Watch Dogs: Legion Review II

IGN’s review on Watch Dogs 2:

The unique hacking adventure of Watch Dogs 2 successfully makes itself differs from GTA series. When you walk through the beautiful bay area, the unique mechanics of the game will remind you that it’s not a copycat of GTA. Hero Marcus is too kind-hearted that it’s hard for us to believe that he’s the one who caused the chaos. But the flexible hacking style gives the players a chance to complete most of their missions without using violence. Meanwhile, the multi-player game provides the players with a distinct experience of “hide-and-seek”.

Score: 8.5

It’s good to have a funny character like Bagley in the game. But since the number of playable characters in the game is too many, Bagley’s role is not that distinct. Different from the previous two games, where players are only able to play two roles (Aiden Pearce and Marcus), players have to control all the characters in the collective (players are able to shift from one role to another in the game). The highlight of the game is that almost all the NPCs can be recruited to DedSec. In the game, you can scan any persons in the street, and see their abilities. And if you want to recruit them, you need to do a specific task. No matter building worker, stock broker, doctor, protester, killer or security, you can recruit them to DedSec in a specific way. But sometimes in order to recruit somebody, you have to spend lots of efforts to investigate his/her personal data.

The way of recruiting NPCs in this game is quite similar to recruiting orcs in Middle-earth: Shadow of War, when you find out the professionals of drones or find out someone with spy ability, you will feel like finding out a gold mine. The outlooks and voices of the characters are generated randomly in the game. As the game producer has prepared enough faces and voices, you will hardly see any repetitive faces or voices. But if you recruit a large number of people, some of the recruitment tasks will be exactly the same. Besides, to avoid repetition, game producers has processed some of the voices, making those voices sound unnatural. In addition, characters’ mouths do not match with their lines.

Different from traditional action games, heroes in this game are not powerful. They are not able to acquire new abilities like Pearce and Marcus. Players may feel constrained as every character is limited to certain weapon and certain ability. But every time when we find a new unique character, we feel fresh. I once came across a magician in the street, who can hypnotize my enemies to fight for my side. And that ability was exactly what I need. And the magician became one of my best characters.