Watch Dogs Legion – PC Review

Watch Dogs Legion

Welcome to London DedSec operative(s) your task.. to Unfuck London from the mess
that it’s been left in after the Albion takeover, this is what you are thrown
into in the beginning of the game.

You’ve seen the trailers, and teasers.. bombs going off in London, the police
has been left without powers and their duties transferred to the Para Military
company Albion to restore peace and stability to London by any means necessary;
even if it means beating up civilians on the side-walk of a busy street, or
invading privacy with 24/7 drone surveillance. Without spoiling anything
of the story as this one is really interesting and well executed with more plot
twists and shocks than an episode of Coronation Street (British Soap Opera),
I’m more than sure you will have a thrill and a wild ride playing through it.

The game builds on mechanics from the previous titles in the franchise, mainly
the hacking aspect is unchanged as well as the puzzle layout that you got familiar
with in the first and the second game, keeping it nice and tidy as well as simple
to get into to or remember. Nothing more fun than having a car chase throughout
the streets of London, driving through a check point with liftable barriers to
crash out the bad guys, or giving a terrible Mercenary who is beating on a
innocent person a proper electrical shock through your phone.

London as the map, is massive in this game and thankfully there is a fast travel
option as you progress in the game that you can take use of, snappily traversing
between the tube-stations from one side of London to the other. If you prefer
the scenic route, you can have most cars go on auto-drive.. since this is a
technological society we are living in.

There is no single character in the game, which is a mechanic that is both great
and also in a way makes most of the recruits that you end up convincing to join
the resistance rather forgettable, kicking off the game you choose your initial
character, and throughout the game your trusty AI sidekick Bagley is suggesting
you convince more people on the streets of London to join your team, and this is
for their abilities, skills that you can work in your favor when you play as that
specific character.

There is almost infinite amounts of people with different skills you can approach
in London, and this is the fun side of the game overall,
helping that specific character with a problem (be it they owe money, getting
threats), sorting it all out for them, and then having them join up with DedSec.
Screenshots above, show some of the recruits I’ve had join my DedSec team,
most of them have non-lethal weapons, but some you can recruit also carry
more lethal options, as sub machine guns or pistols.

When you’ve recruited people, you can flip between the recruits as you see fit,
let’s say you have a mission that requires you to infiltrate a police station,
convince a member of the police to join your team, this means you can walk in
on guarded locations with relative ease to a certain extent, are you injury
prone? hire a doctor to the team to speed up the recover of your team when you
fail a mission, hire a lawyer to reduce the time spent in jail when you fail
the mission. Then there are comical people you can recruit, like you’ve seen
in the videos leading up to the game, convincing an retired little old lady
to join the team, or an old man that is prone to having heart-attacks..

But like I said once you’ve recruited the person you feel will benefit the team
their “story” vanishes as you have so many people already, and
the game does not focus on that persons life anymore.

So initially while you get to know them a bit, that’s all you will get.
But that’s not at all a bad thing is it?
if you had continually story on the character you are playing that is
not relevant to the game, you would have such a massive undertaking finding out
everything that the games story itself would suffer I guess?

It is double-edged sword, but in my opinion the way Ubisoft chose to make it
is the right way in the end, your objective after all is to unscrew London
whatever it takes and not to explore your characters backstory further than
you get to know their name.

You have access to a lot of technological gadgets and gizmos in the game that
you can use as tools, and all of these once unlocked can be further “upgraded”
to provide more functionality, example of this would be disabling drones or
turrets, and furthermore hijacking and having the ability to turn them on their
own people.. certain recruits you add to your team, also have their own abilities
to call in for example heavy lifting drones.. which could come in handy when
you need to get into places high up in the sky. All these upgrades are done
with technological points that you can find in various “hidden” places
throughout London, or completing main missions in the story.

Speaking of the story and the length of the campaign on Watch Dogs Legion.
You are looking at multiple main-missions, and approximately 15-18 hours
of gameplay to complete the story (this is based on my own Playthrough)
at Normal difficulty, and included minimal Side-Missions so far. I’d
guess around 25-30 hours in total to complete everything the game throws at
you. The good thing though is there will be more DLC and more playable
content coming to the game over time, and there also will be a multiplayer
mode, so you can expect to return to London also multiple times.

I’ve had a blast playing the game so far, and I would really recommend the
game to anyone who has or has not played Watch Dogs 1 or 2. To answer a question
I’m sure many of you are thinking about, do I need to have played 1 and 2 to
understand Legion? No, you can jump directly into Legion, without having
played the other games prior, the only thing you might miss out on then,
is that the main character (Aiden Pearce) from Watch Dogs is playable DLC
with the season pass.

London is a fun world to explore with all it’s quirky characters with snappy
comments, and it’s eye candy to behold on top of that as well.

The game is out today 29th October 2020, on PC, Playstation and Xbox One
consoles. Please see your local store or online store for regional pricing.

Performance

As you can see from the Required/Recommended image above, WD Legion does
require some serious hardware to run at it’s full capabilities. And boy
does it look good when you turn on all the bells and whistles, I’ve recently
upgraded a bit on my system.. unfortunately not to the 30xx series due to lack
of supply as everyone knows, but I managed to snag a more than decent MSI 2080
Super Gaming X Trio card for a fairly decent price that will carry me over til
the next upgrade. That said, Running WD Legion on my i5 9400 (need a CPU upgrade
yes I know) with 16 GB ram at 3200mhz and the 2080 Super, on 1440p with a mix
of Ultra/High and RTX Ray Tracing on, netted me around 50-60fps. These settings
included having DLSS on as well, which helps on the FPS front overall.

From the screenshots in the beginning of the review you can see that already
with these settings the game looks absolutely stunning, and more importantly
runs very well and steady, except the few times I encountered a strange loading
into a cut-scene bug, which led to that I had to restart the game a few times
to get past that particular scene..

But I am sure that “bug” will be ironed out, if it’s not already been done.

An SSD is definitely recommended here also for your install, the game clocks in at
67.30 GB, and besides the fairly long start-up load time, all other areas of the
game load in quickly after that.

Final Thoughts

Watch Dogs Legion is a truly beautiful game, a show case for RTX graphics;
that is more than super fun to play to due to it’s new character recruit/switch
mechanics, you want to play as a doctor? no problem, you want to play as a hard
core football fanatic who likes his beer? no problem. The story has more twists
and turns than a episode of Coronation Street (British Soap Opera), and will
keep you entertained for countless hours. All that there is left to say is
Welcome to Britain DedSec Operative, now go unfuck London! Pick it up now!