Even as someone who has spent minimal time in London, many of its landmarks have been absorbed into my psyche over years of seeing the city represented in films and on television. The city in Watch Dogs: Legion is definitely London-but it has been tilted a few dimensions to the right, offering players a view into a possible alternative universe. What makes this version of techno-terror so effective is the way that the game’s creators dropped a dystopian science-fiction overlay onto one of the world’s most familiar cities. While it is remarkably fun to play, Watch Dogs: Legion might be regarded by some with a mixture of awe, terror, and knowing recognition. This is a work of fiction that extrapolates the work of Orwell, adds in modern sensibilities and a slick interface, and slaps a nice fresh coat of Kurzweil on the surface. We do twisted things to our digital minions.īut all of that ruckus and mayhem doesn’t keep me from seeing Watch Dogs: Legion as a dire alarm bell. Because, after all, this is a video game, and I am a gamer. And, if I’m being perfectly honest, I’ve been known to sic my swarm of killer bees on innocent people in museums, just to watch them run and scream. And I’ve used my magic floating cargo platform to drop explosive payloads onto luxury boats floating innocently in the Thames, just to see what would happen. Yes, I’ve run over and killed scores of London pedestrians and potential allies with an ambulance. You might think that I’m digging a little too deeply into a game in which I spent the majority of my time sneaking around and thrashing people with a wrench. It’s reality, just cranked up a notch or two. Does any of this sound familiar? Legion’s parallels with the real world are what makes the game so frightening. Surveillance drones buzz about, occupying a significant percentage of the city sky. The government tracks everyone by their cell phones, able to locate anyone in an instant. People are routinely stopped, either beaten in the streets or arrested for no reason. The police have been sidelined by military contractors, and London is held in an iron grip of technological surveillance and controlling street-level terror. But much like the best episodes of Black Mirror, I played Watch Dogs: Legion nodding in recognition-I can clearly see how we can get from here to there.īritish society (and one assumes, the rest of the world) is wildly oppressed in the world of Legion. Sure, that reality may still be far off on the horizon. While we the people complacently tap on our phones, willingly giving up our private information and voting away the rights of our fellow citizens in the name of “security,” the Big Brother world presented in Watch Dogs: Legion is clicking steadily into focus. But at its heart, Watch Dogs: Legion is a shrieking siren warning against the dystopia towards which our society is ever so quietly sliding. I didn’t go into Ubisoft’s latest open world epic thinking about it in those terms. Watch Dogs: Legion is an audacious work of science fiction.
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