3/5 ★ – AllieN7's review of Watch Dogs: Legion.

Admittedly rather solid once you get past the pretty excruciating opening hour or so of gameplay, I enjoyed it the more I continued but it’s absolutely the weakest Watch Dogs game so far. I do respect Ubisoft’s willingness to try new weird ideas with this franchise, this one having the concept that you can play anyone, any random NPC found on the streets you can recruit into you deadsec team and while it’s pretty cool at first it’s ultimately just a gimmick that restricts player customization and takes away massive narrative investment as you don’t really form an attachment to the character you’re playing, not to mention the recruitment missions you have to play to unlock new characters get very old and repetitive very quickly and there’s real no drive to recruit anyways once you have a few ones capable of doing unique tasks and decent weapon loadouts. While the gunplay feels a bit better here at least for me everything else has somehow downgraded, no longer can you buy cars or weapons due to them being attached to each character nor can you hack bank accounts or really do anything with in game money outside of cosmetics. Writing and the narrative here are an absolute mess that clash with each other tonally as the return to more dark storylines reminiscent of the first watch dogs doesn’t work well with the extremely cheesy and over the top dialogue and characters of this game. The main AI continuously making very out of place jokes and just being annoying overall. Even ignoring the tone issues the game lacks any interesting or fun characters or a worthwhile story in general, very disappointing as I found watch dogs 1’s story to be extremely engaging and 2’s to be filled with a fun cast of characters, here it’s just very boring and dull. Handful of technical issues even though I played this quite awhile after release and on PlayStation 5, a lot of the characters and animations often looked off, had a decent about of audio issues as well, and the open world in general was just riddled with small bugs and glitches, nothing too bad or game breaking. Load times were very good and the game never crashed or bugged out to the point of me having to restart but definitely not the most polished game out there. Hacking, shooting, and just running around this scary future take of London was a lot of fun and really made this game a blast at times, the city is very well designed and fun to explore, I especially had fun with the cargo drones, I just want air transportation in every open world game. Overall, a pretty alright time to spend 20-25 hours with, a massive downgrade from the series other entries and I really wish some aspects were ironed out better. The core gameplay loop makes this work and the open design of a lot of missions definitely kept it somewhat fun. No matter what I hope the next installment continues the trend of introducing and exploring new and weird concepts like this, just hope next time around it’s a little better executed.