I have really enjoyed the Watch Dogs series up to now, the current “baby” series of the Ubisoft line up with only two entries so far. Legion itself was originally slated for an early 2020 release until the disastrous launch and reaction to Ghost Recon Breakpoint put all Ubisoft plans on hold and it was delayed until October 29^th, just one week before the Xbox Series X/S globally launches and the PlayStation 5 in the US. This is a very busy time for games and with Assassin’s Creed Valhalla out on the 10^th November, Watch Dogs Legion has to do enough to make sure its standout on its own, so does it do enough to warrant your attention at this crazy time of console launch and silly season of game releases?

In the four years since we last visited the Watch Dogs universe in 2016, that world has changed very quickly with technological leaps in artificial intelligence, drones and AR/VR technology changing the world quickly. London is now a city on the cutting edge of this technology, currency has changed from the £ to cryptocurrency with driverless cars and culture now reflecting this new world of technology. Dedsec, the heroic hacker group who challenge anyone who would use technology to impose their will on the people, is still going strong and the London branch discover a plot to blow up Parliament in a V for Vendetta meets HACKERS merger of plot devices. Sending an operative to put a stop to it, they quickly discover that another Hacker group calling themselves Zero Day is taking responsibility for the attack and not only that, but they have outsmarted Dedsec in every way, not only have they set up Dedsec to look like they planned the bombing, but just as the bomb in parliament is about to be deactivated, Dedsec are raided by armed and well trained  attackers who slay the members of Dedsec with only their leader Sabine able to escape and Bagley, their own super AI shutdown. Zero Day was thorough in their planning, though the bomb at parliament was stopped, several others around the city then go off and Dedsec is blamed.

The resulting aftermath leads the UK Government handing the security of London and task of hunting down Dedsec to Albion, who quickly seize power in the city with armed soldiers, checkpoints and bases in every borough of London. You as the player are then recruited by Sabine and tasked with rebuilding the London branch of Dedsec and to investigate who was really behind the bombings, who Zero Day are and freeing London and its people from Albion control. Sounds like we have some work to do!

It has to be said that Watch Dogs Legion is the best looking game Ubisoft has done yet for me, this is after Assassin’s Creed Odyssey of course but you can really see how that engine has been refined and it looks incredible on the Xbox One X bringing London to life, I can only imagine how this game will look on the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 with boosted visuals including raytracing! London is truly brough to life here with all the recognisable landmarks there to see and visit. But as a Londoner familiar with the streets between these landmarks, I do get a real buzz both walking and driving down the streets between those landmarks, all recreated so close to flawlessly can you could use it to learn to navigate Central London. Of course, some changes have been made such as no real-world branded shops but having the game contained to one large city space still offers so much to visit and do, I am really looking forward to seeing this on the next gen consoles.

So, to answer the question does Watch Dogs Legion do enough to stand out on its own, In short, yes. Watch Dogs Legion set itself a massive challenge right from the very start with its evolution of its gameplay from the previous titles. The action this time has come to London which is very personal to me as someone born, raised and still lives in London. Assassin’s Creed Syndicate made Victorian London a playground for me so I was incredibly eager and a little nervous to see a more current even if set a couple of decades in the future, version of my home town. But there is one massive factor that quite frankly Legion is relying on which if it works would make it awesome but if it failed it would be a complete non starter as a video game so, Legion already has that hurdle to jump over. That hurdle….the ability to play as ANYONE.

This system actually works incredibly well and was the biggest concern I had for Legion. This system allows any and all people in the world to be a recruit for Dedsec and therefore playable by the player and each will have certain requirements in order to recruit them adding an abundance of side activity to do as you have to convince them to join Dedsec. These side missions can be helping to solve a problem for them such as hacking and erasing incriminating evidence Albion has on them or helping by rescuing a friend of theirs. Once recruited, they join your team and can be hot switched to at any time outside of combat of course. This is really important because the system will randomly generate how they look but more importantly, the skills they have. Some people may have a certain weapon or their own personal vehicle. The skills however is the most important thing with some having more positive ones than others such as some having boosted melee combat skills, better hacking skills or extra perks such as being able to help your team out passively by helping to make money, giving a discount for things or reducing the arrest or injury time should a recruit be taken down.

But they can also have negative perks as well, we have all seen the early gameplay trailers showing the more elderly people you can recruit and these “Granny Gangstas” as I came to call them, will move slowly and be unable to use the cover system. Some may even have a flatulence problem meaning that during a stealth section they will quite literally fart which will alert guards and drones to your presence. Some will even have a death wish meaning they will try to get themselves killed which is even more damaging when you play with ‘Perma Death’ switched on. In Legion, your recruits can be injured so badly they can’t be used for a certain time, they can be arrested removing them from the pool of recruits for a certain time but with Perma Death turned on, should they die then they are dead and you lose them for good. This can really suck if you happen to be using a character with a particularly good set of skills gets killed in a careless gunfight or an explosion. Now this mode is optional but believe me, this is the only way to play the game if you want to experience the “play as anyone” system because once the novelty of using a Granny or a farting person has worn off, and you are into the seriousness of playing the missions which can be challenging, once you build a good team of recruits tailored for any mission type, to lose one can be a big problem, especially if they are so unique that the chances of finding someone else with the same skills is rare.

That is where Legion really comes alive for me, completing the style of Watch Dogs missions that can require stealth, hacking or just good old-fashioned gunplay and Legion blends the grittiness and tone of the first Watch Dogs game with the more colourful and vibrant Watch Dogs 2. Legion certainly finds the right balance with big missions and hard impacting themes of how technology could both help and be abused as it continues to evolve. It also suffers from repetitive missions especially in the side and recruitment missions which often will have you completing multi-step missions that simply take you from one part of London to another meaning you spend a lot of times in vehicles or using the fast travel system of moving between London’s tube stations. Now I never bully became bored of doing these missions but I did find myself simply recruiting a full squad of 34 members and just keeping them and even when one was lost through the perma death mechanic I just simply never replaced them.

More issues come as a result of the game constantly needing to populate London with potential recruits and I came across many doppelgangers of those I had recruited on the streets of London with their clones from appearance right down to appearance and skills without them having a different name from the one I had in my team. The world also fails to really respond to your actions, once you have freed boroughs from Albion’s influence it would be nice if you had to fight to main them or the threat of losing them via your actions. You can pretty much go around beating up or killing anyone you want without any repercussion’s other than the Albion guards maybe searching for you but its so easy to escape or they just give up so quickly its never really troubling to get away. Which is a shame because London does feel alive and the culture of London is reflected in the different types of people including accents although whilst some are regionally correct for certain parts of London, often the voice of a random person won’t suit that person. I often had an elderly voice for someone who was young or a posh English accent for someone who was suppose to be a street punk.

Overall Watch Dogs Legion is great fun with a solid main story and enough to give players to do and I am really looking forward to the co-op/Multiplayer side which is due to launch in December for the game. Visually stunning and a great soundtrack brings my city of London to life in a way only Watch Dogs can and I had and am having great fun playing it. Once boosted with Series X/S or PS5 enhancements pushing the visuals and performance of the game even further, than Legion is a great title to have if you are getting one of the next gen consoles and it really is just a solid game experience that does enough to stand on its own but I can see how it will be overshadowed by AC Valhalla and particularly Cyberpunk 2077 should it actually release this year.

Watch Dogs Legion is worth your attention if you are a fan of the series and will other enough gameplay to make it fun to have and not a bad way to try out your shiny new next gen console should you get one or find one under your Christmas tree this year. It will be interesting to see what DLC will bring to it with the Season Pass but for now, there is enough here to keep you going and it will never not be fun to recruit a team of OAPs and have them take down an entire enemy base!

Until Dawn was a tough act to follow, a masterpiece in interactive horror story telling that really put the player in the middle of a story where every decision they made had a consequence both good and bad. The follow up to that bench mark title was The Dark Pictures Anthology, a collection of games serving as chapters hoping to recreate the Until Dawn experience in an almost episodic fashion but for me, the opening chapter in Man of Medan failed to come anywhere close to what Until Dawn achieved as a player experience. Now we finally have Chapter 2 in ‘Little Hope’ which released right on Halloween weekend for extra weekend spookiness. But could Little Hope get the formula right this time?

Little Hope had a lot to do quite frankly to win me over following a rather dull let down experience with Man of Medan and the prologue gave me a lot of hope which felt like a very early on “ok we listened to what you all said, look we fixed stuff”. By that I mean we very quickly jump to the action in the prologue compared to the slow rather slow lethargic pace of Man of Medan. The story opens with a bus driver setting off on his route before the image of a young girl in the middle of the road forced him to swerve leading to the bus flipping and ending up on its side. The action then jumps to what appears to be a family home in the 70’s where kids are discussing their parents having another fight but this time over the youngest daughter. A chain of events is triggered when the youngest daughter, Megan, seemingly taken instruction from a shadowy figure with creepy hands, sets her doll on fire which then starts a house fire trapping various family member across the house.

The prologue as you would expect is a very good tutorial into how the gameplay mechanics work from the now traditional player choice that comes in the form of dialogue choices between the characters as well as decisions on which can determine an outcome where life or death could depend on making a decision or not making one. In setting up the story this way the game also takes the opportunity to let the player know just how gruesome the game can get as each death is incredibly detailed and animated in the most brutal of fashion, even compared to Man of Medan and Until Dawn, the violent deaths in the prologue is enough to put anyone on the back foot.

The quicker pace of getting to the more horror focused elements of Little Hope certainly enable getting to the action much faster than Man of Medan which for me, took far too long setting up the cast of unlikeable characters than getting to anything really spooky and horror. Little Hope uses a variety of tricks to keep the player guessing as to what the hell is going on from dropping little teases such as books on Witches and the Witch Trials to the setting of this small American town that for some reason is enveloped in traditional “fog”. Even the introductions to the characters is much faster than in Man of Medan, allowing the player or players depending on the mode you choose, to make a quick assessment for each one as understanding a character is key to making the right choice for them as the story goes on.

I actually really liked the performance for each character and really enjoyed them far more than the ensemble in Man of Medan. I felt my choices in terms of choosing dialogue options for each of them when I was in control felt a lot more natural though there are still times when the narrative seemingly ignored my choices for them but overall, my decisions felt I was crafting character relationships when given the opportunity to do so. The writing did fall into the same trope trapping of Man of Medan with your stereo typical roles but they are very believable as characters as they all try to piece together what is happening whilst reacting to the craziness of it all. It definitely felt more in tone with how Until Dawn used its own cast of characters and so worked much better this time around than the wooden and single dimensional cast of Man of Medan.

Even the story setting just felt more fitting, moving away from the urban legend of a “ghost ship” in Man of Medan to the Witch Trials with clever twists as the characters from the modern day suddenly encounter their doppelgangers with strange events both confusing and scaring them all equally as events unfold. The way the characters react to each other and events is bolstered by the decisions you as the player or players if in co-op make for them, again forming the relationships that could lead to their survival or their deaths depending on the very choices you make. Switching between the characters feels more fluid and the tension of trying to keep all of them alive is still a powerful tool to drive the narrative as the story will adapt to the success or failure to do so.

Improvements over Man of Medan has helped give the sense of more control with visual queues before a QTE (Quick Time Event) so it less of a shock when you suddenly have to react quickly to an event that might lead to the loss of one of the characters which makes it feel a lot fairer than it did in Man of Medan. The horror aspect works far better this time as well with a focus on keeping the tension and mystery of what is happening throughout which failed in the last game for me. The three ways of playing either fully solo, passing the controller style co-op or the shared experience where two players view different aspects of the story as they play different characters still adds that level of replayability. The Curator is still that little element of magic and continuity for The Dark Pictures after each act, he will assess your performance with little hints depending on how well you did and possible clues that might give an insight into what is happening next.

Which is why I enjoyed Little Hope far more than Man of Medan but this series has yet to match the brilliance of Until Dawn and after two attempts, Until Dawn still remains the best example of this style of gameplay. Refinements were made and this series is back on a more positive note for me and left me interested for the third chapter due out in 2021.

Little Hope managed to actually give me some hope for this series after Man of Medan ultimately failed to deliver anything other than a lacklustre experience.