Watch Dogs: Legion.
I've been playing Watch Dogs: Legion for a fair deal of this weekend, since UbiSoft has it on Free Weekend and all. I have some thoughts on it, after spending some good 12 hours or so with it.
Let's get the bad right out of the way. Watch Dogs 1 was laced w/ predictable on the characters & the hacker narrative here w/ tropes, cliches, killing off characters, and writing off characters too much. Watch Dogs 2 was an improvement w/ having a more interesting story (over the original game) in both character development, storytelling, and stuff of that sort...while also adding more stealth & non-lethal options in combat. Watch Dogs: Legion...doesn't even feel like it's trying in the character depth stuff here; and some of the mission types, mission areas, and/or spoken lines (either the actual line itself and/or the same voice-actor/actress returns on another character) from NPC's/Legion members often feel repetitive.
It feels like, this game needs more familiar faces (like Aiden from WD1 or Wrench from WD2, who both will be in the game's Season Pass) and/or more special NPC's that have some actual depth to their character, skills, and/or maybe their own special missions that only they can do. While it's easy to root for DedSec (given their situation), it's hard to root for any of the Legion members that join you as...you don't have a lead character or a few lead characters that you can play as to actually get behind.
Here's probably why there's very little character-depth on the characters you can add to your party: you can recruit pretty much any NPC walking about the game-world. Often, each NPC you meet has certain skills in their arsenal (which you'll know when you hack their phone); and sometimes you will find special NPC's with their own special skills and/or classes of NPC's that have their own special skills in their arsenal. When recruiting NPC's, you'll often have to do a missions or two for them, before they join your crew.
Once the game & its plot gets going, DedSec needs to more or less be rebuilt in England, after they were blamed for some bombings & attacks that they didn't commit in England. DedSec was set-up. Meanwhile....the Gov't, organizations & corporations are getting too powerful & corrupt, as technology is getting even more powerful, sinister & misused by those in power. Pretty much, you will re-assemble DedSec to clear their name; stop those abusing their power; and cause a Revolt in England.
The actual main story & plot is solid itself. These are told in Chapters here, as multiple Main Quest-lines. Feeling like it's out of the DA2 playbook, each Chapter feels like it's its own Game. You'll take down a group and/or help out another group in another chapter, which feel like these are separate chapters....but do later tie into the on-going narrative. In one of the Chapters, there's even a decision at the end to be made, which seems like it could shape the game and maybe something later in possibly one of the later Chapters.
If you've played Watch Dogs 1 & 2, you know what you're getting into, gameplay-wise. This is an UbiSoft open-world game with GTA-style gameplay (open-world game with shootouts & vehicles you can drive, all in third-person) while also having additional stealth elements at your disposal. You can hack computers, phones, camera, turrets, electrical panels, spider-bots, and anything else you can think of....to complete your missions. You can use a guns blazing approach or a melee-based approach. One of the more different things on the gameplay here in Legion (when compared to previous WD games) is that now there's more of an emphasis on hand-to-hand combat; and this is especially true if you just don't walk into using guns.
If you don't go in all guns blazing & shooting, they'll likely just battle you in melee combat with weapons or fists & feet. Unless you're doing a number on them, don't expect guns blazing all the time...unless the mission is going to have shootouts. WD1 and WD2 often focused on shootouts, but many encounters and/or missions will also focus on hand-to-hand fighting or melee combat with a weapon. That's not to say you won't run into shoot-outs, but...you can; and there are missions or parts of missions when you'll need to go guns blazing.
Back to the hand-to-hand combat - there's also some Underground Bare Knuckle Boxing arenas all over the game-world, so that not only can practice the melee and become a Champ in those arenas - but you can also gain more boxers to add to DedSec, since you can pretty much recruit any NPC in the game-world to join your Legion.
Since you can recruit any NPC, they also have an option to turn Permadeath on or off. When running it at its default difficulty of having it off, your NPC's can get arrested and/injured, if they get knocked-out in combat. Then, you'll likely have to either go get them (in a separate mission) or wait for a timed penalty in gameplay-time to way until the NPC is available to use them again. Sometimes, your Legion members can get kidnapped while you're playing the game & it'll offer you up a rescue mission to go get them.
This game's gorgeous, on both a technical level & with its artistic look for England. England and the character models in this game look great, which is not surprise as often Ubi's games on the Watch Dogs Engine usually looks great. Though, as usual on Ubi's games - expect to need a good PC to run it at higher settings; it's demanding. My PC's specs are as follows: i7 10700KF; 16 GB RAM; 8GB RTX 3070; and W10 x64. On my PC here, this game can easily go over the 8GB of VRAM that a RTX 3070 has on its board, even at 1080p - meaning that I can't even max this game out at 1080p, often having to turn-off something...such as sacrifice the highest quality textures (this extra 4K texture pack is an extra download via UbiSoft Connect) or sacrificing RTX. B/c I'm not running at 4K here, I've got RTX on - and especially at night w/ the lighting & reflections and all, this looks absolutely amazing with this on. With most stuff on Very High or Ultra and with both RTX & DLSS On in-game with some enhancing of some AA types & image enhancing via the NVidia Panel to its max over there - I can get mostly performance here in the 50-70fps range, on a regular basis - so to keep the FPS a bit more stable, I capped it at 60fps in-game. There was an area, where I received a hit of down to 30fps, but these framerate-hits were very rare.
Regardless, despite its few problems & issues, Watch Dogs: Legion has been a solid & good sandbox game; and also has been lots of fun. After 12 hours with it, I've certainly not seen everything here & there seems to be more fun stuff to do, which I haven't finished or taken on yet. While the Watch Dogs franchise may have never fully lived-up to its insane amounts of hype over any of these 3 games, I still can't deny this: these games have always at least been fun, with its gameplay...and that certainly still remains true with Watch Dogs: Legion.
