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…
