Watch Dogs: Legion‘s comedic gameplay and serious narrative cause a tonal imbalance that can disorient the player. When enemies ragdoll while falling or die at the hands of mind-controlled bees, it’s hard to take the revolution-centric story seriously. For all the dissonance that such a blend of elements entails, though, an online mode can work to strip away the troublesome narrative aspects in favor of a chaotic playground. While Legion’s online play does manage to do away with the game’s storytelling woes, problems arise when it tries to deliver on focused and enjoyable chaos.The trouble begins with recruition, a major selling point for the game. Anybody from construction workers to protestors can join the hacktivist group DedSec and help London expel its militarized government. Legion’s multiplayer shares the single player campaign’s recruitment system, but carries with it the problem of recruits growing bored with DedSec and resenting the hyperbolic organization.Furthermore, there isn’t much to do in this virtual recreation of London. Besides a galling lack of co-op missions and an empty open world, a planned cooperative heavy raid had its release pushed back. Thus, the initial content roll-out for Legion Online amounts to five short and uninspired co-op missions, a series of solo objectives, and a player-versus-player (PvP) Spiderbot Arena. This all serves to leave recruits twiddling their thumbs until more content shows up.This is all the more astounding given that Watch Dogs: Legion is multiplayer-oriented design in its purest form. Players gain influence by completing the content listed above or performing daily tasks like destroying five trucks. Once they have accrued enough points, players can either recruit civilians to the DedSec cause or buy character upgrades. As with the campaign, civilians have their own abilities like immediate access to cargo drones or a stealthy Spiderbot. Players can recruit up to 20 civilians to liberate London, which translates to shooting soldiers in the face while intel slowly downloads. This is where the main source of content comes in: the co-op missions. For a game about hacking, the co-op missions sure have a stark lack of it when compared to the likes of Legion’s predecessors. In the original Watch Dogs, players could hack into another open world and initiate a stressful game of hide-and-seek. The target then had to search every crevice of a specific area and kill the hacker before they downloaded all their data. Whereas Watch Dogs experimented with multiplayer options appropriate for its world, Legion’s missions boil down to killing all the NPCs in a restricted area.It’s a peculiar choice for the online mode to focus on gunplay, one of Legion’s more underdeveloped mechanics. For a brief refresher, the cover system and animations were awkward, the AI acted in an unintelligent fashion, and enemies absorbed a ridiculous amount of bullets. Taking a combat system that skewed toward mediocrity at the best of times and having it serve as the centerpiece of a game’s online suite feels like a bad idea.
Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake will launch on November 14.
According to SteamDB
. Dragon Age: The Veilguard is available now for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC.