Before it’s release, I was actually looking forward to Watch Doge Legion, because despite everyone packing like it was America, a game about mass surveillance abuse being set in the UK made a lot of sense and opened up story possibilities that wouldn’t be available to a game set in America.
Upon mulling over the premise however, something dawned on me: why aren’t we playing as cyber-terrorists fighting against a legitimate authority? It harkens back to my criticisms of the first game and the series as a whole, in that instead of being a more grounded GTA, it’s a less-zany latter-day Saints Row game where the backdrop is ignored in favour #Resistance grey-hat hackers vs. unscrupulous tech billionaires, gullible politicians, and crime lords.
Instead of it being something interesting and questioning at what lengths it’s ok to go to in order to fight against an encompassing mass surveillance state, it suffers from unseen consequence of Ubisoft’s pathological fear of making ‘political’ games: the story, characters, and setting suffers due to constraints on the writers.