I primarily played Legion as a stealthy hacker so I made sure to use my points to upgrade my drones, as well as to manipulate my enemy’s drones to either be disabled or outright betray their own allies. A lot of essential hacking abilities are also unlocked right away, unlike the huge tech tree of Watch Dogs 2, and your abilities can be upgraded even further by using tech points you obtain on missions or by exploring the world.
Areas and missions are still open-ended, allowing players to reach their goal in a variety of ways, whether that be through stealthily hacking your way past doors and guards, or simply taking the more direct approach by bringing an arsenal of weapons and drones to bust your way through. Mechanically Watch Dogs: Legion is just a structurally sounds as its predecessor. Because these two archetypes had the best tools given for any given job, they were my go-to operatives 95% of the time. After a while, the novelty of the “play as anyone” system wore out once I recruited a hitman and a spy. This created some jarring issues, where my party of eccentric artists, cosplayers and grandmas all acted like they were trying to be dark, brooding vigilantes. Watch Dogs: Legion reverts back to the dark themes of first game, and as a result, it feels like every piece of dialogue was written strictly for Aiden Pierce to perform. While each of these characters may sport an in-depth bio of their schedules and achievements, none of that will translate over to how these characters act in cutscenes or their personalities out in the field. However, this freedom to choose from anyone to play as acts a double-edged sword. For example, one of my first recruits was an elderly woman by the name of Jette Lund, who despite having a broken hip and low mobility, could still hack her way through New Scotland Yard’s precinct and bust out a hefty Rex 357 revolver when she got compromised stealing files from the main server. Of course, there are also quirky characters to recruit, such as elderly folk and drunks, that may not be the best operatives strategically to employ, but still bring some fun to the table. Recruiting street artists and spies can give you access to new varieties of weapons, construction workers and beekepers are great at manipulating drones, and even recruiting a barrister or an EMT can provide party-wide effects that help keep all your operatives at peak efficiency.
The core feature Watch Dogs: Legion is built around is that anyone you encounter in the streets of near-future London can be recruited to the DedSec cause, and each one brings something unique to the team.
In Watch Dogs Legion, players must retake London from this authoritarian regime one borough at a time and rebuild DedSec’s resistance from the ground up with the only recruits available, London’s very own citizens. In response to these acts of terrorism, PMCs now control London’s streets and oppress its people, intelligence agencies no long have any impediments to who they target or how, and the true culprit behind these bombings, Zero Day, is still at large. When a coordinated set of bombing attacks strikes, London and its DedSec branch are plunged into chaos and brought to the brink of collapse.