https://www.cybersport.ru/games/articles/obzor-watch-dogs-legion-interesnaya-mekhanika-ne-spasla-igru

Attention: the review contains spoilers for the game’s connection.

Our name is “Legion”

Meet Leroy Pal, the master drone racer and the main hope of oppressed Londoners. This is the second member of the revived hacker group DedSec whom I recruited, but it was he who inevitably became my protagonist in the first half of the game. You will not see the founding father of the gang, for this role I recklessly chose a YouTube star (I was led to his personal bike, which he could summon to any part of the map) and after half an hour I was tired of the pretended “Cool!” in every line. Soon I got rid of him – which in general was very pleasant: the character’s dossier states that he could not pass the exam in driving his motorcycle.

Leroy is a simple guy and not too ideological: he doesn’t really care about the regime, revolution and rampant crime in London. He only joined DedSec because my youtuber helped him get revenge on his former employer. Paul’s bosses decided to optimize the work of the plant and replaced the honest workers with AI – and DedSec willingly destroyed the robots. Well, or rather, erased their program – we have a hacker team.

If the main feature of a YouTuber, for some reason, was a personal bike, then a drone racer has a completely different range of skills. He can summon custom drones: one shoots a laser at enemies, the other drops bombs on them. Leroy also wears cool glasses and a mohawk that sticks out amusingly through the textures of sports cars.

The ability to independently choose a protagonist is the main feature of Legion. In the new part of Watch Dogs we do not control Aiden Pearce or Marcus Holloway, but DedSec itself, and therefore the name of the game is “Legion”. You can recruit literally every NPC from those that roam the street to the team. Here comes a politician – with an expensive personal car and a passive “Police connection”, which significantly reduces the period of detention of other team members. Here is an employee of the military academy – she carries a pistol in her purse, and she also hates crime and therefore inflicts additional damage in a battle with members of the local criminal syndicate.

The effects can also be negative: gamblers passively spend currency from your account in order to satisfy their needs. Shopaholics do the same, but at least clog your wardrobe with new clothes. I saw the “Hiccup” passive at the bartender’s – because of it, the hero cannot act secretly, because at any moment he risks attracting the attention of enemies. And some characters may even die suddenly, for example, due to health problems.

The owners of the simplest skills can be found literally on any street (I once met 24 lawyers in Piccadilly), but the most valuable recruits have to be specifically looked for. Spies (their watches block enemies’ weapons), magicians (they turn enemies into friends with hypnosis), members of underground cells (they wear powerful weapons under their cloaks) appear in the city less often, but they are marked on the map by helpful AI. To recruit any hero, you will have to complete a small quest chain for him, after which he will happily join DedSec and magically acquire the skills of a genius hacker.

A story without heroes

At this moment, the notorious people-narrative dissonance arises, which very much interferes with empathizing with the already not too dramatic events of Legion. You can recruit literally anyone in the game: not only drone racer Leroy Paul, but also a police officer, politician, Albion agent or an old woman feeding pigeons in the park. And all of them, having received a service from DedSec, will at once forget about moral dilemmas and turn into hardened cybercriminals, capable of hacking the security system of the country’s largest techno-corporation with one hand, and shooting a dozen opponents with the other.

No problem, I’m ready to believe that Leroy Pal fumbles for these rootkits of yours, and he treats human life without much trepidation. But why are the honored surgeon, who once took the Hippocratic oath, and the 77-year-old research assistant ready to destroy people without a twinge of conscience? Let us omit the question of why the old woman is generally capable of neutralizing the Albion special squad in hand-to-hand combat.

In the announcement video, the very fact of the participation of old women in shootings on the streets of London was presented with irony, and therefore it seemed that Ubisoft decided to try to play on the field of perky trash – for example, as id Software previously did with Rage 2. The attitude of fans to this shooter is not so unambiguous. But the change of the setting itself, in my opinion, went to the benefit of the series – a serious post-apocalypse today can only cause a yawn. Unfortunately, Ubisoft failed to pull off a similar maneuver.

Legion is the same serious Watch Dogs from 2014, only without a full-fledged storyline. When the game was first shown at E3, there was a discussion in the press – were the developers ironic about the situation with Brexit? Clint Hawking, the project’s creative director, gave a damn logical answer to that. Confirmed that Brexit did happen in virtual England and that the use of real context in the game is meant to help people get emotionally involved in the action. I didn’t really believe it, but deep down I still hoped that a real rebirth of the Watch Dogs series awaits us; that maybe this game can even become a symbol of change at Ubisoft – a studio that has seriously used up the community’s trust limit in recent years.

But my hopes were in vain. It seems that the developers just jumped into a convenient HYIP-train when the journalists started talking about Brexit and other allusions to reality. In fact, Legion offers the user a painfully insipid story about how the system oppresses ordinary London hard workers. And the worst thing here is that this story is thoroughly saturated with various cliches, but it is presented anyway with an absolutely serious face, without a shadow of irony.

Legion’s plot begins with a failed terrorist attack that was supposed to lead to the explosion of Westminster Palace. Unknown people planted bombs in barrels in the basement – well, so that the player would definitely remember about Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot. By the way, I think that is why the game abandoned traditional bandanas and focused on masks – all in honor of the progenitor of “anonymous”.

The explosion was stopped, but throughout London at that time a series of others thundered – and DedSec was immediately blamed for the incident. The agents of our hacker group are systematically destroyed, and London is handed over to Albion, a private military company, which has undertaken to maintain order and security, turning the city into a closed police state. Oh yes, there is a familiar to all fans of the ctOS game in London, thanks to which millions of cameras and drones are monitoring every step of local residents.

If it seems to you that something is missing here before the caricatured dystopia, then you are absolutely right. So here they are, from left to right: the frightening Kelly crime family, to which Albion somehow turns a blind eye; the eccentric head of the mega-corporation conducting unethical experiments; and the mysterious hacker group that set everyone up. Now the player’s task is to build DedSec from scratch, save the city from the oppression of Albion and … well, in general, everything – all hackers in Legion are completely altruists and have forgotten to think about any personal benefit.

The game greets you with a mass of notes and audio messages, podcasts, news reports, which makes the world of Legion really seem to be alive in the first couple of hours: each NPC has its own perks and biography, and notes and audio files open their eyes to the problems of the current situation of Londoners. We learn that Albion is watching people, that fear reigns in society, that denunciations of neighbors for many have become a way to survive, that crime reigns on the streets … Yes, this story is not new, but GTA V also began with a stereotyped robbery and problems of African American car thieves.

But then you set off on the plot, and in it – again the same stories, but in other words, everything is all about how the ruthless state machine strangles ordinary hard workers. And then it suddenly becomes clear that behind this convincing, though painfully caricatured facade, nothing else is hidden. Your hero is a doctor / drone racer / politician who just struggling with the system. The head of Albion is a warrior who just wants power. The head of a crime syndicate is a criminal who just chasing money. None of them have any emotional connections with other people, no ulterior motives, or at least some healthy motivation. They are all one-dimensional – to match the dummies that DedSec recruits on the street.

Game without towers

Many games, no matter how complex their narratives, can often be reduced to some simple, even primitive formula. For example, in Death Stranding, the core mechanic is the transfer of goods, in Amnesia: Rebirth, it is walking through dark corridors, and in Dark Souls, it is directly beating mobs. Watch Dogs: Legion also has a basic mechanic – and this, of course, is a hack.

In the new Ubisoft game, we will have to hack cameras, drones, tablets, PCs and endless security shields that are literally in every home. Everything seems to be logical, but the fact is that at Kojima, in between deliveries, you will still sometimes fight with Mads Mikkelsen or watch “movies”, and in Amnesia you will solve puzzles and run from ghouls. There are no other attractions in Legion – almost all story missions here require the player to arrive at point A, hack something and leave.

I’m not exaggerating: Legion’s storyline quests have two three-minute car chase missions and about three mandatory gunfights. You can go through all the other tasks by throwing your spider-bot into the window of the next closed zone.

The rest is a matter of technology (literally). The bot can disable security systems, download passwords from guards, and, as a rule, at the end of a mission, hack quest devices. At the same time, your hero will be safe outside the closed zone, and then even if the spider dies, he can simply launch a new one. When I completed one of the first missions without leaving the car, I laughed and decided to arrange a kind of challenge for myself – to see how far you can go in Legion with just a bot. It turns out that you can go through the whole game. The only problem is that during some quests there will be a risk of falling asleep.

Your character can also perform the functions of a bot, but for this he will either have to move covertly or enter into confrontation with opponents. Luckily for our hackers, London is full of gentlemen who don’t get firearms if their opponent is unarmed. I still cannot understand the reason for such a game design decision, however, even if you get into the field of sight of the enemy in the middle of a military base, you can solve all the issues with him in an honest fist fight. He will not call for help, and his brothers in arms, who will witness the fight, will also accept the rules of the game and hide the rifles.

Ubisoft has emphasized that changing your character will open up new ways for you to play. This is only half true. Indeed, a builder can call a special drone and fly with it to the roof, and a spy can get a pistol with a silencer and quietly interrupt everyone. However, the exact same bot can be intercepted right in the sky (or called at ubiquitous stations), and a pistol with a silencer can be unlocked by spending 15 minutes collecting resources in any area. Other agent perks allow you to diversify the game a little – for example, it’s always nice to hack an enemy drone to get it over to your side. But there is hardly a single gamer for whom The Witcher suddenly played with new colors after pumping the Axiy sign.

Aiden come back

It’s strange to say that, but Legion turned out to be a downgrade compared to the previous part of Watch Dogs – and this despite the fact that the “two” was released four years ago. Then Ubisoft managed to reboot the series, replacing black and white Chicago with sunny San Francisco, and gloomy Aiden Pearce with his family problems with a group of funny hackers who tried to collect subscribers on social networks, and ended up at the center of a government conspiracy.

Legion failed to learn its lesson and instead tried to roll out on just one new mechanic – recruiting NPCs. That’s just to have fun with the collection of a squad of fighting old women begins to get bored after a couple of hours of play, and besides this, the new Watch Dogs simply has nothing to offer. Legion is a game with no characters and no storyline, and all the narrative tricks of the writers trying to save the situation can always be recognized a mile away. It is ironic that there was still one quest in the game that seemed interesting to me – at the end of this mission I was given a moral choice, which somewhat raised my morale, but … Literally a second after completing the quest, one of the characters called me and brought the significance of my decision is nullified. Apparently, so that I do not exactly think that I am doing something important in the game.

The gameplay in Watch Dogs was initially not a strong point, and without script support, it completely fades even when compared with the title of four years ago. Cars in Legion are still as tough as irons and can easily fit into any corners at full speed, gunfights suffer from weak AI enemies, and melee battles follow the same formula – I guarantee you won’t lose a fight if you hit three hits. dodge, three hits. However, it is completely unnecessary to get involved in them, since all tasks can be easily completed by a mobile spider robot.

In Watch Dogs: Legion, you can spend a day or two collecting DedSec dreams and dressing hackers to your liking. If you love Ubisoft’s open worlds, then you will surely enjoy finding masks, graffiti spots, propaganda screens, rare agents and other collectibles. Perhaps the multiplayer will also be interesting – at the time of writing this review, Ubisoft has not yet launched the servers. However, the role of a full-fledged story game Legion copes with a very difficult task. It’s a pity, because the hacker setting of the original Watch Dogs was a lucky find for the company.