In Watch Dogs: Legion, there is no one protagonist, no single pair of shoulders upon which the fate of London rests. Instead, there is a collective of everyday dissidents working together under the name DedSec to take down the corrupt and exploitative powers-that-be via hacking.

At first, that idea felt a little grating. Knowing that I’d be playing as a handful of different characters, recruiting new people into DedSec to regrow the hacker collective and hopping between them throughout the game, I was concerned it would make me feel disconnected from the story without a single character to pin my emotions on.

To my surprise, Ubisoft pulled it off. Instead of feeling like I lacked a character to connect with, I found myself connecting with the group's common core of antifascism and anti-exploitation. No matter who I recruited and played as, they all were affected by the injustice of Legion's London in one way or another, unifying everyone you can find on the streets to the resistance.

The engrossing plot pulls a lot of weight in the unification here, beginning with a straightforward mystery but unraveling into some deeply surprising and disturbing developments, including the harvesting of human organs and turning peoples’ brains into AI. From these heinous acts of exploitative violence to the abject anxiety of the militaristic surveillance state the powerful have placed this city under, Legion has a lot of hooks it uses to pull you and every character you encounter into the action.

The idea behind Watch Dogs: Legionis that this isn't just one person's fight. When the world looks like this, when private militaries are taking control of the streets, scientists are kidnapping and torturing people under the guise of "progress," and gangs are preying on the most vulnerable communities, it's everyone's fight. People just need a little direction and some resources, and that's DedSec.

Building a legion

Watch Dogs: Legion opens with a DedSec operative thwarting a terrorist attack on London’s Palace of Westminster being falsely perpetrated in DedSec’s name. Simultaneously, private military company Albion has effectively taken control of London and its police, turning it into a fascistic military state.

When the DedSec operative is gunned down while explosions light up the night sky across the city, the mysterious, villainous organization behind the attack is revealed: Zero Day. Now it's up to the remnants of DedSec to fight back against Albion, figure out who's behind Zero Day, and regrow their numbers by recruiting anyone willing to fight for the cause.

Then the game proper starts with a character select screen, providing a broad palette of people with different occupations and bonus attributes. It’s an apt transition, as it alludes to the core of Legionthat you will be playing as a multitude of recruitable characters, either switching between them to take advantage of their unique attributes that are suited to different missions or being forced to swap out when one is injured, arrested, or killed.

For my first character, I chose a composer named Laura Pal who receives a discount when buying clothes, because I know where my priorities lie.

Knowing that this person was just a rando off the streets of London, and one of many I’d be playing as in Legion, I didn’t immediately connect with Laura. But a few missions in, as larger injustices are revealed and I got to listen to Laura talk with cohorts and see her hack through missions, I felt invested in the cause and became more attached to Laura.

Soon I was tasked with recruiting more DedSec members, and I found that same thing happening again and again as I expanded my team and learned each new person's personality. Not only does each unique personality add more flavor to the game, but their unique abilities and bonuses changed the way I could play.

I had a mission to recruit a construction worker who has the ability to summon a cargo drone without needing to find a drone station, as others would have to do. Cargo drones are immensely convenient because they are powerful enough to hold a rider. This new DedSec member can call a cargo drone at any time and fly through the London sky, reach the tops of buildings, steal important cargo crates, or drop unimportant cargo crates on the heads of enemies. Not only that, thanks to her construction uniform I could get into contested construction sites filled with enemies without alerting their attention... so long as I didn't get too close.

The more you play, the more helpful characters you'll come across. There are fighters who deal extra melee damage and are great in situations where there are just too many guards to be sneaky, people who just happen to own a cool car and make traveling a little more flashy, and healthcare or law enforcement workers that reduce your members' downtimes when they're hospitalized or jailed. If one person doesn't work out for a mission, you can pick another with skills that could be better suited for the scenario.

To recruit someone new, you need to complete a task for them. Sometimes it's spying on their company to see why they were fired (in one instance, a recruit was replaced by an AI) or sometimes you need to do a little sabotage on their behalf. At one point I had to recruit an Albion guard to get into the heavily secured Tower of London castle, convincing them to join DedSec by hacking into a local prison and freeing her sister from confinement. It pays to have friends in all kinds of places in Legion.

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With so many options of people to play as, I still found myself gravitating toward some of my earliest recruits, especially Laura. She didn't have the mission-effective bonuses that others offered but because I experienced so many story beats with her, it just felt right to have her be my main character. Also, I kept buying cool new clothes for her, so she was always the most stylish.

I still checked in on the others and used a rotating cast of about five or six people, especially one spy character with a cool car and a silenced pistol. They were affable companions on my journey with DedSec and could fill the protagonist role in a pinch.

Hacking London

The gist of Watch Dogs: Legion's gameplay centers around hacking and stealth. Aside from cutscenes and times I had to drive a car down the "wrong" side of the road, you better believe I was walking around in a crouched position and/or hacking into a drone to fly through enemy territory and mess with them.

Legionfeels like it's built around these two elements, with each mission providing a bevvy of ways to navigate through buildings, hideouts, and compounds without being seen. Many objectives are locked in rooms that require some technical finessing, whether it's completing a grid puzzle or needing to reach a security panel to physically override it, either with your character or your handy little spider drone. Plotting out the path you need to take and the people or security measures you need to quietly attend to along the way is an engrossing challenge.

As you progress, you earn resources like the aptly named "tech points" which you can spend on outfitting your squad with gadgets and hacking upgrades that everyone gets to enjoy. You can buy a non-lethal shotgun for when things get dicey up close, or unlock the ability to control different enemy drones. The best of those drones have weapons, so you can give Albion and others a taste of their own medicine without bringing suspicion onto yourself.

Drones are a hacker's best friend in 'Watch Dogs: Legion.'Credit: ubisoft

The progression system allows for more and more creativity as you move through the game's story and complete more missions. That personal creativity is necessary because after a while, many missions start to blend together into an amorphous blob of hacking cameras, setting traps for guards to walk into and electrocute themselves, and crouch-walking. It's an issue that many exploration-focused action games have to contend with, but by choosing to go at things in different ways with your different skills in Legion, you can manage to keep things fresh.

For one mission, I managed to erase the enemy's data just by chain-hacking through cameras and drones and utilizing a remote mechanical spider, all without setting foot inside the building. For the next, I decided to infiltrate the compound myself and fist fight any guard that I came upon, brute-forcing my way to the objective.

Generally, though, the stealthy/hacky approach is better. Combat is not the focus of Watch Dogs: Legionand it shows. Hand-to-hand combat is slow and lacking in any nuance. You can punch, grab, and dodge, but each moves feels more sluggish than the last. If you get the attention of others nearby, you can find yourself facing a handful of relentless fighters at once, which is frustrating at best and likely to end with you needing to restart a part of a mission with a different operative.

Gunfights, on the other hand, are just obnoxious. The auto-aiming on controller is imprecise and finicky, and if you fire a weapon once, everyone nearby is alerted that it’s time to take their guns out. All of a sudden you’re surrounded with no place to hide. Becoming overwhelmed in these moments is common, so I avoided gun combat at all times.

Thanks to Legion's open approach to gameplay, I could do the things that I enjoyed the most and avoided the things that just didn't click for me. If you're more of a gunner, all the power to you.

Watch Dogs' London

Outside of main missions, Legionfills London with a plethora of side missions, like a bare knuckle boxing league and major acts of sabotage and disobedience that stifle the oppressive presence of Albion and reclaim the city map, neighborhood by neighborhood. These activities, along with an overabundance of collectible text and audio logs, cosmetic hacker masks, and currency, dot every square inch of the map, which can be overwhelming to look at and underwhelming to complete.

They can be fun at first, just some things to do to mix up the game here and there, but there were many moments where I passed by these optional tasks without batting an eye. After juggling a soccer ball once, a timing-based minigame of hitting button prompts as they appear, I never felt like doing it again. I didn't bother much with reading or listening to logs, so I stopped picking them up. I even passed on grabbing some tech points out in the wild because I knew I'd get more from missions and didn't feel like finding a drone to reach any that were above ground-level, up on London's rooftops.

Even side missions to recruit new members started to pile up unfinished in my menu. At many points I felt like I had enough people and didn't want to spend a half-hour or so adding one more to the hopper. They just didn't suck me in most of the time.

Legion's main missions are generally more engaging and climactic than side ones, with major story beats and twists keeping the plot fresh. Ask yourself, would you rather track down an elusive tech entrepreneur to her evil lair, and then face a gut-wrenching moral conundrum, or just juggle a soccer ball? Generally, you're going to go with the former, especially when the latter barely offers a reward.

It's just too easy to skip past a lot of these side things. I tried many of them, but they're just not nearly as appealing as the main story.

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Part of my hesitance to do anything aside from fast travel to the next main objective stems from the fact that exploring this city isn't particularly engaging. The driving feels clunky with its broad turning, there's little variation in vehicles, and many of the streets look identical. Sure, there are some beautiful sights, but the majority of London in this game is a blur of gray concrete. It lacks the fun chaos of a game like Grand Theft Auto.

The missions are where you get to explore the deeper aspects of city life under technofascism, delving into underground bunkers, exploring famous landmarks, and experiencing more than bland city sidewalks dotted with Albion forces. It's also where we dig deeper into the minds of the people behind all the oppression, learn what they're really after, and how they're using London for their personal gain.

But drab as it can be, London isn't there for their personal gain. It's a city full of people that, at least in this game, have tangible backgrounds and unique qualities. A saving grace for Watch Dogs' London is that you can walk up to and talk to anyone you see, recruit them, and play as them. It's a concept that breaths life into the game, and makes you connect deeper with the story, knowing that peoples' actions can directly affect someone who you could play as and embody.

The "legion" part of Watch Dogs: Legionworks.

Watch Dogs: Legionis available now on PlayStation 4, Xbox One consoles, and PC, and will be available on Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 when those consoles launch in November.

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