Gameplay

Watch Dogs Legion is the long anticipated sequel to the 2014 and 2016 titles Watch Dogs and Watch Dogs 2. Just like in previous games, you are part of DedSec, a hacker group whose goal it is to liberate its home town—this time London. Ubisoft did a great job modeling the city, if you've been to London before, you'll definitely recognize the important tourist landmarks and areas surrounding them.

Unlike previous titles, you no longer play as single hero and are free to choose from several premade characters, and recruit many more during gameplay. This genius idea gives you multiple skill sets to choose from to tackle a mission in the best way, or match your playstyle. Each character comes with a fixed skillset; for example, better hacking skills, stealth, or guns. Besides that there is no development of individual characters; no XP, no skill tree or similar, which is fine, though. Having a near infinite supply of playable characters makes up for that. I do find the recruitment process quests a bit generic and repetitive, however. You also unlock several new characters during story missions.

While playing, you collect Tech Points, which you can use to unlock tools and abilities available to all your characters. One of the most useful is a remotely controlled spiderbot that can enter high-security areas without detection. From behind enemy lines, it can wreak havoc, operate switches, hack electronics or just scout ahead. Other unlocks give you skills to hack enemies, hostile drones, or turrets. Not the most impressive list of unlocks, not a lot of playstyle choice, but alright I guess.

The story is very decent and definitely interesting, with surprising twists and turns. The whole game feels a little bit like a TV series: there is a major story arc with shorter stories being told throughout episodes. Watch Dogs Legions doesn't expose a "series" or "episode" concept, though—you just play through the story missions. For example, in one quest chain, you have to stop a mad billionaire scientist from uploading her conscience to the cloud. For about two hours of gameplay, you will track down and unveil more details that culminate in a sequence of events that made me wonder whether this the end of the game, and that it is too short. But no, once that part of the story is done, a puzzle piece of the main story is revealed and you're off to more adventures. You're guided through the world by an AI companion called "Bagley" that has a voice and humor similar to Claptrap from Borderlands. Very nice.

Another mission requires you to pilot a micro drone inside a security computer mainframe, a very well-made experience that differs from the usual perspective, and a tech geek's paradise. While nearly all missions are completely linear, they require some scouting, which is done by hacking into security cameras found all across London even today. Using these cameras, you can tag enemies and remotely operate some security equipment; you may even commandeer drones to cause havoc. Drones of the cargo lifter type are awesome for shortcuts—jump on one, take control, and fly straight to your destinations, bypassing most of the security guards.

Watch Dogs encourages you to be stealthy and non-lethal, but you're also free to jump in guns blazing. There are some puzzles to solve on the way, but they're all quite dull and won't take more than a few minutes. Similar to the Hitman games, there's some (less) variety to how you can solve a given challenge, the paths are very obvious, though. Traveling around the world is quite convenient because of an easy-to-use fast-travel system.

I encountered some minor bugs, nothing game breaking except for one optional mission that simply would not progress in its script. Several elements from previous Watch Dogs games have either been simplified or removed, which is not a big deal in my opinion. The core game loop is basically go to mission area, scout for enemy presence, optionally switch to another character, make your way through the map, and complete one or several objectives. It's a little bit repetitive, yes, but the story makes up for it in my opinion.

Overall, Watch Dogs Legion is a typical open-world Ubisoft title, much like Far Cry and Assassin's Creed. Over the years, they have perfected the formula, but this also leads to games that feel a bit cookie-cutter. I've played around 15 hours so far and will definitely play more—mostly to find out how the story ends. Would I pay full price for Watch Dogs Legion? Not sure. There aren't that many new games out there at the moment though, and Cyberpunk got delayed again, so if you like the genre, check out more reviews. What sucks is that Watch Dogs Legion is available only on Uplay and Epic, not Steam.

PC Port / Tech / Graphics / Performance

Watch Dogs Legion uses the Dunia engine, which we've seen in Far Cry before. Actually, the engine was exclusive to Far Cry until now. With Watch Dogs Legion, Dunia finally introduces DirectX 12 support—an important capability needed for features like raytracing and next-gen console support. This almost looks like a test run for the Far Cry 6 engine. Ubisoft delayed Watch Dogs Legion earlier this year, which gave the developers more time to polish the whole experience and also add raytracing and DLSS support.

Graphics are alright, definitely not next-gen—we've seen similar graphics many years ago. Watch Dogs Legion comes with an optional "High-res Texture Pack" download, which we installed for all our testing. If you take a closer look at our screenshots, you can see that character models are excellent and textures super crisp. World geometry, on the other hand, isn't impressive at all, especially the roads, floors, and cars look poor. Many other objects that are placed inside the world look great, though. While playing, I got a feeling that several teams of artists worked on the various missions. Some areas are richly detailed and almost what I would expect from next-gen, while others look like they were made by a bunch of bored interns with little skill, time, and knowledge.

I have to praise Ubisoft for giving us tons of configurations options on the PC. You can adjust a huge list of settings to fine-tune the game's performance to your hardware's capabilities. You'll definitely need those. Watch Dogs Legions is one of the most demanding games we've ever tested and definitely not one of the best-looking ones, due to "bad optimization." We've been using the Day One Patch for all testing, which fixes some performance problems, as well as the latest drivers from both AMD and NVIDIA.

While other publications are testing using the integrated benchmark, I found that to be way too optimistic for what actual gameplay runs at. For example, with GeForce RTX 3080 at 1080p, the integrated benchmarks runs at 106 FPS, while actual gameplay sits at around 85 FPS—a huge difference. Now, you of course could argue that not all gameplay happens in the open world, and that indoors areas run higher FPS. However, I rather prefer a realistic test scene that's not the worst case, but also doesn't show performance in a favorable picture only to leave you disappointed after buying the game.

For 60 FPS at 1080p Full HD with Ultra settings, you need an RTX 2070 Super or better. Only one card from AMD can achieve 60 FPS at 1080p, and that's the Radeon RX 5700 XT. At 1440p, only the RTX 2080 Ti and beyond hit that magic 60 FPS mark, and at 4K, not even the mighty RTX 3090 will get you 60 FPS, but it's pretty close at 55 FPS. Cards that were fine for 1080p not long ago can barely achieve playable FPS; RX 590: 34 FPS, GTX 1060: 30 FPS, and RTX 2060: 48 FPS. When looking at generations of GPUs, there is not much difference as all of them have roughly the same performance hit. I'm not seeing any specific optimizations for Turing or Ampere. On the AMD side, there is a small deviation that favors the Vega architecture a bit, barely worth mentioning.

Because of the high-res texture pack, which is an optional download, we can finally make use of all the VRAM paired with modern GPUs. Even at 1080p, Watch Dog Legion will use more than 6 GB, which is a good thing as textures are much improved. NVIDIA cards with 3 GB and 4 GB VRAM do much better than their AMD counterparts in this memory constrained situation. For example, the 4 GB RX 5500 XT drops to only 12 FPS, whereas the GTX 1030 3 GB runs twice as fast at 22 FPS. This just confirms what we've been seeing in such scenarios previously—NVIDIA handles memory pressure much better than AMD.

Watch Dogs Legion has support for raytracing and DLSS. Raytracing is a minimal implementation, like the reflections in Battlefield. You can see it in action in our comparison screenshots, and while it looks pretty, it's not a game changing experience, probably because the game has some basic reflections even with RTX off (screen space). Raytraced reflections on highly glossy surfaces are probably the easiest way to get the "RTX" sticker for the title. A proper lighting and shadow implementation, like in Metro, would have been much more impressive. I also got you a set of screenshots from a garage where raytracing makes only a minimal difference even though the scene has tons of RT potential. It seems the developers specifically have to activate raytracing for each surface or material—definitely not the simple "enable and forget" solution we often hear about. Depending on the setting, the performance hit from raytracing is quite large. There are three settings that do give different results, but for me, RTX Medium would be sufficient, actually an "RTX low" option with a lower FPS hit would be nice. I wouldn't mind slightly more blurry reflections.

DLSS works great to increase your FPS without a major loss in image quality. Personally, I find "DLSS Performance" the best choice, though the difference to "DLSS Quality" is minimal. "DLSS Ultra Performance," which is marketed as for use with 8K, looks terrible, though. Everything is super blurry, and you can feel how low-resolution the original image is. There's also very strong artifacting around moving objects with that setting—not recommended. The other settings work well, though. What's distracting at all DLSS levels is that the the blue-striped GPS indicator in the game world has some serious moire artifacts with DLSS enabled. Overall, I can still recommend DLSS since it's the easiest way to gain more performance while keeping high details.

Overall, I would expect much better performance optimizations from a title that has been in the making for so long. Ubisoft has nearly infinite resources—this is not a small developer/publisher. I'm also a bit surprised NVIDIA didn't push for a better raytracing implementation because RTX has to impress to convince people—once again, thanks to all those graphics settings we can play with, support for widescreen displays, and the ability to run uncapped FPS.