Watch Dogs: Legion - Ubisoft's new title tested at Gamescom 2019

Among the most anticipated titles of next season, Watch Dogs Legion definitely has a very special place on the list of games to watch. You want because the first two chapters of the series, although imperfect and open to numerous improvements, represented the will of Ubisoft to bring stealth and free roaming out of a context characterized by hooded assassins and Templars, but also and above all for the potential of an IP with a thousand different facets. Legion is indeed a sort of container of ideas, as witnessed in first person thanks to the demo made available to the press on the occasion of the recent Gamescom 2019 of Cologne.

When a smartphone is no longer enough

Although the playable test was almost completely identical to the one shown at E3, we were able to wander around the Camden Town district, properly rattling off the stealth mechanics related to hacking, the real strength of this new chapter of the series. The mission we tested saw us busy recovering data from a server, and to do so we were called to infiltrate a heavily guarded area (both by armed guards and by security cameras and drones). Based on the recruited character (in our case, an infiltrator) we had carte blanche about the possibility of approaching the action in war mode - that is, shooting at everything that moves and engaging in firefight after another - or try to use our hacking skills to get out of the mission unscathed without a scratch.

Obviously leaning towards a silent approach, the character we have chosen has on his side the possibility to activate invisibility (obviously for a limited amount of time), as well as the ability to conceal the bodies of fallen enemies. But not only that: we were also able to take control of one of the various surveillance drones, and then use it against the guards. All of this, except for the help of the smartphone supplied to us (the historical players of Watch Dogs know very well what we are talking about). Interacting from a distance with (almost) anything seems to be in fact one of the most particular features of Watch Dogs: Legion, with a control system that does not seem to put a spoke in the wheel too much to the player (as long as you are already familiar with the series) .

Clearly, the dynamic missions selected from time to time based on the recruited character ensure that each NPC potentially becomes a story to follow. Ubisoft was keen to emphasize that every passer-by is driven by artificial intelligence, so much so that each of them has a goal and purpose outside of the plot that we will decide to follow: who is going to a bar, who at work, who is looking for a dose of drugs. It goes without saying that the mechanics of recruiting non-player characters on which the plot (and consequently the gameplay) of Legion is based, is certainly one of the most interesting things of the package, although from our test we did not notice any particular differences between one NPC and another (except in physical performance, as in the case of the XNUMX-year-old granny).

Is everything perfect as scheduled then? Not at all. The version shown to us by Ubisoft highlighted the free roaming sections aboard the various cars stolen in the street (clearly in GTA style) rather canonical and really boring (also considering the presence of the fast travel, here justified by the presence of the underground line), just as the level of detail of the virtual London in we will be called to move does not yet reach the qualitative level that would be expected from a Triple A game at the threshold of 2020. To this must be added all a series of rather annoying bugs (a couple of which forced us to start a mission all over again), which we hope will be fixed in the final build.

In any case, there are still several months left from the release of Watch Dogs: Legion in stores, scheduled for March 6 on PC, PS4, Xbox One e Stadia, which bodes well for Ubisoft's willingness to further enrich the gameplay, set up a plot to the height and, last but not least, correct the shot with a technical sector in step with the times. While waiting to find out with our hands, we can start setting our smartphones in hacking mode.