Watch Dogs: Legion: PS4 Review

Developed by

Published by Ubisoft

Platform: PS4

Mixing Grand Theft Auto's sandbox world and gameplay with the physics and sensibilities of a Saints Row game, Watch Dogs Legion is as much of a game of input as it is output.

Surrender to its world, and the yield is more than satisfactory; resist, and the shallowness of the play and similarity of the game becomes evident.

Set in dystopian London, where drones fly the skies and the disaffected are everywhere, Watch Dogs: Legion centres once again around hacktivist group DedSec.

When DedSec is framed for a series of bombings in London, the revolution goes to the people as civilians rise up to take the place of the group in the aftermath of a power grab by a private security firm.

Centred on taking down Zero Day, the game isn’t slow in allowing you into the action and letting you run with it, pitting you front and centre of a race against time to prevent London being obliterated. 

But that's also its strength - and its weakness.

Watch Dogs: Legion is quite keen to keep things moving, and does so with little depth for character. The fact you can play anyone once they've been recruited to the Dedsec cause via a short side mission makes the game as open as it needs to be, but as an in-depth experience for the amount of hours that are thrown in, it's lacking.

Some of the truly laughable mockney dialogue gives the game a feel of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels: the game experience, and while it does represent in part some of the English capital's vernacular, it does sound odd from characters you've barely seen for very long. (Several phrases are repeated, a kind of limitation of the everyone can be a playable character, one guesses).

Missions are fairly straightforward; go here, do something, hack your way in, use the tech against those who would use it against you - there's not much new here that Watch Dogs hasn't done before. 

That said, it's actually immeasurably fun, if you want to dive into the world for a brief dalliance.

Matching NPCs to their skills and using them against their enemies is amusing - there's much to be said for flying through the air atop a construction drone after you've unlocked that worker and recruited them to your cause. (Paired with more depth, this could make Watch Dogs: Legion a real groundbreaker).

The continually chatty and somewhat sarcastic AI Bagley (played with brilliance by Pascal Langdale) hams up his script, but makes a great companion as you're careering round London. And talking of London, the streets are very well realised, and give the capital the life it needs. From the back streets to the main landmarks, it feels real and lived in.

All in all, Watch Dogs: Legion is a fun title to spend time; it doesn't reinvent the wheel of what's gone prior, nor does it fully move it on. But it proves to be more than a good bedfellow to wile away the gaming hours.