"Because I wasn't allowed to ditch recruits, I had to start throwing any dead weight off skyscrapers or into speeding buses," Stewart confessed. Game Informer's Marcus Stewart also played with permadeath on, but described a very different experience once he bumped into the game's limit on team sizes. That angst was by no means universally felt. "And thanks to permadeath, they were worth careful play, because losing one delivered the kind of angst I'd only felt when a trusty operative was killed in XCOM." "Watch Dogs: Legion got me to play with this medic, and as a lot of people I never would have created in an ordinary character builder or avatar customizer," Owen S. "Losing one delivered the kind of angst I'd only felt when a trusty operative was killed in XCOM" Numerous reviewers mentioned the way that system pushes players to try new approaches and explore the game's mechanics, particularly if the player opts to have permadeath turned on and their favored agents fall prey to mishaps and misadventures.
IGN's Dan Stapleton said the system gives the game a more sandboxy feel than its predecessors, while TheGamer's Kirk McKeand said it was one of the most mechanically interesting AAA games in memory, even if the characters wind up feeling replaceable in large part because they have to be. Everyone has a different set of abilities that can contribute to the resistance, and the series' hacker collective known as DedSec will need to use the combined power of the people to upend their oppressors. Set in a near-future London overtaken by authoritarian forces, Watch Dogs Legion forgoes the standard AAA protagonist route and instead allows players to recruit a team of revolutionaries from any of the multitude of procedurally generated NPCs that wander the streets. The game's central conceit ties its gameplay together with its narrative. The review embargo for Watch Dogs Legion passed this morning, and the initial wave of reviews for Ubisoft Toronto's open-world action sequel is largely positive, with cheers for its central play-as-anyone feature tempered somewhat by a variety of complaints.