The first Watch Dogs game is one of my least favorite games I’ve ever finished. I hated the protagonist, the story, the setting, and thought the gameplay was barely adequate. I only saw it through to the credits out of some sort of twisted combination of spite and the hope that something cool would happen. There were a couple decent sequences, including a fun battle in a junkyard, and I thought the soundtrack was okay, but overall I thoroughly disliked that game.

Watch Dogs 2 made substantial improvements. Marcus Holloway and crew were appealing protagonists, the story, while far from great, was at least engaging and had interesting moments, and I really liked the version of San Francisco the game presented; one of the most colorful and lively open world cities in any video game. The gameplay also saw improvements, with a focus not just on rote stealth and combat but on the use of two drones that Marcus could employ to get into certain areas and take out enemies. The game ultimately buckled under the weight of repetitive open world mission design and the ludonarrative dissonance of its light and frothy story and characters being involved in way too much brutal violence, but on balance it was a pretty fun time.

Watch Dogs Legion feels like an amplification of some of the best parts of the second game, mashed up with some of the worst parts of the first. It leans into the gameplay improvements from Watch Dogs 2, further explores the idea of Dedsec as a rag tag group of wacky operatives, and then ties all of that into an incredibly predictable and weirdly dark plot set in a version of London that is both incredibly detailed and lifelessly dull. It is probably the best of the Watch Dogs games just because it is so fun to play much of the time, but feels like a real step back in storytelling and sense of place.

Watch Dogs Legion starts with a big terrorist attack and its aftermath, which wipes out Dedsec and puts London under explicit fascist control. The only Dedsec survivors are one operative who managed to escape to the countryside, named Sabine, and a hacked version of an AI named Bagley. After the brief prologue you start the game as a randomly generated character (chosen from about a dozen options) inducted into Dedsec and set forth with the task of freeing London from its domestic occupation and discovering the identity of the Zero Day group that destroyed the prior version of your group.

From there you are set free in the city to do missions, explore, pick up collectables, and all the rest of the open world game design we’ve gotten used to. The game’s big gimmick is that every character in London, from random pedestrians to enemies to bartenders is a randomly generated character with various skills and traits who you can recruit to join your Dedsec team. If you see someone on the street you can play as them. There’s not huge differentiation between characters; most have between 1 and 4 traits that can be positive (e.g. owns a gun and/or a car, fast hack cooldowns, can get your teammates out of jail more quickly) or negative (e.g. suffers permadeath even if you don’t have it turned on, can’t sprint or take cover, takes extra damage). Each is fitted with one of twenty voices, which are further modulated to provide some differentiation between characters with the same VO performer, even if they will say the same things and sound roughly similar. They all have randomly generated faces (though you will see some who look more or less the same) and hairstyle and clothing, though you can change their wardrobe though sadly not their hair or anything else about them.

Despite all the characters roughly playing the same and having a disappointing similarity in appearance (there are no fat or particularly buff or skinny people in London, nor short or tall people or people with long hair, though there is a good mix of ethnicities) building your team is one of the most fun and addictive parts of the game. Every character has a randomly generated story and relationships to go with their traits, there are some nice unique classes with special skills and even clothing, and it’s just a lot of fun to see a random person on the street and decide “yes, I will play as her.” Unfortunately, the team building eventually loses its luster for a number of reasons. You’ve got a cap on the number of teammates you can acquire, every character plays roughly the same, and the recruitment missions are a little too long and repetitive. You will settle on a list of favorites and just use them because new people wouldn’t add much (oh joy, this guy has a different weapon than this girl) and because each recruitment involves multiple locations and doing a few of the same things (Steal a vehicle, hack something, kill someone, whatever) and can take half an hour. Ironically there’s a bit more variety to the missions you have to do for some characters to make them recruitable, or to make amends if you screwed up their recruitment (like by accidentally killing their friend you were supposed to rescue) and you can woo some characters by beating them in darts or beating down someone who’s harassing them, and I ended up wishing that more characters could be recruited quickly, or at least there was more variety to how you get them on the team, because for the last 10-15 hours of the game I just rolled with the same squad and really the same two characters for every mission. This is made worse by the fact that so many of the character voices are unlikable; which meant that I picked my main (a 38-year-old Romanian woman) based on her sarcastic personality and rather than her skillset, and did not feel like trying to freshen up my group with more people I couldn’t stand listening to. In addition, the actual upgrades that matter (drone hacking, improved weapons and gadgets) are handled through collecting "technical points" and investing in upgrades that go across characters, meaning that as the game goes on there's even less differentiation across operatives as they all gain access to the enhanced suite of powers and equipment. Despite these issues, assembling the squad was a lot of fun and it’s a system I’d definitely like to see again but implemented even more thoroughly.

The other innovation that Watch Dogs Legion brings in gameplay is its use of drones. While Marcus had only two types of drones he could use there are close to a dozen in Legion, and they are everywhere. You can use a Spiderbot infiltrator that can cloak and double jump to do many missions without exposing your character to any harm. You can use cargo drones to get yourself on to roof tops to avoid enemies or grab collectables hidden up there. You can scout with hacked cargo drones and fight using hacked military drones, and there’s even a mission where you’re on a tiny walkway in pitch darkness lit only by a drone with a light on it, which you have to maneuver into place to show the path in front of you. The game also has the same hacking and sneaking and gunplay systems as the prior titles, and it also adds a hand to hand combat system that you use a lot because it’s Britain and not everyone is strapped. Those range from adequate to surprisingly bad for the fist fighting, which only has a simple button mash combo, a dodge, and a guard break despite being emphasized in much of the combat. The drones are really where the game gets interesting and it presents a new way to interact with an open world and do stealth. Of course there have been games where you used drones before, but I can’t remember one where you used a cargo drone to airlift a spiderbot into a building through an open window to open doors so you could fly a news done in and take a picture, while fending off attackers with combat bots, all while your operative stayed safe across the street. Watch Dogs Legion is ostensibly a game about hacking, but all the hacking is done through a single button press or tiresome “pipe” puzzles we’ve seen hundreds of times. The drone stuff is new and gives the game a gameplay identity in a crowded genre.

While the character recruitment and drone elements made the game more fun to play than previous Watch Dogs titles, there are a number of areas where Watch Dogs Legion is a step back from Watch Dogs 2. Chief among these is story and tone. Randomly generated characters were never going to be as charismatic or deep as Marcus Holloway, but Watch Dogs Legion ameliorates this a little by making at least some of them even more ludicrous than Wrench and his emoji mask. Freeing one of the boroughs from occupation nets you a cybernetic beekeeper who can use her bees as a weapon. I recruited a protest leader who always wears a cardboard pig mask. One of my main characters was a 49-year-old hitwoman who had the same grandma voice as my 75-year-old drone expert (who also had a red mohawk and face paint) If you think that means the game leans into the frothy lighthearted tone that Watch Dogs 2 mostly had, you’re very wrong. Instead Watch Dogs Legion’s story is almost entirely po faced serious, with themes like organ harvesting, human trafficking, terrorism, and fascism. It handles all these themes very badly, and features sequences where you discover dismembered body parts of people whose organs have been harvested and then a few minutes later are chatting with your wisecracking AI companion while you fly through the air in the rain on a cargo drone dressed in a bra and bright blue leggings.

Because the game has essentially twenty different possible protagonists and the script cannot account for the specifics of their backgrounds and what they’ve done in the game (since you might have been using different operatives for different missions) the story and character development are all shunted off to supporting NPCs, none of which are very good. Bagley, the AI, is the character you talk to the most and while he had the potential to be extremely annoying he was mostly just…fine. I neither liked or disliked him, though I wished he had done more to parody Siri, Alexa, Cortana, and the other AI voices we have in our modern society. There are no such gags, he never accidentally turns music on or tells you that he’s secretly listening in on you, he’s just a helpful if sarcastic AI guy. The human NPCs are all much worse. None are as bad as the NPCs of Watch Dogs 1, but they’re all bland wet blankets and because there are 20 different potential responses to everything they say (player characters actually do have a ton of situation specific dialog, which would be impressive if it weren’t for the fact that so many of them are awful) all the conversations are vague and non-specific, with lots of data dumps and very few back and forths. Unlike the villains of Watch Dogs 2 the bad guys in Legion don’t seem to be parodying anything in particular. They’re just toothless versions of the same fascists and insane idealists we’ve seen in a million works of fiction and each is as forgettable as all the others. While Watch Dogs 2 sent up Silicon Valley in interesting ways, Watch Dogs Legion just constructs its antagonists from a book of clichés.

Watch Dogs Legion’s London is an incredibly detailed city filled with people that somehow manages to feel bland and dreary, especially in comparison to Watch Dogs 2’s San Francisco. London is a famously gray and dreary town so it’s not surprising that there’s less color than there was in SF, but the issues go further than that. There’s not much to do in Legion, with most of the side activities being either variations on the main game (there’s an underground fight club of course) or very simple diversions like darts, juggling a soccer ball, or having one beer at various pubs. The game has lots of collectables scattered through restricted areas and on rooftops and you can shop at stores, though you can’t go in them, your character just stands outside and changes their clothes.

The biggest issue with Watch Dogs Legion’s London is ultimately the game’s largest strength; the NPCs. The streets of London are full of interesting looking people doing boring things. In theory the game should be teeming with street life because every character has a schedule and activities that they do. Once you unlock the “deep profiler” you can see where characters work, what they do for fun, who they spend time with etc… Unfortunately the system is a mile wide and an inch deep, and it ends up with the vast majority of characters walking to a place they’re supposed to go, loitering at that location, or engaging in a static activity like playing the guitar or “going on a date” or playing darts. Sometimes the cops or private military will be harassing people or beating them up, but nothing feels organic. In Watch Dogs 2 you had tourists taking pictures, unique NPCs representing San Francisco’s local color, and lots of stuff going on as you walked or drove past. Fascist London feels much more muted and boring. I rarely fast travel in games (I beat Cyberpunk without doing it once) but I was constantly using the feature in Watch Dogs Legion, partially because the game loves to assign different objectives in a mission to opposite corners of the map and partially because the streets of London felt so boring to drive through. The only time I was able to really enjoy the carefully detailed city was soaring above it on the back of a cargo drone away from the boring street life and just able to enjoy the exquisite digital architecture and nice draw distance.

Watch Dogs Legion is far from a perfect game, but it sets the foundation for a better version of the series. If they can expand the procedural generation of characters to give them more life, provide a lighter story more in line with the crazy aesthetics and hijinx you can get up to, give the game more mission variety (some of the main missions do change things up but many of them and almost all the side stuff are just about breaking into a succession of buildings and hitting a button next to a computer of some kind) and liven the city back up then they could have a really great and unique series that doesn’t just play like “Assassin’s Creed but with guns.” If the game could also leverage its team concept to create missions that only certain characters could complete or have you work with a team of operators all functioning in tandem in different places to accomplish goals, it could be something really special. I assume Legion’s focus on having you play one character at a time is a function of its development time, since you can’t even have operators you’re not using run missions on your behalf like you could with Assassins back in Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood in 2010. It would be great if you could have your operatives handle some of the recruitment grunt work, or at least go out and find you good people to recruit (something that Bagley does from time to time once you liberate some boroughs.)

I enjoyed Watch Dogs Legion. Towards the beginning of my play through I even had some moments that were exhilarating and immersive, such as when a gang kidnapped my constructor worker, the only operative who can summon the cargo drones you use to get to the tops of buildings, and after I got her location from the kidnapper I took over a turret and turned a riot drone to my side, killing all the kidnappers from the safety of the street below. Over time the repetitive missions (including at least one procedurally generated mission that was literally impossible to finish because it tasked me with stealing an ambulance that could not be driven out of the auto shop where it was parked) and bad world and story wore me down, but I feel like this is a good example of a game that’s worth buying cheap, playing until you’ve had your fill, and putting aside. It ends exactly how you’d expect anyway. It looks decent, runs well on the Series X, has an adequate soundtrack, and does a few things that no other games have done as well. Just stick to the women operators and stay away from the men. Bunch of tossers they are, eh Guv?