Watch Dogs Legion REVIEW - The Nemesis System in a City -

 agent meet your team jim affleck no relation to ben jim will straight up drop a pitch he wears white butler gloves so his enemies can see his victim's blood

rumors say that he is so badass when he pours milk for guests it's directly from the cow and it's always chocolate operative number 217 nina young while not running her only fans for lovers of leather-clad recliners she runs dead set a tough leader with a poncho for pricey posh hats dina can kick ass with the best ofthem she also makes wicked goods to meet old sweet sally a magician hipster with an overdeveloped sex drive who looks like she stole uncle sam's costume her trick hip isn't the only trick up her sleeve with the ability to weave magical mothering onto enemies to have them join you and your band temporarily sally is for all intents and purposes a badass granny can you imagine those three were the best that you had those unfortunate three were the cream of the proverbial crop what would you do to stop a city-wide take over london and that's the question that watchdog's legion has for you you're a member of dead sec which is not only the hacker group's name but the amount of time it takes me to drop this group and trade up in the game you see each one of these characters is a person from the streets of london one of the entire city of possible agents it's your goal to take down the military contractor albion and its forces using guy augusto and some guts in the occasional get out of jail free card in the form of two-bit lawyers that you can recruit

onto your team legion is exactly what the name implies a game where every single character can be recruited as long as you don't mess up too much this title has been in the work for years delayed almost a full one and now is finally out created by ubisoft toronto it's out this week for pc ps4 and xbox and it'll have a patch later for next-gen systems let's see how the third game in the third-person action stealth title did as always this is carrick with acg and it's my continuing mission to bring you reviews that aren't two minutes longer filled with sponsored bullcrap if you liked the video maybe subscribe

let's discuss gameplay first watch dogs has always been wrapped up in the governmental conspiracies of its time from watchdogs one with its trench coat wearing main character aiden pierce in his battle against overarching government oversight and tried to fix it all by causing as much anarchy as possible and hoping the problem would just go away on its own then you jump to watch dogs 2 with its lead marcus halloway working his way through the san fran hacker underground like steven seagal with a pool cue stuck at the end of a rubber band the games have always reflected the battle between the forces that be and

the forces that be in trouble if someone found out what was on their secret folder on their pc hard drive it's that conspiratorial feel of hackers and super spys mixed into one but it's always had an issue they've always been the bards of the ubisoft dnd party singing a song called mediocrity and then remixing it for the second title and that's why legion is so interesting here comes trump and in it's a game world based in some kind of post-brexit london where terror attacks from a group called zero day have framed the dead sec elite and forced everyone to pretty much go underground this has caused dead sec to

recruit from well just about damn near everyone following the story of the group itself with the characters being anyone in the game world that you choose and i do mean anyone you can walk along and at any time scan a person and see bits of their life and clues and hints on how to recruit them later on you can get extra tools that let you see their personal calendars where their plans for the days are laid out and you can use that information to recruit them

to deadsec by following around the game world like some kind of spy slender man walk by someone you think looks cool and find out what might turn them to your side maybe it's helping them get a passport for an illegal friend getting a pal out of jail investigating a company's fraud once you find that out it's then your mission while the main mission tell dedsec's own basic sort of hero story crux that's the main part of legion but think of the side stuff as crusader kings light or even sim super uber light edition and you're a bit close every person in the game world has zero to three skills and traits from good or bad meaning you might find an old hacker who's beat up they can't sprint or even hide behind cover but perhaps they can hack card keys from

a huge distance and can call drones in at any time to their spot or you might be a friend of a spectacled construction worker who can sneak into any construction area mostly unseen but who also has an underground boxing career and is a drunk so when he gets close with enemies his just sort of powers through him and can soak up insane amounts of damage and somehow comes out the other end with a bloody lip and a [ __ ] criminal record the size of nebraska this is all focused through ubisoft somewhat typical third person open world design that we've seen where watch dogs and assassin's creed share a heritage with you exploring the game world and taking on different missions or helping other people untake parts of london from albion who has control of it now

this can involve everything from major gunfights if you go in loud to stealth as you sneak in and take out enemies without anyone noticing to hacking every camera and setting up traps luring hardened enemies around corners and into the line of a parked car that you hack and then run them over with like the prior games legion is a sandbox here withinteractions in the game world overlaid  with that unique presentation of people's lives and that is what is the

pivotal difference between legion and the other games in the series basically the technical bits behind the system is this when you see someone bump

into them or interact with them the game engine starts tracking that character and overlaying their stats and story elements with other characters ones that you have met or might meet so you might have hired a brawler from the mean streets who's on parole so he gets arrested by the albion forces

 and hey he's stuck in prison longer because he has a criminal record but you may find out that he has a brother who has been working hard on prisoner and criminal reform and guess what if you recruit that character who's a lawyer he can actually get anyone on your team a better legal defense and get him out of jail more quickly an the game knows how to set those characters up and if you like these kind of things this game is going to be your bread and butter especially the first time you find a person with a great skill who is also sadly cursed with incredible flatulence which occasionally will alert enemies during stealth i like that not every character had positives however the negatives that are there there's not a ton of them so it feels far more realistic than haphazard like it could now without permadeath on which i'll talk about in a second the game basically has three states for your characters

active as in character that you can switch to at any time arrested and hospitalized depending on what has happened to them if you turn permadeath on

and a character takes real damage then they're gone from the game and their chances their ties into the others that's all gone for instance let me tell you  

little story i saw a guard at a palace i wanted to get in he hated dedsec though so i scanned him and found out that you know what he's got a schedule and i

tracked him down a couple times tryingto see if i could while away at his willpower one time he met up with his sister who wasn't so against us i decided to

help her with a mission finding some refugees she had lost contact with and she joined dead second guess what the game remembers that and makes sure the brother knows about it every character remembers what happens to those connected to him including by the way unfortunately if you fail and i did that in this instance and i got her killed in the next mission the brother went from about to join dedsec to not wanting anything to do with me that was one hour

wasted or well not really wasted because it was awesome and a moment of singular or organic and just emergent gameplay that i like and while not benefiting from this comparison greatly i gotta mention it it has a bit of a nemesis from the lord of the rings kind of feel to it but in a very lighter style and

spread out across every character in the world so yeah it's a little less so than an orc who suddenly shows up and can't be lit on fire but enough that it offers a tangible thread running through the seams of this blanket in the story and if you sort of detach a little bit and accept it there's a lot here

luckily while not excellent the game's combat and shooting is about where you would expect of these titles driven by a radial dial style choice system for your different weapons as well as a couple pieces of equipment you can outfit each character with items that can be purchased and upgraded in three levels via points you get for performing the missions and those can be traded in and out to any spy member on your team as long as you're not within a restricted area or in combat now fighting itself is actually based on the character skills and some of them have different one for instance some characters have weapons others know how to fight and others stun or run away it just depends on what items you have unlocked for your spy team and what kind of fighting they're good at and if they have a crippling deficiency when it comes to hand in hand some may have drones and turrets and electrical brass knuckles as

if ramrodding a pound and a half of copper into someone's face isn't enough someone apparently looked at this and assumed you know what i think it needs

12 cattle prods attached to itmovement and stealth are also pretty much bog standard with you able to stick to walls and items take down enemies who are unaware as well as shoot them if you have any of the assorted lethal and non-lethal weapons now the world of london itself is sizable but not incredibly memorable it's not massive like some other open worlds but it's large enough to spread out and offer unique looking locations and economic reflections throughout and by economics i mean faster cars and faster deals in the high class and beat up cars and drug dealers in the lower class we're bumping off a

drug user by tasering them in the nuts from a drone and then watching this witless thug sprint through a gaggle of [ __ ] is not unheard of i'm not actually sure what a large group of prostitutes is called other than congress so we'll just go with a gaggle now this is big enough in this game

world to require taxis or other kinds of fast travel and driving you can do anything you can also steal vehicles and i'll say this driving with keyboard and mouse sucked no matter what while gamepad nailed it overall i was not a fan of driving with the mouse and keyboard that'll be up to you but just be aware how long is all this stealth action gonna take you well going through the story plus some of the sides is probably going to be 35 plus hours depending on the difficulty and if you use permadeath you could probably shortchange that and just go through the main story i ended up turning permadeath on as well

as high difficulty i think this is a game where either you have to detach from the reality of the game itself and understand that there's going to be some

shortchanging here and there and i'm going to talk about that in a bitor you just go in here as some kind of sandbox and shoot a bunch of people either way but i will say this if you give a little you're actually gonna get a lot back when it comes to that style of gameplay make no mistake though legion does not

do a ton of things wholly different and in many ways it doesn't dig itself out of the rut that i personally felt watchdogs too set it in however there is no denying whatsoever that i had some of the best times with my regtag group of heroes and that ability to take martha dumpster brown and johnny seen

better days into a [ __ ] special forces training center and by somehow using nothing but smarts well-placed hacks a bit of luck and somehow getting in and out is epic lastly monetizations is it in here yes it is and this is friggin weird let me describe this there's four agents you can purchase right now they

aren't really special in any way in fact mine are better but they do come with clothes and it feels to me like they're just sort of there to entice you

if you don't want to just buy some money in game and then buy some different clothing you do get these specialized characters they look sort of funky but you can get a lot of that stuff in the store that'll be up to you they have some unique lines as well but they're mostly ignorable the rest is a couple

clothing types as well as two sets of currency one in the game and well one in the game but you buy it outside the game and then turn it into in-game

currency i hate that [ __ ] by the way well not nearly as bad as other ubisoft games really to me it makes no reason to be here despite being non-impacting on most of the gameplay and certainly on the performance that to me is even more of an indicator they didn't need to put it in here versus being fined that it is in here when it comes to multiplayer which will come at a later patch at a later date we'll have to keep our eyes open to see if maybe there's something there and that brings us to graphics when legion has everything going for it when you're on a drone flying over a bridge across the water on a clear day and you can see all of london it looks good or when your ray tracing is on and it's storming outside and the reflections and the lighting

are just perfect or you're walking through a park and watching everybodyjust sort of play around  but a little bit like that unhinged ex who looked really good but always felt like they were about to fall apart that's the game it's got a futuristic look for london and to be honest it's a bit drab for my taste actually it's got a huge number of locations but many of those don't have a lot of interaction in fact it was sad to see that other than bars most other places you actually couldn't go into now this hurt that feeling of interaction especially because you are supposed to be [ __ ] jenny from the street right instead the only thing street about you is where you're buying your friggin clothes because most of the stores make you stand out on the street and put them on in front of digital billboards which isn't creepy enough when you think about it and as you go around the game world there's a couple things to collect

including various face masks which are used as disguises while in enemy territories now just assume that god 404 errored as he was writing the code of all of the faces on the characters in this game and you pretty much get an idea of what they look like trust me some of them need to be wearing the masks all the time i don't get what's going on in this game i'm not sure what ubisoft does when they generate the characters but it's a little bit like the world's

scariest family reunion around here they just look weird especially in the game and in the hud this isn't helped by the voice technology and lip syncing

being loose at best and just straight up not giving a [ __ ] at the worst i've seen cave openings more animated than some of these dudes yawn holes when they're talking and it's bad enough that there's one character on my team that when he talks i swear [ __ ] it scares me so much because it doesn't look like he's talking and i keep thinking the game is gonna have like a ghost in the machine moment also everyone's beard like everybody it looks like somebody shaved four angry beavers and then just threw the hair at somebody's face as they ran off and yet went yeah that looks good enough it's like baby doll hair transplants for beards this makes mass effect look well pretty good and they're not oh wait yeah most of them are ugly i don't even know why it's so funny but if you look at somebody it's so messed up because by the seventh or eighth cranky ass puffy around the midriff businessman that you take over or under your wing or some strangely mismatched ruffy and you're gonna be begging for a superhero that's both the saving grace though of legion and its fall from it it's that feeling of everyday people rising up in each skill overlapping in a crusader king's way of making them all sort of feel a little bit real why is bob going to mourn at the bridge every night when he goes over and then he has a drink late at night he's strangely late to work every single morning is he falling apart you don't know and maybe you won't find out but it's that extra bit of thought process that allows for a gamer to put two and two together and make three instead of four and i know you might be thinking man does this guy have anything good to say about the way the game looks is it always ugly no well a lot of times but it's just i think about it that most of us don't look like movie stars most people look like guys shoveling horseshit in game of

thrones we don't look like the main characters themselves maybe joffrey though while there are some animation issues as well and i want to make sure to point those out and there's some bugs many of which have existed in assassin's creed and watchdogs since well day one it's pretty damn awesome to see how all of the different characters move around and react depending on who you've recruited from playing the saxophone for money on a street corner as i waited for a contract to show up to spinning spells like a mage as thefemale magician standing outside hyptonizing people as i waited for the next cutscene

unfortunately for every good thing there are some bad things like leaping from a car and sometimes just you know standing there you just slide like 60 feet or this chick one of my best agents who apparently in a fitter rage so profound that i didn't choose her for a mission sprinted into the wall of the building and headbutted it like a [ __ ] test missile target let's get to performance the game it's a bit all over the place understand right from the get-go this is future-proof when it comes to the ultra settings they're just not really going to work well especially even on a 3080 you're gonna have a problem with all the settings on the highest and with ray tracing at max however with the i7 and the 2080t i was able to actually get above 60 at all times with some settings on a different mixture and careful tuning of the ray tracing to medium or low and some adjustments to shadows and dlss also when it comes to the consoles even next-gen games systems are going to run this at 30 fps and that's just the way it is playing it now i can see why optimizations are

probably going to come later in lower settings the game actually doesn't look dramatically worse than the higher settings but make no mistake it should run better and that brings us to sound music and voice and we'll do sound first so this is not bad much of the sound seems cribbed from the prior games and i

think that's fine because it is sharing those games lineage in the overall game world one of the things i actually really like here is there's anumber of distortion effects  depending on your status and things like machine guns in particular have a unique and varied sample bank with the rattle mechanics moving and shaking as you beat in on some poor dude just sitting there trying to pay child support as a guard and you gun him down and then land your drone on his body it wasn't absolutely stupendous also electric cars pretty much all the way throughout so don't expect any really cool engine sound when you're

driving around and that brings us to voice and one thing to get out of the way right away the context here is that legion uses voice modulation systems so they can have so many unique voices in the game many voice actors have recorded their lines and those lines are then modulated so that many actors sound like thousands of actors but it doesn't always work in real life we still have mike tyson right whose high pitched voice made him sound like a 13 year old the first time you heard it and people's voices are really varied in real life it's just that here it pops up a lot disappointing as well when missions

repeat or when you have a somewhat repeating object or phrase like any open world game does then the way they talk can be sort of grading now this was highlighted whenever i did missions for people and you can tell the two sets of lines were not really written to identically react to one another so one person says hello man you want to work with us and the other person's like hey i would love to work with you if you have a slot open what's working with you going to be like and who are you it works but it doesn'talways make it feel like it makes sense that being said half of the games out there they can't even get their voice acting right when they have voice actors for every single line so here it is what it is and that brings us to music and yeah it is what it is here too as well lots of licensed tracks in the taxis which was nice i guess but nothing really caught my ears sometimes in battle there was a stir up moment with a nice theme that built up when you were going through battle but it never really struck with me ultimately most of legion i spent realizing music was playing suddenly or suddenly realizing it wasn't and neither is really a great response for a soundtrack maybe you'll like it more than me but it just didn't grab me how's all this come together well that brings us to fun factor there is an intrinsic childlike feeling to legion even at its most dire

something about seeing your goofy ass character in each cutscene working through a stealth area with all the finesse of like a frustrated linebacker after daily doubles and then seeing them rewarded with taking out an enemy by dropping crates on him from the sky with a construction drone or knocking him

off the roof with the same the emergent way in which everyone is systemically tied together by the game's storytelling engine worked for me personally especially if just for a moment you can remove a bit of that logic cap from your brain there are so many times where i kept thinking to myself is the game making it so that the wife is working with possibly legal foundations funneling money and her husband was recently unemployed but had worked for them and she's now asking questions about their legality or did she ask those questions prior and maybe that's why he was fired or that feeling of success when you take a character who doesn't like dead sex perform some quests and then have them join you and it pays off in spades with a character that can now go

places you could not go before as i found out when i straight up super spied a character found him he had not only the skills but the gun and the spy car

and i just found him standing alongside the road needing help not quite sure why butyou know what i bought off on it and buying off on this game is gonna require a lot and possibly too much from a lot of people the gameplay is bog standard also there isn't really a big change in the way this game plays when it comes to other watchdog titles whether that's for you or against you well that's for each one of us to discover looking at the strengths of this game for a moment it's got a serious strength if you can buy often the story elements and having that feeling of just doing something crazy and taking a character you didn't expect through a mission you didn't expect and coming out with success you didn't expect but it also means that those expectations are a little bit broken for example these characters they're supposed to be a bit more street level a bit more down on the block and yet at the same time you really can't go into any places other than the bars that you can go and drink at you really just can't engage in a lot of stuff and i get it a lot of people be like why would i want to engage anything i just want to go through the main story or through the combat or the missions that's great for you but for people who are intent on exploring there's not as much as i think a lot of people would like and to me that's even reflected in the home base which i gotta

 say is sad as [ __ ] if depression could build a house and invite his cousin sloth and unwashed over that's what this friggin place would look like it's just the first floor is mannequins and then you go out to the second floor and it's a subway car and a boxing pit none of it makes any sense it didn't really bother me too much but i looked at it and i was like dude who's living here and how did we get all of this [ __ ] down here it's crazy and that'll move us to the rating as you guys know i rate games on a buy weight for sale rent or never touch it again rating system with rent being replaced by deep deep sale if that is the score i give it on pc this is a weight for a sale solidly but i'm going to give you a little ratchet here up or down if you bought off on any of this stuff and you're okay with the voices being a little weird and the typical stuff that occurs in watch dogs assassin's creed games when it comes to bugs and performance that like i said is not amazing but you can dial it in i want to make sure that's clear then this is probably higher for you but if you wanted something really brand new from watchdogs and maybe the legion part interested you but you were more interested in say london and brexit this may not actually interest you as much because i didn't find london an incredibly enjoyable place to explore at least personally this might be something that you might find more engaging than i did that being said i'm still gonna returnto this game i enjoyed the hell out of some parts of this and while it isn't ready exactly for prime time those monetizations aren't necessarily something that i think should be there there are parts of this game that just

had me laughing out loud in the giddiness and the craziness and the idea of hey i want to go and i want to search out what makes this character tick and looking at them and tying all these things in it's a little bit like a puzzle that you're not ever 100 sure you've completed and you will never know you'll get a character with a bunch of traits and you'll get a character that when you look at their deep scan they've got all this weird stuff in it and you start to figure it out and then they'll pass by a certain building or they'll pass by you and you'll be like wait are they here because of that who knows

the way the game is set up you will probably never know but one of the coolest parts in this game for example is being the husband of a character who

i couldn't get this character to join in and yet she was being arrested by dedsec and i walked by it as a different character and it told me this is the spouse of so and so and i saved them and later on she was going to end up joining dedsec was awesome she died unfortunately because i drove over her on accident but long story short that was still a cool moment just make sure that you don't accidentally drive over people you'll probably have a great time

anyway that's it for me hey i hope you guys like these videos i hope you like these reviews ps5 xbox next gen current gen got a ton of reviews for you guys

i got my hands on the systems doing a bunch of different footage gonna be doing a bunch of different new stuff i would love for you to spread the word

of these follow me on twitter please at jeremypenter that's on the twitter you'll see it at the uh in the description you know post this where people are talking about games it really does help and you can always become a patron patron is the way sort of like dedsec we've had to go underground and patrons the way to do it because youtube just ain't working if you guys join patreon you get some awesome stuff you get a secret place totalkcalled the discord which is absolutelyunknown no one else is doing thisit's just acg a special discord yeahcompletely secret unheard of i'm the first and only youtuber who's done this

but anyway i would love for you to join peace out everybody have an awesome week stay tuned for yakuza valhalla cyberpunk though got delayed and a bunch of other stuff