Watch Dogs: Legion, the third installment in the Watch Dogs series, lacked focus. The “play as anyone” system let you recruit people from around London, including a posh lawyer or troubled doctor, to rebuild the local DedSec hacker collective. It gave you plenty of team-building flexibility to battle the ctOS security system, but the hacking and infiltration fun quickly lost its shine due to a weak story that lacked motivation and thematic resonance. The $14.99 Watch Dogs: Legions – Bloodline DLC goes in the other direction. The PC game features returning characters from previous games, Aiden Pearce and Wrench, that make for a stronger, centered adventure. That said, the old characters don’t slot well into Legion’s gameplay.
It’s About Family
As the oft-memed Dominic Toretto from The Fast and The Furious says, “You never turn your back on family.” As the game’s title suggests, Bloodline is primarily about family. Since his exploits in the first Watch Dogs game, Aiden Pearce has travelled the world and caused trouble. When he accepts a job that takes him to London, the city where his estranged nephew Jackson lives, Aiden jumps at the chance to check in.
In the first Watch Dogs, developer Ubisoft portrayed Aiden Pearce as a cool character, but the attempt often fell short. Although “awesome, clandestine hackerman” was the aim, Aiden came across as an amoral murderer. Now, Ubisoft seems to have caught up with the community’s perception of him. In Bloodline, Aiden begins as an unwashed man living in his car. His surviving family has left him, and his only friend is a hitman for hire. The story is about Aiden trying to make good again; he keeps screwing up, and wants to be better, but he doesn’t know how.
Aiden’s London job brings him into conflict with Broca Tech, and its CEO Thomas Rempart. Fortunately for Aiden, Rempart is already in a personal war with Wrench, the masked best boy from Watch Dogs 2. While Aiden is given a more heroic turn over the course of the Bloodline DLC, the story is truly about Wrench dealing with the consequences of his actions. You can’t be an anarchic madman without someone getting hurt, especially when you’re no longer a 20-year old.
Bloodline’s story is far more satisfying than Legion’s main campaign. It’s not the most amazing plot, but there’s more emotional investment compared with the base game. It’s good enough that I think a fourth Watch Dogs title could split the difference between the older and newer gameplay styles by letting you play as a set main protagonist who recruits a squad.
The New Gear
Each character brings their own traits and gear to the table. Aiden is the more combat-centric character, and he starts the story with a powerful revolver and an extendable baton. His unique skill is System Crash, which hacks everything in the immediate area and causes chaos. It’s a great tool for when you need to escape a serious situation. Aiden also has effective, passive skills that slow time after an enemy takedown and boost his damage output after a timed reload.
Wrench is more of a glass cannon. His primary weapons are a massive hammer named Lady Smash and a gun that randomly hacks targets when charged. Wrench also obtains stun grenades that let him quickly disengage from fights, and he has the ability to call in his custom cargo drone that ferries him across London.
The pair share a straightforward upgrade mechanic. By completing missions for specific people, you’ll unlock new skills that mirror some of the character skills from the base Legion game. You can easily see the available skills, as well as the jobs that you must complete to obtain them. You’ll later unlock an additional upgrade track for Wrench that requires you to do missions for Aiden’s fixer friend.
Tuning the Mechanics
Although Bloodline’s story is better than Legion’s, the gameplay needed additional tweaking to make room for Aiden and Wrench. Bloodline has the same outposts, hideouts, and bases as Legion, but the returning characters lack the tools used to properly tackle them. For example, you can no longer hide in plain sight, as Aiden and Wrench can’t change their outfits.
Bloodline is more difficult than Legion in the game’s early moments, because the enemy locations feature the same number of foes—and you’re low on tools and upgrades. The scenario adds challenge, which is welcome, but the enemy locations and spawn rates should’ve been adjusted to match the characters’ abilities. Fortunately, Aiden and Wrench can access attack drone to even the odds.
Ubisoft removed the Legion recruiting system, so an entire chunk of the Watch Dogs: Legion experience is gone. You can profile London’s citizens, but you can’t further interact with them. It almost feels like Watch Dogs or Watch Dogs 2 within Legion’s map, rather than DLC for the latter game. That’s the stumble. Bloodline is missing part of what made Legion work, and unlike the Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: Wrath of the Druids DLC, this isn’t a new region or the addition of vastly different gameplay mechanics. In fact, it feels like a bridge from Watch Dogs 2 to Legion, rather than proper Legion DLC.
The bright side is that once you’ve finished Bloodline, Aiden and Wrench are unlocked as characters within the base game. You’ll be able to add the pair to your DedSec squad, which is a ton of fun. All their moves carry over to the base game, too.
Can Your PC Run Watch Dogs: Legion – Bloodline?
Bloodline has the same system requirements as the base Watch Dogs: Legion game. Your PC needs at least a 3.2GHz AMD Ryzen 5 1400 or Intel Core i5-4460 CPU, a Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 GPU, 4GB of RAM, 55GB of storage space, and the Windows 10 operating system. You can enable ray tracing if you have a Nvidia GeForce RTX graphics card.
The game ran well on my desktop PC, which has an AMD Ryzen 5 3600X CPU, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 GPU, and 24GB of RAM. At 1440p resolution, with ray tracing activated, Watch Dogs: Legion struggled to hold a consistent 60 frames per second. Turning off ray tracing stabilized the frame rate. Bloodline has many tweakable graphics options, including texture filtering, motion blur, bloom effects, anti-aliasing, and other expected PC gaming features.
Bloodlines Are Thicker Than Water
Watch Dogs: Legion – Bloodline’s return to main characters means that the story makes you empathize with the heroes—something that Legion’s campaign lacked with its “play as anyone” focus. Sadly, Bloodline loses Legion’s gameplay and overall vibe, and there’s no new region to make up for it. Still, the hacking and action make the game worth a pick up.
Going forward, Watch Dogs needs main characters in future series installments, but it shouldn’t ditch Legion’s recruiting system—it’s a blast. If Ubisoft can combine both elements in a single game, the Watch Dogs franchise can finally live up to its potential.
Watch Dogs: Legion isn’t available on Steam (you can download it from Epic Games Store or Ubisoft Connect), but check out PCMag’s Steam Curator page for PC game reviews and previews. And for in-depth video game talk, visit PCMag’s Pop-Off YouTube channel.
