare does not win!
Review in German | Read full review
Watch Dogs Legion, like most of Ubisoft’s big budget games, is disposable – a value-sized bag of chips. The gameplay experience is pleasurable and addicting by nature, making you want to play even if you don’t feel like it. And when you get sick of it, you just throw it away.
Watch Dogs: Legion is more of the same, albeit with more technical problems. Even the most diehard of Watch Dogs fans should wait for a patch or two before jumping in.
A surprisingly inaccurate recreation of London ties into simplistic gameplay and terrible performance to create a deeply flawed and shallow game.
Watch Dogs: Legion aims to be a truly ambitious entry in the series with its Legion system, but to paraphrase Ian Malcolm, the developers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.
While it has its moments, Watch Dogs Legion doesn't have enough to feel like a fun place to escape to. The gameplay is too repetitive and too restrictive to allow for anything tremendously exciting over a long period of time. It's a game that shows all of its tricks within the first few hours and leaves you with nothing but jank for the remainder of your playthrough.
Watch Dogs: Legion has some good ideas, but its story is downright terrible and it suffers from so many technical problems that it's hard to recommend the game over a different, more refined, Ubisoft sandbox game.
There’s some fun to be had in Watch Dogs Legion, but it becomes so repetitive that by the end of the game everything feels like a chore — one I was desperately wanting to be over hours before its credits rolled.
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.