author: Bart Woldanski
First Reviews: Watch Dogs Legion - Could Have Been Better
On the eve of launch, a number of reviews of Watch Dogs Legion appeared on the web. Did the dystopian London sandbox game meet the expectations? The scores speak for themselves.
Watch Dogs Legion is the third major installment of Ubisoft's sandbox game series and one of the biggest launches of this season. The prequels were getting pretty good reviews, although it's hard to hide the fact that many players remember the visual downgrade of the original game the most. How did the the third game do in comparison? Average ratings on Metacritic (78% for Xbox One) and OpenCritic (75%) suggest that we are dealing with a decent game that will satisfy fans of the series and Ubisoft's open-world games, but not everything has worked out as it should.
Watch Dogs Legion - selected review scores:
- Game Informer - 9/10
- IGN - 8/10
- GameSpot - 8/10
- Shacknews - 8/10
- Wccftech - 7.9/10
- COGconnected - 75/100
- PCGamesN - 7/10
- GamesRadar - 3.5/5
- GameCentral Metro - 6/10
- VG247 - 3/5
- Videogamer - 5/10
Watch Dogs Legion offers a traditional Ubisoft experience with a well-made open world, a mass of side quests and activities. However, the gameplay is very repetitive and although it allows for a lot of freedom of action, according to some reviewers it is sometimes too restrictive. Contrary to appearances, it is not as revolutionary as one could think after the announcements. On the other hand, critics are fairly unanimous in their assessment of the recruitment system, the complete novelty of the series, and the hacking possibilities, which are even more fun than in previous installments, and which are expanded in time thanks to the progression system. However, it is regrettable that Watch Dogs Legion shows all of its tricks in the first few hours of fun, according to some reviews, and doesn't reveal too much new to the players later on.
The plot and characters are, in short, terribly bland. It's no wonder, however, that instead of well outlined characters we got a hundred NPCs, over which we take control. Unfortunately, this accusation also applies to the story characters, including the cliche antagonists.
To sum up, Watch Dogs Legion is a decent game, which is quite good in terms of gameplay mechanics and recreation of London, but it stands out qualitatively in terms of plot and design of many missions, which are too schematic. In terms of average ratings, it is at a similar level to previous installments of the series series, so it's hard to say that it's a big surprise.
Watch Dogs: Legion will debut tomorrow, on October 29, 2020, on PC (Ubisoft Connect, Epic Games Store), Google Stadia, as well as PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles . The editions for Xbox Series X/S and PS5 will be released on the day of their launch, i.e. November 10 and, depending on the country, November 12 and 19. The new consoles will offer 4K gameplay at 30 fps with ray tracing enabled.
