Unlike previous titles in the series, Watch Dogs: Legion is one that never had a central protagonist, to begin with. Here, you’re kind of thrown into a game that skips the entire world-building process that was centred with maybe a single person or a group of individuals that had a certain goal in mind. But today, Bloodline, the new Watch Dogs: Legion story expansion which takes place after the initial events of the main game but before its conclusion puts us back on track with the old ways. Since you’ll be put in the shoes of Aiden Pearce, the main protagonist of the first Watch Dogs game as well as the most notable character for Watch Dogs 2, Wrench, who if you didn’t know already is the master of badassery and witty comebacks, unlike our gloomy masked vigilante. The stark contrast between the two makes for a great balance of extremes which makes each half of their story quite fun in a weird yet unique way.
The premise here is that Aiden Pearce receives a call from Jordi for a fixer contract within London. And despite being at the age of 55 and a retired vigilante, the idea of having to reconnect with his nephew Jackson, who is now a 26-year old rebel seems like a good start for a nostalgic spin on the series. There’s enough of that iconic Aiden Pearce fashion of doing things but also it strikes deeper into his life later on which makes for an interesting conclusion to the now-retired man that he is. But here you also get to meet up and play as Wrench which for better or much better actually connected well with the Bloodline story progression it was going for. Unlike Aiden however, Wrench had a more personal motivation as to how they ended up butting heads with each other.
The £11.99 Bloodline DLC includes pretty much just that. The Bloodline story in which you can play it separately from your base save data you initially had which kind of dampens the experience a little bit. Because if you’re hoping to play as Aiden Pearce or Wrench in either the Legion storyline or its online mode, they’re actually not included in that pack for some reason. So if you even want to create some chaos using either protagonist online, then the £32.99 Season Pass is the only option here as you don’t even get an option to buy them separately with WD credits unlike other operatives like Mina Sidhu or previous operative additions.
Although, on its own, the Bloodline expansion introduces some cool new tech to even just slightly make the experience not be the same brand of shizz you’ve already done hundreds of hours later. Because, unlike your regular tech tools, Aiden and Wrench have some fun new mechanics they’re bringing into the sandbox experience. With Aiden for example, he has the gunslinger perk which gives you a damage buff when you pull off perfectly timed reload prompts. Then again the bar to hit is actually pretty huge so you’d have to be really panicking to your pants to not get this pixel perfect. Meanwhile, his System Crash pretty much disables electronics in a wide area around him which on its own sounds really OP for the online portion especially on the final boss of the first Tactical Ops.
On the other hand, Wrench brought his own taste for chaos with a custom cargo drone that not only looks cool but also shoots balls of electrified grenades that messes with electronics in the area and when shot on things like hostile drones activate a betray hack on them, given that you can actually hit them midair. He also gets mini LTL Flashbangs that would stun, stagger and slow enemies with a POOF! Or at least that’s what the description says. The Princess Rat-tat-tat SMG can hack objects when shot which if you’re shooting something like a drone, can cause them to get disabled for a time while the Lady Smash which from its name sounds like something you’d use to smash something if we’re not talking about anything sexual and NSFW here. Both characters also get access to the improved spider bot that can now change from modes from flight to ground and vice versa but it’s exclusive to the expansion only.
It already goes without saying that being the iconic characters that they are, it would make sense for them to even be slightly better than what the normal operatives would have to offer in terms of perks and utility items. Although they might have gone a little bit overboard with this idea. Especially given the fact that you’d have to spend £32.99 to even be able to use them online. Although the season pass does include the full game of the first Watch Dogs so it might be worth it for those who haven’t bought the game before.
But all in all, the 5-6 hour long campaign of Bloodline which excludes the 15 side objectives you can do within the expansion, delivers a fun experience especially to fans that have played through 2014’s Watch Dogs. It still takes place in the same areas within the base game so you’re not going to find anything in that regard but the addition of a new target as well as robotic enemy types that has their own unique mechanics before you can take them down provides a certain level of challenge that scales well with the new characters’ abilities as well. The characters in the game also really aged well which provides such good context to the entire series and this makes me appreciate Watch Dogs as a whole.
Publisher and Developer: Ubisoft
Platforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Series S, and PC
This review is based on Xbox & PlayStation
You can grab the Xbox Version here for £11.99, or you can grab the PlayStation version here for the same price.
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