I just sat on a cargo drone like a cackling goblin, swooping over the Thames and commanding boats to smash into each other. Never once did I have to download drivers, switch anything on or off again, create an account, identify the squares containing traffic lights, or go through any of the other purgatorial frustrations involved in making computers do anything useful. I felt like an arsehole wizard with a smartphone instead of a wand, forcing a world of machines to wreak havoc on itself as I capered between blinking pellets of arbitrary achievement on the map. I never felt like a hacker in a desperate resistance movement. Unfortunately, all of the mega-sincere hacktivist chat, the full in-universe podcasts on the ethical minefields of civic connectivity, and the reams and reams of tech-heavy lore, feel entirely at odds with the crash-bang-wallop, cor-blimey way the game is played. It's like the entirety of twee liberal Twitter, boiled down into one piece of graphic design intended to enrage angry left Twitter.īut fuck it, it’s at least unapologetic about which side of history it wants to be on, and there’s little bet-hedging here for the sake of being ‘apolitical’. A picture really can say a thousand words. There is no room, here, for the banality of evil. I think it abstracts the struggle against fascism a little too far into Saturday morning simplicity (you replaced Albion propaganda with a stylish DedSec ‘ReSisT’ poster: Camden’s DEFIANCE meter has risen by one point!), which feels grating at best, depressing at worst, in a world that has slid halfway into the game’s setting over the course of its development. I will say this up front: Watch Dogs Legion actually manages much greater political coherence than I was expecting. ![]() And on a holistic level, it doesn't really work. These are two very tough things to achieve at the same time. But it also wants to be an extremely earnest game about technology, personal liberty, transhumanism and authoritarian oppression. Here is a game that’s extremely serviceable as a cartoonish urban mayhem generator in the vein of a GTA or a Saint’s Row, with the additional flavours of ‘dodgy geezers’ and ‘hacking’. But it’s also a perfect illustration of my biggest stumbling block with Watch Dogs Legion. This was the first five minutes of my game. Naturally then, Diane immediately steals a high-powered sports car, and embarks on a full-on, hundred-mile-an-hour Ragnarok of a joyride through Westminster, while retro footie belter “Three Lions” blasts from the stereo. Diane will have to keep to the shadows, working every advantage she has, if the renewed DedSec London is to survive. The odds, it’s made clear, are overwhelming. Underground hacker collective DedSec has just contacted Diane, tasking her with rebuilding the local resistance against omniscient, fashy security megacorp Albion. She’s a talent agent in her early thirties, with a pet owl, an anti-immigration voting record, and a history of going to furry conventions. But while it makes a commendable stab at tackling real world bleakness, it's trying to be a more earnest game than its open world cockney murder playground allows.ĭiane Ganguly is a totally ordinary Londoner one of the nine million NPCs who put the “Legion” in Watch Dogs Legion, since they can all be recruited and made playable. ![]() Watch Dogs Legion is a literal and figurative riot once its 'play as anyone' mechanic gets in gear.
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