Hacking on the streets of London

Watch Dogs: Legion has a seriously impressive open world.

ACTION- ADVENTURE

UBISOFT’S OPEN-WORLD London is quite an achievement, even if its inhabitants frequently speak in a way that would make even Guy Ritchie think the dialog coaches had gone a bit far. It’s a shame, then, that such a fine representation of a near-future capital city has been tethered to such an unrelentingly grim game.

There’s no main character this time around, a very good thing when you remember the sullen Aiden Pearce from the first entry in the series. While you create a custom character at the beginning of the game, you can play as anyone you meet as you rebuild the DedSec white-hat hacking crew from scratch after a false-flag terrorist attack wipes them (almost) out.

Starting as your custom character, you’re sent out onto the streets of London by a bizarrely profane AI to recruit new members. The near-future setting allows the realization of all sorts of conspiracy theories, and London— presumably the rest of the UK too—is being run by the PMC Albion, turned into a surveillance state with checkpoints, drones, and itchy-trigger-finger armed response. There’s also another crew in town, Zero Day, who you’ll need to take down. Watch Dogs’ genetic makeup has received a heavy dose of GTA DNA—stealing cars and setting off urban mayhem is a major part of the fun on offer. Stealthy infiltration of company premises makes up the rest, using vents, camouflage, or spider-bots to obtain information from locked server rooms or dingy basements.