holy fucking shit this game. this is a really unique case. everything you do in this game feels amazing, the guns, the glory kills, everything. but what happens around you is where it starts to get interesting.

this game is stressful. even on the easiest difficulty i will find myself struggling. so the satisfaction comes from the result of the stress. the amazing music, and the satisfying as fuck glory kills.

the things i hate about this game are the unneeded platforming sections, and the bullshit enemies: the marauder and the archville; they throw away everything the game was about before, and force you to play a certain way, making the game way less doom, and in the process way less fun.

gameplay gets a 4.
story gets a 5.

This game takes a concept that is cool on paper, lays the foundation for it to work, then does nothing else. Being able to recruit any NPC is a neat idea but it does not serve as a replacement for well-written characters. I'll admit that i did like using some of my randomly-generated characters, but the problem is that everything they say is so corny. I brought my first recruit to the final mission, and he literally said "damn, I didn't think of anything cool to say" at the climax, which sums up this game really well. The gameplay is fun for a while but gets repetitive. The world itself is well-made and some of the "levels" in this open world are very well designed. Many story missions do a good job too, climbing through the innards of big ben with a robot spider sticks out in my mind. However, no matter how many glimpses of fun this game has, it is still another entry in the long line of gameplay feedback loops from Ubisoft. Watch Dogs 2 at least made up for it with more creative hacking systems, a better sandbox feel, and fun characters. Here, the experience feels constrained and the story has no stakes. Without going into spoilers, there is a rather memorable moment near the end that is completely reversed after the credits - it is barely explained and is rather transparently required by gameplay. Legion had a lot of potential that was just thrown away by very poor, un-subtle writing and the formula of Ubisoft games. If I go back to a Watch Dogs game in the future, it will probably be #2 and not this one.