The core ideas of Watch Dogs have always been as engrossing as they are prescient. Playing as a hacker on the fringes of a surveillance state is an inherently cool setup for an open-world game, and when you add in a bunch of novel tech-based abilities that let you alter the world around you, you’ve got a franchise that meaningfully breaks away from more popular titles in the genre.
The first Watch Dogs was a decent if forgettable Chicago-set romp with an unlikable protagonist at the center of its glum story. Watch Dogs 2 made this world as fun to exist in as it was to play, with a much better lead character and the sunnier setting of San Francisco. The steady improvement between the first two games set up the third title for a hat trick. Instead, 2020’s Watch Dogs: Legion took the foundation and experimented. And while I commend developer Ubisoft Toronto for taking a risk, the result wasn’t something any fan of Watch Dogs asked for. Five years after it hit the PlayStation 5, it seems that big swing did more harm than good.
