Watch Dogs: Legion — Ubisoft’s Most Ambitious Failure

What if you could play as everyone?

Xbox Series S screenshot taken by the author.

On paper, 2020’s Watch Dogs Legion is one of the coolest open world action games ever produced. Set in an alternate universe’s futuristic dystopian London, it casts you not as a slick well-designed video game character, but rather as a collective group of randomly generated people, all plucked from the sea of city-dwelling NPCs that we’re so used to ignoring in these games. It had a lofty goal to try and turn these background actors into true, fully-formed characters — but some rough execution means that instead Ubisoft might have accidentally killed one of their bigger franchises.

I love the idea of being able to play as any of the characters inside of a video game. Watch Dogs Legion starts out like a “normal” game experience, but then quickly pivots hard into this potentially interesting idea. In its thrilling opening moments, you’ll feel like you’re playing a cancelled James Bond game, controlling a suave suit-wearing ex-military intelligence agent named Dalton who is trying to stop a terrorist bombing of various iconic London locations. In spite of having a whole slick-looking hacker group and an intensely futuristic sci-fi AI buddy to help him, he mostly fails in his mission, with disastrous results. This sets up the villains of this new game, and helps explain the setting of a weird tech-integrated almost Cyberpunk London that’s even more obsessed with technological surveillance than the real-world city.

This opening, while exciting, intense, and even a little bit politically risky, also foreshadows the execution problems to come in the rest of Legion. The stories of the first two games also prominently featured surveillance and hi-tech hacking, but their actual plots were grounded in very personal stories around one or two main characters. As the general conceit of the third game is that you can play as anyone, they had to go way too big with the setup, wrapping the whole of London into the story and putting it under a nightmarish grip of mercenaries, robots, cameras, and evil drones. When compared to the intimate vengeance-driven stories of the earlier installments, Legion’s tale feels more like a wild cartoon, and it’s harder to connect with as a result.