Explore London under siege with 20 minutes of brand new Watch Dogs: Legion gameplay. With hacking, shooting, bareknuckle boxing, and even a spot of darts, London is yours to explore.
Watch Dogs: Legion is the third instalment in Ubisoft’s futuristic Watch Dogs IP, but it almost feels like a brand new title altogether. The “Legion” in the title describes an astonishing piece of tech at the core of the game experience: every person you bump into on the streets of London is a recruitable character.
That’s right, you can take the ‘N’ out of NPC with pretty much everyone you meet. Sally the painter who happens to be a particularly good fist fighter? A desk clerk with a kickass motorcycle and a lead pipe on hand? Or maybe an officer of the fascist military group Albion, an insider who’s able to infiltrate enemy lines with ease? Ubisoft’s “play as anybody” claim is dead on the money.
After sitting with a near-complete demo version of the game for three hours, here’s what we learned.
From that session, we were able to record 20 minutes of Watch Dogs: Legion gameplay for release. What you’ll see in the video is a little bit of the main storyline we played along, an underground bareknuckle boxing match, a little bit of a recruitment mission, a cheeky game of darts at the pub, and more.
The footage you don’t see was more of the same: an additional recruitment mission with a lawyer character (bringing her into the DedSec circle meant less jail time for the rest of the team), and more story missions which included infiltrating a police station for confiscated evidence, and sneaking into a refugee camp for some sweet, sweet data.
The ‘recruit anybody’ feature at the core of the game provides a startling amount of depth – there’s quite literally endless ways to complete a mission based upon who you decide to play as. Pick a more combat-focused character to take the mission head-on, go through the trouble of recruiting a professional hitman (no easy task, their trust is tough to earn) to execute the quest in style, or play as a drone expert to fly in and out without anyone realising you were ever there.
For instance, I completed the police station mission while standing outside the building thanks to a character with a spider drone – a tiny, eight-legged machine which was able to sneak through ventilation shafts and hack from the inside.
When encountering a bareknuckle boxing ring, I picked a character who received bonus damage on a perfect dodge, and had the ability to knock back enemies on bigger melee strikes. Thanks to her proficiency with fisticuffs, the mission was a breeze – even when the final fighter called in a few mates.
Yet later, that dirty trick turned into a boon. The boxer in question Alexei became a recruitable character after he was defeated in the ring, meaning I could add him to the team and utilise those same mates who had once ganged up on me to my advantage.
The game also looks gorgeous, and provides an incredibly detailed recreation of London – albeit a London under fascist pseudo-military rule. You’ll be able to visit iconic locations such as Big Ben or the British Museum, the latter of which I happily bumped into by accident. Battersea, Camden, Southwark, Brixton, Chinatown, Soho, Westminster, and the City of London are all available as part of the map, ready to explore as you see fit.
And that’s Watch Dogs: Legion to a tee, it’s ready to be played however you like. The open world is truly open; I found a wealth of side quests in a short demo, and you could likely spend years on recruitment missions given there’s an endless supply of Londoners to team up with. The systems at the game’s core will no doubt offer an endless amount of depth to the game even on a first playthrough – just think, who will you recruit on yours?
Watch Dogs: Legion will be available on 29th October 2020 on Xbox Series X, Xbox One, PS5, PS4, PC, and Stadia. Find out more here.
