Watch Dogs: Legion has been on my “can’t-wait-for-this-to-come-out” list since it was announced at E3 back in 2019. The concept of recruiting every single person in the game – pretty much making NPCs obsolete within its world – blew my little mind. Talk about ambitious! Ubisoft was going to flip elements of the open-world genre on its head, do the hokey pokey and turn the whole idea of “random NPC on the streets” around and into a living, breathing recruitment agency.

The game begins with a mission that sees you play as a character that is chosen by the game. This is the only time this will occur throughout your entire time with Watch Dogs. It sets up the events that will lead to the Watch Dogs: Legion world that you will inhabit. The London division of the hacker group DedSec is set up by another group of hackers called Zero Day. They place a number of bombs around London and blame it on DedSec leading Londoners to hate the hacking vigilantes and giving them no other option but to disband.

After these attacks, the world of London has obviously changed and not for the better. The strong and corrupt have taken over, bringing brutality and surveillance to the streets. Security company Albion is using corrupt police power, an extensive drone presence and violence to keep Londoner’s under their thumb. Crime boss Mary Kelley has control of the underworld and has her fingers in some pretty nasty pies (organ harvesting anyone?) Then there’s Zero Day – who are they, what do they want and why did they frame DedSec in the first place?

To bring back London to the people and stop it from being one big corrupt, scary Orwellian nightmare, DedSec must reform, recruit the best and delve into some pretty scary corners of the city.

The first two Watch Dogs were very focused on their protagonists who players had a long time to get to know and embody. Legion doesn’t have this angle anymore. There’s no brooding Aiden Pearce from the original Watch Dogs or no hipster Marcus Holloway from Watch Dogs 2. Character development is null and void in Legion because you can literally play as anyone, so really, there’s no main protagonist. Instead of presenting a character’s personality and how the story impacts them, Legion focuses more on seeing characters as interchangeable depending on their skills. Have a mission that you know will be populated with drones? Select a drone expert to handle it. Need to be stealthy af? Get a hitman or a spy to sneak around and use their silencers.

However, not all characters are created equal. When you access a player’s skills and gadgets via their “profile” you will find that a number of them aren’t worth the effort to recruit. Yeah, these people won’t come willingly. They’ll want you to do them a favour that ranks anywhere from stealing a car from a bunch of thugs, to wiping their data history from an Albion facility. It is only then that they will join DedSec and be a character that you can play as.

DeadSec operatives all seem to have their own skills, style and distinct voice, but their speech is repetitive and you will hear their exact words spoken by other DedSec members. So if you’re hoping for each of the playable characters to be unique, I’ve got bad bad news for you. Characters are important due to their special skills and usefulness in battle rather than for their personalities. This is part of what makes the game’s open world fall a bit flat. Certain voices or lines of dialogue are highly repetitive, and you can see how in some ways, this “no NPCs” idea has its limitations.

The slight glitches in the game also make the world seem less sophisticated. Randoms on the street will start punching you for no reason, or you’ll be swimming and can’t climb out of the water, or a person will just randomly disappear in front of you. Tiny things, but they interrupt the flow and feel of the world.

The London of Watch Dogs: Legion is just stunning. It captures the grit, the life and the energy of the city well by using the right colours, littering Brit slang in the character’s speech and even including a number of famous British artists, such as Lily Allen, The Gorillaz and Fat Boy Slim, on its soundtrack.

Moving the action of the Watch Dogs series to a European rather than a North American city totally changes the feel of the game. This may be because I’m an Aussie, but it felt more familiar, more colourful and not as dreary as the streets of Chicago. However, though the location has changed, the formula hasn’t. Even though Ubisoft has reported that they’ve tried to change their infamous formula, the bare bones of the previous Watch Dogs can still be seen through Legion’s pale British skin. So, if you’re a bit tired of the Ubi formula and were expecting Watch Dogs: Legion to be totally different then I’d stay away from this one. If you want a similar experience to the previous entries but with a slight twist, then I’d be grabbing up this fun dystopian open-world romp!