It's very rare that I spend so long trying to see if a game can win me over, the fact that Legion is set in the UK really peaked my interest as there aren't many games that explore our modern cities. However, After 30+ hours I've decided enough is enough, I even reached the final mission and quit after failing 4 times. Despite being so close to the end I was annoyed at myself for already sinking so many hours into this.

Legion has so much promise, a decent open world with an almost living city with plenty of locations and character, a premise which has lots of potential with all the hacking abilities, character recruitment, and the hint of an anti establishment rebellion. The foundations and possibilities are there but it never seems to fully realise any of them.

The electrified streets are bustling with environmental landmarks, alleyways, street signs etc. and yet it somehow feels dead? Cars sound like remote control sets you get for Christmas, guns pack absolutely no punch, the story is extremely limp, and there's no real sense of progression in skill or gear as you progress through the game. For a game about revolution it feels more like a youth club that's in the process of being shut down.

The star of the show is the city itself in my opinion and it shocks me that there are so many locations from real world London here and yet they're hardly used in missions. There's a lot of cool stuff to see but the game almost never leads you to it purposefully. What's more confusing is that instead of showcasing these varied locations, the game sends you back, time after time to the same locations you've already been to so that you can hack yet another terminal.

What the game does do sort of well is allow you to approach almost every mission in your own way depending on your play style. What I would have liked to see more of is the city changing and evolving as you progress through the game. I did quite a few side objectives and 'liberated' boroughs, but never really saw any noticeable change in the city?

Hopefully the screenshots can showcase how much potential the game had but unfortunately it falls very flat. I really hate giving bad reviews for games but this one really confused me. Some good ideas and themes with the main missions but very poor execution.

GAMEPLAY OVER STORY

In this game, the main story is designed to work with every character, but you cannot tell an engaging personal story when it can be told by anyone.
That is why I never expected a good story from this game.

What I expected was a very good and fun "Legion System" where I could recruit my own team based on my taste and needs, and play and customize them.
In my opinion, that aspect was great. I had fun with it, even though it wasn’t perfect. It was a brand-new feature in the gaming landscape, and I can definitely see room for improvements in future games using this system.

REPETITIVE LEVEL DESIGN

After a few hours of playing, the levels became very repetitive due to the Albion Facilities, which were all very similar, and many of their locations were reused constantly.
They could have improved the game by adding more types of enemies as you progress through the story or by incorporating an ability-based progression system common in Metroidvania games, which unlocks certain doors that are only accessible as shortcuts or advantages after the player unlocks a specific skill. This would have made revisiting the same location more valuable.

PERMADEATH ENHANCED THE GAME

Because I knew I would spend most of the time creating characters (since I am a passionate Sims player), my roster would quickly fill up. To counter that, I activated Permadeath. This turned out to be a great decision because I became very attached to every character, and when they died, it made me genuinely very sad. With this feature, every death felt meaningful, which is something very rare in video games. Turning permadeath on made me play the game for 15 hours instead of dropping it after 5 due to boredom.

FINAL WORDS

I hope this isn’t the last Watch Dogs game we see, It would be fascinating to see how other studios might approach developing a Watch Dogs-like game, bringing fresh perspectives and innovations to this type of game.

Thank you for reading my review and stay safe from hackers❤️

Ricci

The whole idea of this game sounds pretty awesome, Recruiting anybody in this huge massive world, but I quickly got a bit tired of recruiting people in the game and just wanted to get to the story. plus most of the people look the same, sound the same, and I just didn't care about the missions required to do to recruit these characters.

Now I did find a few Decent characters that Felt Unique in my game like Two of my favorite girls, Mary Hay and Elle Walczak. There was also Catherine Saha I recruited and i like her, but i noticed a few characters that look a bit similar to her.

The Radio songs in vehicles are pretty decent but nothing that sticks with me. I didn't care about any of the Files and sounds, it became so boring for me that I ended up just getting the files and exiting from them without reading cause I didn't understand what I read anyway when I did read them. As for the story, I really cared nothing for it, it was boring and dull and I didn't care about the stuff going on. The most fun I had in this game was playing as a construction worker so I could just hover in the sky on my cargo drone. Everything just feels so repetitive to me.

I also should mention that this game would constantly crash on me to the point my file did end up getting corrupted. Thankfully I was able to restore it since I had Ps Plus at the time. but it would crash multiple times a day when i was playing this, it was ridiculous.

I believe it's safe to say at this point that this was the worst game I played in 2020. I'd give it a 2/10

While I played a couple hours of the first two Watch Dogs games I bounced off them pretty quickly. While I liked the set up, I didn't understand why I had to shoot people in a game about hackers. I thought we could more fully replace my primary way of interacting with the world to hacking. I was tired of shooting.

In retrospect, I think I was actually tired of killing virtual people. Because here comes Watch Dogs: Legion and you tell me the guns that look and operate like guns are in fact shoot little bits of electricity that stun a person into submission and I'm okay playing this series again. Go figure!

Anyway, despite my lukewarm experiences with the first two games I bought this one largely for three reasons. Firstly, I wanted to support local developer Ubisoft Toronto in creation of a game - I've purchased every game they were lead studio on and enjoyed them all the varying degrees -- SC: Blacklist might still be my favourite. Secondly, I wanted to see what raytracing would like implemented on my shiny new Xbox Series S - looks great, by the way! It doesn't seem like it's wholly implemented, but the reflections from and the way the light plays of certain surfaces looks stellar. Thirdly, I was really intrigued by the 'play as anyone' conceit that is core to the game and is largely a success.

Now that I've got the preamble out of the way, let's look at the game's achievements and shortcomings for a player like me.

Achievements

Story and realization of a certain Post-Brexit London

I've read couple short reviews and it looks like I'm the odd person out here. The 'play as anyone' mechanic didn't take any weight away from the story for me. In fact, it helped me see, feel and understand how much of a threat Albion is because you experience it's effects directly across many characters. I also noticed a lot of work went into voicing multiple characters to have VO for all the critical conversations and cutscenes that occur. To me, this is a triumph. As for the actual story, I enjoyed the satirical take of post-Brexit and taking it to the natural conclusion that I'm sure exists in some Brexiters minds - set up processing centers for people and disappear them after harvesting their organs.

Gameplay

The gameplay was fun for me. Coming off of other Ubisoft games it was nice to have a new take on taking over compounds, a common Ubisoft loop/trope. The three or four activities I could complete were fun - the first couple times.

Shortcomings

Gameplay / activity variety

Again, this is tricky because I enjoyed what I played but something left me wanting more and it simply wasn't strong enough to keep me going throughout the whole game. After I made three or so boroughs defiant I felt like I really had seen everything game could offer me gameplay wise. It's a shame because I feel like the open world was well realized in all other respects -- the audio logs and radio stations were great -- but the activities I could fill my time with just weren't that exciting.

Watch Dogs as a series has had an identity issue in my opinion. The first game was a self-serious, Person of Interest-esque, techno crime drama. The second one was more about young hacktavists and the technology of our modern world. Legion has some of those Watch_Dogs 2 vibes, but with a more near-future, Orwell dystopian theme.

So, yeah, the world plays a big part in this game. While this game is set in a semi-realistic world of the near future, you could use it as a sorta substitute to Cyberpunk 2077, which is apparently the worst thing since moldy bread. While, as far as I remember, the technology of Watch_Dogs 2 was sorta grounded. I remember the big bad technology of that one being a really intrusive data gathering algorithm, so just Google. Here in Legion we have Minority Report drones, microchipped human slavery, and uploading human minds to hard drives, among other things. It definitely takes our current technology and plays “what if” into fantastical predictions, at least fingers crossed it stays a fantasy. Legion is going for an updated version of 1984, and of course it is, the game is set in London. It’s a city in the midst of a quiet dystopia. Sure, there’s all that crazy tech I just mentioned, but it’s kept hush hush by the elites. There’s homelessness and corruption, but the average Joe is still holding down a job and eeking out his living. Ubisoft is known for not really trying to charge their games with preachy messages, and the same is true here, but even with the surface level approach they take it does put at least a small mirror up to our own world.

One of the fun bits of terrifying technology you interact with is Bagley, an AI that serves as your tech guy and mission giver. He's a sarcastic, witty AI, not the newest of tropes, but he did manage to get several laughs out of me with the great line delivery. I found out some of his lines were written by Yahtzee Croshaw, which explains a lot.

The in-game music is alright, there’s a few catchy tunes on the radio, my guess is they are all London born musicians. I was surprised not to hear any recognizable classic British rock songs, like “London Calling” or the such. There’s also a pirate radio podcast channel with two or three different shows about conspiracy theories, tech, and London’s shady underbelly. This are fun to listen to, but annoyingly, everytime you get out of your car & then get back in or just change the channel the podcast restarts instead of just continuing on. It made me like these otherwise neat podcasts even less, because I just kept hearing the same beginning 2 mins over and over.

Honestly, this Watch_Dogs game feels like the spiritual successor to the older Assassin’s Creed games vs. the new RPG route that series has gone. Legion has a focus on melee combat over gunplay, and the system is set up like the classic rhythmic combat of early AC games, which I have a soft spot for. There’s a real attempt to convince you to play this game non-lethally. When the situation escalates to a firefight you are usually equipped with a shock pistol, but some of your operatives are packing real heat, as are all your enemies, The gadgets you use, mostly the Spiderbot because it’s the best, make it feel like the modern Assassin game we never got. All the hacks from the other Watch Dog games show up here too; spying with cameras, remotely controlling cars, exploding gas lines, etc. There’s some simple platforming as well. You can climb certain pipes and use scissor lifts or cargo drones to reach high areas. The cargo drone actually makes some of the challenges laughably easy.

Another thing that feels reminiscent of old Assassin’s Creed games is the way the story is set up. Granted Watch Dogs has always hinted at being in the same universe as Assassins. I was kinda hoping there would be at least a nod to AC Syndicate, maybe one of the gangs in London was the modern version of the Rooks. In Legion you are building a group, or order, of underground resistance fighters to combat several evil elitists, pretty much the Templars. You go through the story systematically ruining all their lives. The main bad guy in this game, Nigel Cass, is a PMC CEO who has found himself in power of London after another hacker group, Zero Day, bombs London and frames your group, DedSec. The game seems to start to set him up as a “hero of his own story” villain. He very much sees himself as London’s savior who needs to be in power not because he wants to be a dictator, but because he needs it to save London. But it isn’t long until he does the typical villain cliche of murdering a business partner that doesn’t agree with him. The side villains are typical bad guy stereotypes like the untouchable mob boss.

A secondary overarching goal of this game is finding out who Zero Day is, since they framed you. Spoiler time here, so be warned. It turns out Zero Day is actually the alter ego of DedSec’s leader and she wants to rid the world of technology because it’s evil? I’ll admit, her goals are poorly defined and all over the place. She hoards the technology you steal, but has this sorta neo-luddite agenda. Definitely the weakest villain in the story has she seems to do things that are counter-intuitive to each other.

The big selling point of this game was the fact you could play as anyone in London. Now, when I first heard this, I figured it was an exaggeration to drum up hype, and there’d be a limited pool of characters you could recruit. I was happily proven wrong. You can recruit & play as near anyone in London, save for major story characters. Obviously some characters are better than others, a professional spy brings more to the table than an executive assistant, but even they have unique perks, and you can come across their family and friends in the game world, making the citizens of London feel like more than just throwaway NPCs. You want to avoid killing them, which stinks that the NPC AI has a bad habit of jumping back when you start driving crazy, even if that means jumping into your car, not away from it. Also, I don’t want to hear any British people complaining about how we Yanks speak English, because some of the NPCs in this game more gargle the English language than speak it.

I really do love the recruit anyone aspect of the game and the care that went into it. The skills and gear a person has is related to their life or job, not just some randomly generated thing. An upholsterer comes with a nail gun, the news reporter can summon a camera drone, or the venture capitalist may net you more money for completing missions. And you may come across a landlord packing a silenced MP5, but their flavor text mentions they are a member of a gun club. There are flaws some characters posses as well, the octogenarian hobble around unable to sprint or sneak, some people have hiccups that alert guards, and others are “doomed”, meaning they may die randomly at anytime. Social stealth is also a viable solution to sneaking around in this game. You can recruit enemy goons to your squad and they can don their uniform to stroll into restricted areas, as can doctors, police officers, and construction workers.

Now, I played this game on what I call XCOM mode, that means if your current character dies, they stay dead. It added more thrill to the game and encouraged you to avoid firefights. I grew an attachment to my band of misfits and my favorite one was an old man decked out in his country tweed, Aaron Davies. I recruited him early and used him often, unfortunately he died, and I’ll admit I was tempted to reset the game back to a much earlier save, because he was the perfect character for me and I was pissed I got him killed, but I lived with my fate. Tied for my 2nd favorite characters were my Connery inspired spy and the getaway driver with the ever-attractive Irish accent. The fact you can play through the story as anyone does mean you aren’t going to get a developed character arc from your protagonist. Still each DedSec agent has different enough personalities and enough VAs to not have too many similar sounding characters.

That is one downfall to this system. A mission may have you sneak into a construction yard to steal something, so you go undercover as a construction worker, but if the mission ends with an unavoidable “survive until the download is done” section, your construction worker doesn’t have the armament to take down waves of enemies. That’s more of a hitman’s job. The few operatives I lost were due to these types of scenarios.

All in all, I ended up enjoying this game a whole heck a lot more than I expected. It has an unsettling, yet engaging story of technology and the ethics behind it. Sure, it’s not super original, but I still was interested in following along. London is a beautiful dystopia and the unique “play as anyone” game mechanic created a bigger attachment to my character than I expected. I am interested in the DLC that will bring in an actual Assassin’s Creed assassin and ol’ grumpy Aiden back.

I wanted to like this game. Really. The idea of recruiting anyone in London to join the resistance? On paper, that’s a bold step for the Watch Dogs series. But Legion feels more like a proof-of-concept than a fully realized game.

London looks wildly underwhelming compared to the previous two cities. But where Watch Dogs (OG) gave us moody noir in Chicago and WD2 brought vibrant energy and idealism to San Francisco, Legion just kind of… sits there. It looks good, but it doesn’t say much.

The big gimmick—“play as anyone”—starts strong, then slowly dissolves into tedium. Yeah, it’s neat to recruit a former MI6 agent or a street magician, but they’re ultimately hollow shells. No personality, no character arcs, no conversations beyond mission prompts. Half the time, I forgot who was even on my crew.

And team dynamics? Nonexistent. There’s one painfully awkward “party” scene meant to simulate bonding, but it’s like the devs forgot human beings have inner lives. You never get the chance to know your team—or care about them. It’s just mission after mission, checkbox after checkbox.

Worse, the tone is all over the place. The game wants to be dark and meaningful, but Bagley—the snarky AI companion—keeps interrupting like a bad stand-up act. His quips don’t just miss; they undercut any emotional weight the story is trying to build.

And when you finally reach the ending (no spoilers), it’s clear the game wanted to land an emotional gut-punch. Instead, it just sort of… sighs. Especially the whole bit with Bagley, which felt forced and emotionally unearned.

Gameplay-wise, it’s repetitive to the point of burnout. I started experimenting with stealth and strategy, but halfway through, I dropped all finesse and brute-forced my way through the rest. Not because I was having fun—but because I wanted it to be over.

The only genuinely worthwhile part? Aiden Pearce. Nostalgia, yes, but also heart. His DLC gave the game something it desperately lacked: emotional weight, reflection, and a character with an actual soul. I played 90% of the game as him because he was the only one who felt real.

Oh, and Marcus from WD2? Totally ghosted. Only a brief easter egg in the DLC. For a series about connection and digital resistance, that felt like a weird omission.

Final Verdict: Legion had the bones of something special, but no heart or soul. It’s a sandbox full of gadgets and gimmicks with nothing real to say. If you’re a die-hard completionist or want to prep for the next game, maybe give it a spin. Everyone else? Play the first two games.

Watch Dogs Legions Review

This was my most anticipated game i was excited for, Now did it deliver? Yes...and No. What it delivered on was The play as anyone. I was most exciting for this feature than the story itself and for the most part it was fun walking around London looking for recruits. The recruits vary from just normal people to construction workers to gang members to cops to John Wick Gunkara agents to MI6 007 agents and so much more. It is the most fun of the game some got there own traits like the John Wick operative can execute anyone with a gun up close in combat, The MI6 agents has a silencer there own car and a spy watch, Construction workers have a unique melee weapon and an abiity to call carrier drones so they can ride. There are operatives that are dancers or famous so as your walking group of people will come up to you or camera drones will follow you recording you. So much of this stuff was great.

The City

The City of London is amazing to look at especially at night were everything is lit and some places glow in Neon lights. The people in London are vast and there randomly generated but the unique things about this game is not only can you as anybody you see but everybody in the city has lives and daily things they do, meaning almost every person you see you will see again. They do not disappear or get replaced like in a lot of games. You can save the person to the recruit list and you can follow everything they do in there daily lives you can follow them to a restraunt, follow them to there jobs, follow them to there homes and...lol wait for them to wake up and come out of there house and follow them again so it is very freaking impressive. They also have stuff there doing in the City like dancing, playing an instrument, getting into fights, Cops assaulting people handcuffing them, people assaulting cops trying to protect eachother. They also have like people there affiliated with like there wife or brother or there doctor and you can find them and its just so awesome its like this generations Shenmue.

Gameplay

Gameplay revolves around shooting Lethal or Non lethal weapons, Stealth, Hacking stuff or finding a console or computer to give you access and Bypass  Puzzles. Honestly the most interesting thing in the game are the main mission drone sections. You hack like a spiderbot or drone and you go through these areas with infared traps or platforming or a drone were your flying through and theres fans blowing you into electrical things and you have to find ways passed. There was another cool section were you needed to use a spiderbot to climb the London Clocktower so it had a lot of platforming and it was very fun and the most interesting stuff in the game.

Story

Unfortunately this is were the game is not good. It starts with an operative named Dalton hacking something things go wrong people die and Dedsec the organization your working for gets attacked, Dalton tries stopping a bomb but ends up dying and a massive bombing in London happens in like 5 major locations. The game gives you a choice with mutiple randomly generated characters to choose from as your first character. You meet Sabine the only survivor of Dedsec and an AI named Bagley. Sabine wants you to make a new Dedsec gather new recruits for it and find out who bombed London and framed Dedsec for it. You find out there name is Zero Day but you dont know who, So you have to uncover the mystery of who it is. During the journey you find theres other people involved people in high power. Won't spoil all of them but there was one in particular Sky Larson who probably had the most interesting chapter in the game. Sky Larson wants to develope an AI from human brains dissecting the brain into parts she wants. She had a sick mother who wanted to die but she did not want her mother to die so she experimented on her dying mother removing her brain and manipulating it and ultimately making her an A.I to force her to still be some what alive. It is a very awesome Arc but sadly this was the most interesting thing in the game.

The Problems

The problem is with the story mostly. Since there no actual main character and your recruited operatives are the characters you can't get behind no one really, because they don't really have a purpose or a personality so no one feels united at all and it feels like they never take anything seriously. The Sky Larson chapter when you find what shes doing they just respond with that sucks or thats horrible and thats about it. Than you have this AI bagley who cracks jokes in seriousl moments and it takes way from it. Characters feel like they don't even know  each other half the time so theres no sense of a team theres no great interactions there is nothing.

There are zero cool moments in the game  your never really drawn in, theres never a part where your like "That Was Awesome" theres nothing. Cutscenes are also rather boring, when you go to your safehouse you'll get a cutscene where like 4 operatives are sitting on a chair are are standing watching a tv screen getting debriefed and thats it. Think the issue is they relied on the play as anyone way to much and didn't bother making a compelling story because this is the weakest Watch Dogs story by far. Watch Dogs 1 had Aiden who to me was very cool and Watch Dogs 1 had a more serious tone. Watch Dogs 2 had Marcus and was very different from Aiden and 2 had a more light hearted story it moved away from the darker story Watch Dogs 1 had. Watch Dogs legion i have no idea what tone it wants to have at times its serious at times its not taking serious at all.

Other problems is the Mission structure are only 3 you'll either find something to hack, do a puzzle, or survive a never ending wave of enemies until a hack is done and thats it, it gets boring quick. There arent a lot of things to do around the city at all. There are these package missions you can do for whatever reason. Theres a soccer dribbling game which is boring, there is darts which is eh, and than theres enemy or gangbases with nothing but audio logs collectible mask to wear...which is lazy cause its the same mask in different colors, ETO which is upgrade points. So all of this isn't really compelling to do at all. The dialogue it it aint the story characters talking its pretty bad than there are these strong over the top U.K accents that your recruits have and it gets annoying lol i just wanted a normal talking U.K person and i hardly found any, i did find this girl who said Sweety alot she was like a famous dancer  but i found her late game.

Repetitive recruit missions occur after a few hours you will be going to the same place at times doing the same thing hacking the same thing and it just sucked, Talking to them, getting the recruit, missions will be the same after a while, and some of the people you recruit have unrealistic missions lol i'll profile a girl it'll say shes a dancer than you talk to her and shes like "im an undercover hacker or "i was part of a gang" and its just odd and makes no damn sense lol.

Operatives have unique abilities which is cool right? But than you have a skill tree thing and you can buy them like drones and shit and i felt this was stupid to have. Whats the point in having a drone expert if if i can just use points to get a drone i felt like this should have been gone giving you more reason to recruit different operatives.

Also the mystery behind who Zero Day was super obvious it was dumb.

To wrap up this review im not really disappointed and i don't think its a disappointment i was excited for play as anyone and it delivered on that and it was very fun and i never got bored of it. Just the other stuff really brought the game down. I know they pushed the system to the limit though so obviously there were limitations to what they could do. I hope they keep it and build off it more because i think it could be something special because the games definately innovative . My problem with Ubisoft though and i started noticing is they always dumb stuff down or remove it entirely. An example would be Watch Dogs 2 vs Legion Watch Dogs 2 had so much you could do with hacking like you could hack peoples text and call the police on people and it had awesome parkour and all this was gone in Legion. Another example is Assassins Creed Unity vs all the others after. Assassins Creed Unity had the best parkour and climbing out of all other AC's it flowed super well and it felt ubisoft mastered the AC traversal in climbing and parkour, Than they removed it entirely and took it all out and went to just basic climbing basic parkour took the flow out and i don't understand why. Anyway my score for Watch Dogs Legion is a 6.