Compared to the first two games, the latest installment in the Watch Dogs series exudes a sense of incompletion. I’ve noticed a detail in the Watch Dogs series; the cities featured in the Midtown Madness games and those in WD seem coincidentally similar. Midtown Madness had a Chicago map, and Midtown Madness 2 featured San Francisco and London. Returning to WD Legion, the design of London is exquisite, and as usual, Ubisoft has more than demonstrated its mastery in creating open worlds. The narrow streets of London, the left-hand traffic, the predominantly gloomy and rainy weather have been depicted at the highest level I could see in a game. While the map is so perfectly crafted, the theme of the game has become a factor that undermines the map. I found the choice of a dystopian London inappropriate. The future theme is okay, but there’s a tremendous sense of incompletion; there are bird-like drone flights everywhere, Albion soldiers and vehicles are omnipresent in the open world, and the more technological vehicles alongside attempts to integrate classic London-appropriate cars stand out awkwardly. The presence of Minis and Aston Martin-like vehicles alongside the latest models is a retro touch, but it seriously clashes with the theme of the game. Another important aspect of map design is the absence of the Watch Dogs 2 playground in this game, which is a huge negative. As I progressed in the game, I was shocked; they’ve destroyed what made Watch Dogs, Watch Dogs, they’ve hollowed it out. Ubisoft probably took the criticisms of the second game too seriously; I can’t find any other logical explanation, but most of these criticisms are influenced by half-wits who deify mediocre games and a biased press that can’t break out of a certain circlejerk. In previous games, we could use the map as we wished and let creativity flow, but in this game, the only gameplay factor has become the cargo drone.

The most highlighted feature of the game, the playable NPCs, is a disastrous choice. While main characters stood out in the Watch Dogs series and the two main and one side character in previous games were quite satisfying, the playable NPCs in this game have emerged with a half-baked, ridiculous design and have ruined the general gameplay mechanics. Each NPC has its pros and cons, but we can’t add anything positive to them as a team; we can’t even buy weapons in the game, which is a massive downgrade from the first two games. There are three main NPCs that do the job: one is a hitman, another is a spy, and the most important is the construction worker type who flies the cargo drone. After assembling these three, you don’t lose anything in the game if you don’t grind for NPCs. Permadeath could take things to a different dimension, but it doesn’t cover up the disaster of this design choice, unfortunately. If you’re going to play, play with the hitman; they’ve designed a character mixing John Wick and 47. Since there’s no main character in the game, NPC dialogues become bland, and after a while, you lose the desire to follow them and just want it to end. Apart from the NPCs, the main characters in the game are meh compared to previous games. Even the AI dialogues are more bearable, think about that.

The combat mechanics from the first two games are gone, the pleasure of armed conflicts has disappeared, and in their place, mechanics resembling the shallowness of Rockstar games have been introduced. There’s a close combat mechanic that seems very unnecessary compared to previous games, and even that feels half-baked; I’m talking about a point where you end up drawing your gun. In the WD series, weapon use was always secondary for me, but the hack mechanics are also terrible. Instead of the quadcopter, we hack and use random drones, which has devoured the personalization aspect, and the RC car has been replaced with a spiderbot, but neither seems useful to me. In Watch Dogs 2, I completed so many missions without stepping into the mission objective with this duo; this possibility exists in this game, but there’s no flavor. Even Marcus sitting down and opening his laptop screen added an aesthetic. Watch Dogs Legion is tremendously lacking in aesthetics, bland in these aspects, and has dragged the series backward.

The vehicle controls, which provided a bad experience in the first two games, have been slightly improved in this game, but this time they’ve limited the vehicle options, and we constantly see the same vehicles in the open world. It’s hard to understand whether the vehicles have electric or combustion engines because there are gears in vehicles with electric motors; I hope I’ve misunderstood this situation because it’s a significant design flaw. They’ve removed the ability to control traffic lights from the first two games, which was fun for creating chaos, and they’ve removed hackable objects in the city, making car chase sequences quite dull. Escaping from Albion has been overly simplified; the game has become excessively casual.

The mission designs are also behind the first two games; without a main character in the game, the purpose and the path to it remain very dull. There are no creative missions, no blackout option, and more hackable features on enemies have disappeared. Watch_dogs was more aesthetic in this regard; they’ve literally erased the things that made the game a game. Even the collectible items in the first two games had their fun, so I don’t understand the mindset behind designing this game.

Apart from that, I’m playing the game on Xbox Series X, and I haven’t finished it yet. The performance mode with stable 60 fps doesn’t look bad, the quality mode at 30 fps makes the game look fantastic, but it’s not playable at 30 fps; it’s strangely uncomfortable. Even options like VRR, ALMM, and Dolby Vision couldn’t save it.

For now, it’s a 6/10 ordinary open-world game for me, and unless there’s an extremely surprising game-changer event at the end, my views will remain the same.

+ Amazing graphics
+ London map and atmopshere is quite good

- Gameplay is too repetitive
- Story is boring also lack of main character is a bad choice