Hands down, without a shadow of a doubt, I loved Watch_Dogs 2. Did I give it a 10 out of 10? No, because it doesn’t deserve it, though it is probably one of, if not the best game of the 2010s for me. It did everything every other open-world game was doing, aside from that animal skinning business. Yet it was doing it with color, fun tongue-in-cheek storytelling, and improving on every bit of the game before it. This is all to say, in no way am I impartial and unbiased; I’ve been excited about Legion since the teaser three-years ago.

I want to quickly take you on a journey. A journey through a brief moment of what I did. Well, two in fact, as the first was just funny. In the opening mission, you play as Dalton Wolfe, played by Warren Brown of Dead Set and Doctor Who. Wolfe is an ex-MI5 agent working with DedSec that’s sent to infiltrate the Palace of Westminister – the Houses of Parliament. As small and confined as the House of Commons depicted in-game is, I was still happy to be there. What made me the happiest of all was standing right next to the Speaker of the House’s chair, pointing Dalton straight at the benches, selecting the insult in the emotes, and giving the right honorable gentleman for Flydale North the Vicky. I giggled like a child!

That was the start of my first three hours, by the end, I’d used a spider-bot to hack the BT tower, known in-game as the Blume tower. I’d found Number 10 and thought about playing chap-door-run. I even found old Liz’s gaff (she wasn’t in) but thought better of it when I saw the men with guns, and even the Imax was shut for renovations or something. Though after three hours of doing four missions and sightseeing, I finally got my old woman on my team. I took her back to HQ, played a game of darts and lost the game. I walked out of the pub with the young man that beat me, and proceeded to beat him to death with a wrench.

Oh London, how I missed you! Of course, the most significant thing about Legion is the fact we’re not in Kansas anymore, literally. No, you’re driving on the right (proper) side of the road, aka the left, being called vulgarities by passers-by, and knowing full well the food is going to be boiled to death. So many games have two settings for their contemporaneous open-world games that aren’t fictionalized cities, New York or Los Angeles. I know those cities like the back of my hand. They are great in-games, but after 20 or so years of open-worlds, I’m ready to see other cities. I said it a while back about Forza Horizon 4, there is something about seeing where I’m from in a game that just makes it a little special.

It was never going to be perfect, and if you know where to look, you can see where the seams of the city are knitted together. However, that’s not my problem. What is rather annoying is knowing London a little; in game there is a lack of cultures, sights, and sounds overlapping. In London, you’ll see and hear people with hundreds of different accents, wildly varying dress senses, music, and more. it is a literal melting pot with distinct areas. The reason for Legion‘s lack of cultural diversity is, of course, the requirement for there to be a single language. However, I wouldn’t mind a Metal Gear Solid V system of hunting down a translator or an option in the accessibility settings.

The backdrop of London is easily one of the biggest headlines to the game. It is the first open-world to do so in the near-modern day in quite some time. It is just the little things that seem to make it feel like the UK, from sirens, a handful of accents, and even the sound of traffic lights. I never thought I’d have to say this, but speeding down Victoria Street to Parliament Square and hearing traffic lights changing, it is unlike anything else. It is a world I know, a world I grew up in, and a world I’m so close to. Yet it puts a smile on my face walking down The Mall and being called a “tosser.”

I said it a moment ago, there is a lack of the greater London culture, and that’s none more apparent than in the soundtrack. It is a safe “What do the young people listen to” catalog of nothing particularly interesting, versus what Watch_Dogs 2 did. Watch Dogs 2 resulted in me getting a new playlist of music from the game. Yes, there are snippets of music such as the classical station and features include Lily Allen, Gorillaz, and the Buzzcocks that I enjoy, but I’ve yet to find something that stands out. The sad truth is, I doubt I ever will find that something.

This also brings to the fact you no longer run apps from your phone as Marcus did. Instead, that’s been ripped out altogether. No more of that DriverSF app, no more sightseeing and snapping pictures to share with characters on social media, and no more music app. Instead, you are running music from the actual radio, so if you’re running about London, you can’t listen to music. Because the game is such a sightseeing tour of London, especially around the Thames, I feel like I need to jump to my actual phone or put on Spotify. Meanwhile, the last game solved that issue already.

As far as features go, in some ways, there is a feeling of Legion being between 1 and 2. The oddest of subtractions is affecting traffic lights, possibly because unlike Chicago, San Francisco, and most US Cities running on a grid, London is wherever roads would fit for the last 300-years. I don’t know why, but there are minor things that just feel missing sometimes, such as the RC car and drone. Now, of course, you can have a spider-bot or hack one of the many drones flying about. However, there is a noticeable lack of versatility to any given approach.

Why? The other trademark of Watch Dogs: Legion, the player character… Well, characters. In all the millions of Londoners, stretching from the lower reaches of Lambeth to the heights of Camden. You are not only Dedsec, you are London. A mix of about 45 prospective and current recruits, you can be everyone from politicians to pediatricians. Or, you could go from people who enjoy adult entertainment, all the way to bankers, buskers, musicians, poets, anarchists, and so on. Each of these, depending on your luck of the draw, will have special traits. Old men and women aren’t likely to be as quick or flexible to hide. Amateur kickboxers might be able to give more and take less damage in melee fights, and you can see all the other complexities therein.

What’s the catch? It is all a bit of smoke and mirrors. Knowing how games work, you’ll quickly see the lines where it is loosely held together. Every soon-to-be recruit will have a small collection of friends that you’ll begin to notice in the world: Save them, do a task or two, and generally help them out. Soon enough, you’ve got yourself a palace guard. Everyone goes to work, goes home, lives on a schedule, and when you cross their path in the wild you’ll see them on that schedule. Though that’s not the impressive bit, it is the friends and the schedule both working in tandem that does the most for me.

While you can save everyone, you can also kill friends, harm them, or accidentally run them over as you are being chased by Albion. It shouldn’t surprise you to know, that doesn’t ingratiate you with these people you want to hire. Attack an Albion guard, the police, or a palace guard with fantastic traits and either you are going to work hard to get them on your side, or you have to look for someone else. The outfits themselves play a part in how you enter a building. Some areas are off-limits to the general, as that 74-year-old dominatrix once called me, “tosser.” I think it was a compliment.

It is the details overlapping that make Legion the current next-generation game on offer. It is a system no other game has offered before, to my knowledge, and while it doesn’t render the lives of 9-million people in real-time, there is still that larger scale to the world. If you’ve attacked one guard too many times as one member, that guard will remember and start abusing you randomly in the street. It is an ambitious game with very ambitious systems that has some rough areas. Despite those areas, it does more than most larger games achieve with their open-worlds. It is a living breathing city.

With every character distinctly filling out their traits and combinations, you can infiltrate and wreak havoc in any way you desire. Though what I have found annoying about that is my own expectation the game will be like any other. If you walk into New Scotland Yard with a cop or Albion member that doesn’t belong, there will be a few questions aimed directly at you. The outfits get you past the front door, but you still have to keep the distance from other guards, drones, and other security ordinances. At first, I was expecting what every other game does: characters either not bothering at all or still caring a lot. Though, even if you are meant to be in that location as scheduled and in uniform, you will still get questioned highly. You can’t win them all.

With the multitude of characters and combinations comes the heart-racing tension of permadeath, i.e. stealth but on the ultimate difficulty. That sounds fun until you are the clumsy git I am, leaping over chasms the size of the Thames River between sections of buildings and dropping down holes wider than that which a former Mayor speaks from every day. I don’t trust myself to survive the first proper playthrough with that on. I will be leaving that for a second, third, fourth, and so on. I’m not letting Bert, my expert hacker with flatulence, commit harakiri by letting one rip on a stealth run through City Hall.

The combat is another massive change, and you are frailer than the hip of that dominatrix I met. It is a mesh between Yakuza‘s brutality and Arkham‘s simplicity, you have a hit, a guard block, and a dodge. The most important move is that dodge. On Normal difficulty, you can take a few hits and step back before you are KO’d, but on hard, you can take one or two before having to run for your life. Of course, it is better than an early Assassin’s Creed game of jumping on someone before giving them the glomp of death, you need to be strategic with your hits.

While it is advised not to get into gun combat, and for obvious reasons, you can sponge bullets like you were living underwater (no, it’s not Norfolk). Being in London means there will be a few men with big guns, but they aren’t on every street corner. It isn’t America. That said, the swarm of drones will fire god only knows what at you, either to disarm you or kill you. If you need the guns to feel powerful, play on hard. There is just not enough punch on normal to make it feel brutal enough. I’ll repeat myself to get the point across, it is London, there aren’t meant to be lethal guns because of common sense.

That said, I do enjoy the interaction with guns. If you start punching up a guard or two, they will respond in kind. However, the second you pull out a gun, that’s when all hell breaks loose and it goes Eight Mile. That is better at promoting a more careful approach, I like that. I just wish there was naturally a little more behind bullets. Weight enough to yell, “This is stupid.” and s omething that could force you further towards stealth and being careful more than anything else. You are a small guerrilla hacker group trying to show you aren’t as villainous as portrayed, and that leads me brilliantly onto the story.

It isn’t that great. Don’t get me wrong, I love liberating London of a militarized pseudo-police force as anyone would, but there isn’t much more investment than “take back my city.” To once again use Watch_Dogs 2 as the yardstick, Marcus had a personal story that collided, rubbed, and sometimes crashed through the story of others. As a result of permadeath and the fact you can play as anyone in London, there is just something central (other than Dedsec) missing. As much as 2 had that whole 90s hacker movie thing going on, it was charming with cliches and dark moments here and there, but it worked. Legion steps slightly back to the dark side of Aiden Pearce.

The best stories in Legion are the ones you are creating with the playable characters. The stories of how you hired them, saved their friends, and the guards you punched along the way. The fact the profiler on every single person works to tell you if you are even liked by people gives you a chance to tell personal stories only you’ll have in your head. Even the little moments in Dedsec HQ are memorable. While it is a little cliched to have characters being worried they aren’t cut out for the job, I have more empathy for them personally. They aren’t perfect, but they are doing quite a bit of heavy lifting on the story end.

I’d have liked something a bit stronger on this end, something to put my teeth into. I don’t want to say the story is painting by numbers, but it isn’t inspiring any more or less hatred than I already have for Albion, the villains of the piece. There is just more that could be done, such as making it harder to get Albion members on your side than traveling across the map, blipping on a coms unit of another guard, and doing the usual mission like everyone else. On that end, it is playing things rather safe.

Quickly trying to wrap up, the cars aren’t much better than last time. They are very arcade-like, you can still handbrake turn around tight corners and peel it down alleyways, though there is a tiny tiny delay I’ve noticed in controls. It takes a moment to get used to, but soon enough you can swing a double-decker bus or London cab around a corner like you were James Bond. It gives enough power to you but also takes enough away that you can wrestle it into submission and get around fairly well. Or you can be like every other Londoner and use the tube. It is your choice really.

Navigating is possibly one of the easiest things I’ve found compared to other games. If you know the bridges, the tube stations, or you can see the tip of St Paul’s, you can get around easily enough. I’ve had nothing but glee saying to myself, “If I go round this corner, I should be on Piccadilly Circus.” Sure enough, my knowledge of how to navigate London intuitively has gotten me out of chases. Barreling around corners as lamp posts, bodies, and drones go flying every which way, I also feel like I’m in a gangster flick. It is brilliant.

That said, as ambitious and vast as Legion happens to be, I’ve had quite a few hard crashes or minor bugs crop out. Either doing things a little too quickly or other issues causing the game to wig out, I’ve had sirens on Albion cars stay on until I go through another load screen, crashing after switching characters, and other issues. If that bothers you quite a bit, I’d suggest giving the game a week or two to settle down. Let it update a handful of times and check with others to see if they experience that too. It is an inconvenience of longer load times that is the most annoying here.

Speaking of annoying, I said it in the Assassin’s Creed Odyssey review months ago: there are microtransactions that “speed the game up.” Or rather slow the game down for those playing as designed without the extra cost. Yes, the ETO (replacement for the British Pound) is near infinite as you can hack bank accounts as before. However, it still feels like there is something done to make obtaining it a little slower. There is, of course, the DLC, Season Pass, and other assorted business I have fewer grievances with, but that store put a damper on several moments of lacking in-game currency.

Overall, Watch Dogs: Legion isn’t the best game of the year. It isn’t the prettiest, and it isn’t lighting fires in underpants, but it is ambitious, fun, and set in London. I said it at the top, I’ve been excited for Legion since that teaser pointed to Cyberdog, and I couldn’t be more pleased if I could paint a bigger smile on my face. It is rough around the edges. They have yet to seal up some of the cracks, and sometimes stumble at the final hurdle in some areas, it isn’t perfect. I love it nonetheless.

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Watch Dogs: Legion

$59.99

8

Score

8.0/10

Pros

• Tonight Edna, we run this city!
• I heart London.
• One of the most ambitious games of the year.

Cons

• The soundtrack doesn't take as many risks.
• The main story feels rather bland.
• Texture work isn't great.
• Quite a few crashes on occasion.