Watch Dogs: Legion

Watch Dogs: Legion drops players into a near-future London under authoritarian lockdown and hands them the resources of a growing resistance cell, with one specific hook driving most of the pre-release excitement: recruit almost any pedestrian on the street, and you can play as them, complete with their own voice, backstory, and reason for joining the cause. Reviewers largely agree the game delivers a genuinely striking setting and a technically ambitious system built around that hook. Where the reception splits sharply, in a Mixed aggregate across just over 5,000 reviews, is what that ambition cost the game underneath it.

A striking setting and an ambitious system reviewers give real credit

The London recreation draws some of the most consistent praise in the review sample, with reviewers specifically crediting the blend of recognizable landmarks with holograms, autonomous vehicles, and other convincing near-future sci-fi touches as a genuinely well-realized game world. The recruit-anyone system earns its own dedicated credit for sheer technical ambition: reviewers acknowledge the achievement of letting virtually any NPC become a fully playable character, complete with a unique voice and background, and several praise how different operatives with different professions and abilities open up genuinely varied approaches to the same mission. The game's technical presentation holds up well even years later, with reviewers specifically calling out ray tracing and other visual options as still impressive by current standards. Several reviewers also credit the sheer variety of traversal tools available once a diverse enough roster of operatives has been recruited, from a construction worker's cargo drone to a getaway driver's ability to summon an autonomous car, as a genuine strength of the moment-to- moment mission design even when the surrounding systems draw criticism.

A downgrade complaint that recurs with striking specificity

The dominant substantive criticism in this review sample isn't vague disappointment, it's a specific, repeated argument that the game meaningfully regresses from its immediate predecessor. Multiple reviewers cite the removal of systems they specifically valued in Watch Dogs 2, including the ability to buy weapons and vehicles, a simplified skill progression tree, and fewer hacking tools that had previously made car chases and combat encounters more interesting and varied. A related, more conceptual complaint follows from the recruitment system itself: several reviewers argue that letting players recruit essentially any character dilutes investment in any single protagonist rather than deepening it, describing the result as two fundamentally different game ideas, freeform recruitment and a personal, character-driven story, forced together without either one fully succeeding on its own terms.

Ubisoft Connect problems that show up as a reason to downvote the game itself

A large and specific share of the negative review sample has little to do with the game's actual design and everything to do with its DRM and launcher requirements. Multiple reviewers report Ubisoft Connect account-ownership verification failures preventing access to a game they'd already purchased, and several explicitly cite Ubisoft's prior removal of licenses for The Crew as a reason to distrust long-term access to any title locked behind the same launcher. That's a meaningful pattern worth naming directly: a real share of reviewers treat the platform and DRM model itself as a legitimate, standalone reason for a negative rating, independent of and sometimes despite otherwise positive feelings about the game underneath it.

Monetisation and performance complaints layered on top

Beyond the systemic and platform complaints, reviewers report two more specific frustrations. Cosmetic microtransactions in a single-player game already sold at full price draw pointed criticism, with reviewers describing the practice as a scummy addition to a game they'd already paid for in full. Separately, multiple reviewers report meaningful performance problems, including frame-rate drops even at high-end settings on capable hardware, a complaint that suggests the game's technical polish doesn't extend evenly across every configuration despite its generally well-regarded visual presentation. A smaller number of reviewers also flag a related DLC-specific issue, describing character and mission packs sold as separate paid content that several reviewers felt should reasonably have been included as part of the base game's already premium asking price, particularly given how much of that additional content directly builds on systems already present at launch rather than adding meaningfully new mechanics.

What the achievement data suggests about early drop-off

Global achievement data adds a useful data point to the broader picture painted by the review sample: even the single easiest achievement clears only around 36% of players who've unlocked anything at all, an unusually soft start for an open-world game with a lengthy main campaign. That figure is consistent with reviewers' accounts of a game that underwhelms relative to expectations early enough that a meaningful share of buyers don't progress far into it, rather than a slow-burn experience that rewards players who stick with it into the later hours.

Verdict

Watch Dogs: Legion succeeds at building a genuinely striking, well-realized setting and a technically ambitious recruitment system reviewers give real credit for its scope. It sits in Mixed territory here because the complaints layered on top are specific, well documented and numerous rather than vague fatigue: a widely reported step backward from its own predecessor's systems, a recruitment gimmick some reviewers argue undercuts character investment rather than strengthening it, single-player cosmetic microtransactions, and Ubisoft Connect DRM problems serious enough that a real share of the review sample treats them as a standalone reason to downvote the game. Worth exploring for the setting and the novelty of its central system on a deep sale, but go in with expectations calibrated to a lesser, more compromised entry in its own series rather than the improvement its marketing implied.