If you’re stopping on the winding road toward uncovering the identity of the mysterious Zero Day terrorists to do sidequests, recruitment missions, and collect optional stuff, I could see a playthrough lasting you in the neighborhood of 40 hours. Your ally characters, meanwhile, are all fairly bland and forgettable – but DedSec’s resident smartass AI, Bagley, is a genuinely funny persistent voice in your ear who playfully mocks your human abilities without becoming a GladOS knockoff. I’ve definitely seen most of these same ideas in movies and on TV in the past decade, but it does have some decent villains going for it, including a totalitarian tech mogul and a ruthless leader of human-trafficking gangsters. “Each chapter of the lengthy story campaign plays out like a Black Mirror episode about technology and greed run amok in the hands of sociopaths. It’s a cool look, though cruising around busier areas can definitely tank your frame rate even on a GeForce RTX 2080Ti and Core-i7 7700K (even without ray tracing I couldn’t get close to holding 60fps at 1440p when I was moving fast). Its skies are dense with autonomous drones patrolling the streets and ferrying parcels streets are filled with a mix of old gas-guzzlers and Tesla-style self-driving cars and its landmarks are emblazoned with corporate-fascist banners and bright holographic projections. It can be rough and experimental in places, but I have to hand it to Ubisoft for being willing to take chances like this.Legion’s map is a vision of a near-future London metropolitan area, and similar to Watch Dogs 2’s compressed version of the San Francisco Bay Area it is beautifully detailed and immediately recognizable – but this time it’s also starkly different from how we know it. That lends it a much more sandboxy feel than the previous games because any given character can make the same mission feel dramatically different. Legion’s clever twist makes this third game in the series play like a hacker version of State of Decay, where every NPC can be recruited as a playable character and each has their own weapons, abilities, and traits that can give them very different playstyles. Not so much that I drive more carefully or anything, but after playing Watch Dogs: Legion I think about it a little bit more.

After decades of running over pedestrians by the dozen in open-world action games without a second thought, it’s actually a little bit unsettling to think that each of them might have unique talents and even the potential to be a hero.

Watch dogs legion steam