Ubisoft games’ new outing, Watch Dogs: Legion, offers an extraordinary, interactive tour of inner-city London.
Resident and regular visitors of London will take to a vehicle and quickly find themselves exploring what is, by all accounts, the most accurate ground-level rendering of a cityscape in gaming history. Playing the game over the past two weeks, I’ve been struck by just how accurate Legion’s London really is. All the major sites are there. If you want to do so, you can take a jaunt to the Cabinet or Foreign Offices, and leap over into Downing Street. Buckingham Palace is also accessible if you’re able to recruit one of her majesty’s foot guards. So are the London Eye, Parliament, and The Shard. I’ve spent most of my time just experimenting if places of memory are in the game. Far more often than not, they are. This includes otherwise nondescript buildings that will have unique memory or meaning, or no meaning at all, for each player.
What of the gameplay?
Well, as with the previous two Watch Dogs outings, this adventure is focused on a mixture of action and puzzle-solving. Relying on various technical devices, the player is challenged to redirect power flows and summon metadata records to reconstruct crime scenes. It’s a clever idea and one that has cultural and political salience in our era of 5G cell phones. It made me think of the importance of Britain’s decision to ban China’s spy firm, Huawei.
However, sometimes the redirecting of power becomes tedious. I found myself growing increasingly impatient as the game progressed, and the power challenges kept appearing. Still, the gameplay is generally both fun and flexible. As is Ubisoft’s style, Legion allows players multiple different ways to access a building or environment. Want to infiltrate in disguise? No problem. Want to use a cargo drone to drop down onto the roof? Sure. Want to sneak around, ambushing unsuspecting guards? Do it. Matched to its beautiful delivery of an accurate London, this flexibility is Legion’s strength. Another strength is the player’s ability to recruit any of the thousands of non-player Londoners walking the city’s streets. Each seems to have a unique personality and needs.
The game’s narrative is a more mixed bag. While the conspiracy-driven story is rather ridiculous, it also offers a healthy degree of darkness and ethical dilemmas. The idea of power as an absolutely corrupting force is also well developed. By the time players are done with Legion, I think most will feel they’ve had a rewarding experience. Its rendering of London guarantees that all by itself.
