We played Watch Dogs Legion. Be anyone, hack anything – review

For many years, Ubisoft’s AAA releases have been built on open worlds where you need to complete a huge number of tasks. These worlds are mostly populated by extras – but Watch Dogs, released in 2014, made a notable attempt to humanize them. The main character, a seasoned hacker, could directly hack the phone of any passer-by on the go to find out his name, age, and even facts from the biography. The third part of the series, Watch Dogs: Legion, takes this idea even further. In it, every passerby is already a potential playable character.

Brexit

The action of the “Legion” takes place in London, the near future. The UK is experiencing a severe political crisis: the government has completely lost control of the country, and Albion, a private military company, is in charge of everything. During the announcement of the game, the developers talked a lot about the consequences of Brexit, but now this word no longer sounds in the game. Perhaps, after the Brexit really took place, and nothing terrible happened to the country, they changed their minds about linking the anti-utopian future to real events.

Albion controls everything, including the media, but ordinary English people do not trust the company and try to resist it as much as they can. That is why any of them can be recruited into DedSec – a hacker group familiar from the previous parts, for which we have to play for members.

At the very beginning of the plot, DedSec was heavily framed: they were accused of terrorist attacks. The organization will have to find out who is behind this, simultaneously recruiting new recruits and reducing the influence of Albion in each of the districts of London.

Hacker city

Watch Dogs: Legion has no specific protagonist. At any time, the current DedSec agent can transfer responsibility to his partner. And the whole network is organized by artificial intelligence named Bagley – chatty and not without a sense of humor. It is he who directs the heroes to tasks and gives them advice during adventures. Perhaps, it can be called the “soul” of Watch Dogs: Legion.

Because about the characters themselves it doesn’t work out that way. No, they are not silent, faceless protagonists – on the contrary, they actively participate in dialogs, but … Their remarks are too standard, uninteresting and sometimes go wrong with the mood of the conversation. If you liked Marcus from Watch Dogs 2, then the absence of the same charismatic hero in the third part can push away.

At the same time, the characters are voiced well. My spy had an amazing Scottish accent, because of which half of the time I had to look at the subtitles

But this is the price of an infinite number of playable characters. The very fact that any passerby is a potential hero with his voice acting, skills and even a quest line is impressive. But it also causes some dissonance: it turns out that in order to be a hacker and to crack everything in a row, it is not at all necessary to have at least some qualification!

Lighter than lung

As in the previous parts of Watch Dogs, all Legion heroes know how to fight, steal and hack – these are the three pillars on which the gameplay of the entire series is based. Moreover, any of these aspects is as simple as possible to master and apply: literally one button is needed for each action. And to hand-to-hand lay the enemy, and to remove the corpses from the eyes, and to neutralize the enemy drone.

Each character has personal skills and gadgets, but in reality they are not so needed: in theory, any operative can go through any mission in any way. The old woman will knock out harsh mercenaries, the former janitor will break into any network, and the feeble student will easily shoot the guards from a machine gun.

Legion is a game about resistance to the regime, and not about cheerful youth, so you should not expect stupid jokes from the second part in the third

Legion tries not to push the player into any framework. Each mission here is essentially a sandbox where you need to have fun and not bother due to lack of skills. The level of difficulty – in any case, at the beginning of the game – is extremely low. Enemies can only crush a number, and then only if you are careless. To throw off the “tail”, just go around the corner. But even if the character is captured, he will just sit for half an hour in prison while you play for his colleagues, and then he will return to duty again.

Legion is not about a serious challenge to your skills. Rather, you yourself can determine the level of difficulty by setting your own conditions and trying different approaches. And if something goes wrong, you can always go dirty.

Like Watch Dogs 2, Legion offers a wide range of non-lethal means to eliminate enemies. Even a non-lethal shotgun!

Do what you want

Those few tasks that I managed to complete in Legion seemed of the same type. Basically, they boiled down to the same thing: one must penetrate into the protected area in order to break into the necessary terminal or save the NPC. And the latter also includes hacking, because the keys here are electronic and for some reason are read from monitors.

Since the opponents are rather weak and stupid, there is a lot of room for the most seemingly wrong decisions. For example, to pull a person out of the camera, I did not look for a key from her. Instead, I simply showed myself to the guard who was inside: to catch me, he jumped out – and opened the door for me himself. After that, all that was left was to hit him on the head and calmly go out with the captive.

On another mission in the open air, I arrived by car and simply crushed a significant part of the guard. And when my goal for hacking was on the roof of one of the buildings, I switched to the builder, climbed onto his cargo drone, flew to the neighboring roof and from there calmly shot all the enemies. They could not get close to me – they just sent attacking drones. But what’s the point? After all, drones are neutralized remotely by pressing a single button.

In general, it was the builder with his cargo drone that seemed to me the most attractive character. What are spy gadgets and hacking in comparison with the ability to literally fly around the city?

However, if we talk about acting out the role, then the policeman is out of competition. He is not only able to go to places where outsiders are forbidden, but he can handcuff anyone at his discretion. I wonder if this opportunity will be left on the release, given what a sore point the police arbitrariness has now become.

Questions on the map

Typical “penetrate and crack” tasks appear not only in the plot. For example, when I decided to recruit a random woman on the street, it turned out that she was also a hacker and was actively digging into the files of the local hospital. To convince her to join DedSec, it was first necessary to enter the hospital and remove the data from the server. And then another and steal a car on which organs were illegally transported – this is what the future heroine was driving.

Almost all side activities on the map work similarly. To set up resistance for the townspeople, for example, you need to change the propaganda of Albion for DedSec advertising. That is, to get to the construction site – the builder’s uniform is again useful here – go up to the banner and crack it. Or get into the base of “Albion” and arrange a little sabotage, ruining the high-tech equipment. You can even get into the local ctOS hub – then the hero will hack into a whole plane on which political prisoners are transported by autopilot.

When all activities in a specific area are completed, local activists will contact DedSec and share their information. And this means that it will be necessary to go on another mission for penetration and hacking. How else?

Well, at least its completion is celebrated with fireworks.

Legion looks rather modest: it is much closer to Watch Dogs 2 than to Cyberpunk 2077 – this is clearly a game for the outgoing generation of consoles. In terms of gameplay, it feels like a natural evolution of previous releases. And in tone – like a middle ground between a gloomy original and a cheerful sequel. “Legion” is unlikely to be able to impress with the plot, but fans of the series probably expect from him not this, but a large and fun sandbox. And just its Legion provides: now in Watch Dogs you can not only hack anyone, but also to be anyone.