3.5/5 ★ – UpwardBoss's review of Watch Dogs: Legion.

Watch Dogs Legion is great... and terrible... at the same time. Now I know this sounds ridiculous, but hear me out. Watch Dogs Legion has a very solid campaign with a great narrative which kept me engaged the whole way through. Watch Dogs Legion ALSO has very repetitive and disappointingly shallow open world content, a recruitment system which quickly becomes repetitive and boring, and it's in a horrendous technical state on PS4 Pro as of right now. Let's cover the recruitment system first, while a very ambitious concept, the "play as anyone" concept quickly becomes a gimmick since there's really only a few types of characters, and the recruitment missions quickly become incredibly repetitive. It also hurts the narrative somewhat which I'll get into later. The technical state of the game is also atrocious, with a shocking 11 crashes on PS4 Pro across the 29 hours it took to complete the main story and all side missions except for the ones that infinitely repeat (still have some trophies to get however). Now I've heard Xbox One X is also having serious problems with this game, while the base XB1 and PS4 are doing significantly better, so hopefully this gets patched soon. Obviously no one knows how the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S versions perform yet, because as of this writing the next gen consoles are still a week away, so I advise doing research on how those versions perform before picking this game up on next gen. The open world content also isn't particularly great, with a "borough takeover" system we've seen so many times by now, and narrative side content being few and far between. Now, the narrative. While I was concerned as to how the narrative of the game would be, considering the "play as anyone" concept, I'm pleased to say that despite those "play as anyone" issues I'll talk about in a bit, the narrative is overall very solid, with a story that kept me engaged all the way through, with some very good mission design throughout the campaign. However, the "play as anyone" system does unfortunately impact the campaign significantly, as despite the story overall being very solid, the lack of a established main character does hurt the story, as your randomly generated operatives don't fit well in the narrative, and considering the other issues I genuinely feel this would've been a better game without that system entirely. Except for one thing, there were a few times when I'd encounter NPCs in the world and they'd either already love DedSec, making it easier to recruit them (because I'd helped someone they knew earlier, or something along those lines), and sometimes they'd already hate DedSec, making it harder or even impossible to recruit them (because I'd hospitalized someone they knew while in a mission). Now this was very cool, seeing the world react to your actions in this way is incredibly immersive, and *almost* makes the entire system worthwhile, although I don't know how much of this is scripted. Regardless, even if it is an illusion, it's well done. Now I said almost for a reason, while I respect the ambition of the "play as anyone" system, I do feel it hurts the game overall, with the lack of an established protagonist hurting the otherwise great story significantly, and the gameplay of operatives being too similar. As for the game overall, this is a game that is ultimately not something I'd recommend at $60. While the story is very good, the game is held back by the "play as anyone" system, and the technical state on PS4 Pro is atrocious at the moment. However, I would recommend picking this up on sale, at about $20-30, and after patches, as the main story is worth playing through. Final score: 7/10.