Watch Dogs Legion: a messy but promising look at the future of video games

Only a few more days to wait before the release of the new video game consoles.

The Xbox Series X lands on November 10, and the PS5 a week later.

A moment eagerly awaited by players and publishers who are betting a lot on this new technological step forward.

But, within two weeks, Ubisoft has made the bet to release a last game on the current generation: 

, third episode of its license which places the players in the skin of a hacker.

Direction London for an opus with a prophetic tone and which promises above all to be able to embody each character crossed in the game. Promise kept?

Europe 1 tested it.

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Do well hacker

Watch Dogs Legion

plunges us into a London in chaos.

In the indefinite but very near future, after a wave of attacks, the city is torn between several groups: Zero Day, a terrorist faction;

Albion, a private security firm that has overtaken the venerable Scotland Yard;

the Kelley clan, a violent and ubiquitous gang;

and finally DedSec, a group of "nice" hackers.

Wrongly accused of being responsible for the attacks, its members are actively sought by the police.

As a player, we join this hacktivist collective to try to unravel the power games that are strangling London and prove the innocence of our comrades.

The first installment of the license (2014) was about the lonely rider of a man against an overpowered company in a city of Chicago undergoing technological change.

The second (2016) headed for San Francisco, where a group of hackers opposed the system of mass surveillance, in a cynical scenario and willingly critical of the ideal company sold by the GAFA. 

synthesizes its predecessors by taking up the dark and serious atmosphere of the first, where technology rhymes with danger, and the collective of hackers of the second, but much better highlighted this time.

The hero is everyone!

Indeed, the main tour de force of the game is the unprecedented possibility of being able to embody any inhabitant of this London of the future.

To convince the inhabitants that DedSec works for their good, we must help them and especially recruit a certain number of them to give weight to the group.

As a character, you can target and approach any passerby.

After a quick mission to convince him, he joins your ranks and from there you can play him at any time since it is possible to play with any member of DedSec.

In fact, it's simple and really impressive.

We have a lot of fun watching everyone looking for an interesting profile.

This novelty, certainly impressive, still has a significant perverse effect: no protagonist particularly stands out.

There are no heroes, just an infinity of characters whose personal story boils down to one character trait and two lines of biography.

Basically, whether you're a City banker, a Camden dropout, or a grandmother who feeds the pigeons in Hyde Park, this is more of a "costume" than a "personality."

Only the voices give them character.

This leaves the impression of a game in which - and this is ironic considering the basic subject - the technological demonstration has taken precedence over the emotion.

An unsettling dive into a very familiar future

That being said, that doesn't make 

a bad game. Far from it, it is so full of qualities elsewhere.

We do not shy away from the pleasure of strolling through the streets of London recreated with millimeter precision.

The city is teeming with activities and generally pleasant side missions.

You have to walk in the Camden market in search of profiles to recruit, rush headlong into the Mall and skid in front of Buckingham Palace, hack the giant screens of Picadilly Circus ... It's all the more pleasant that the soundtrack , an eclectic playlist of pieces representative of the British musical landscape, is of high quality.

This London is all the more exciting because, despite the invasion of high-tech gadgets, this futuristic version of the British capital is ultimately very realistic.

Ubisoft did not go into science fiction but rather sought to concretely implement already familiar technologies in the city.

So goes delivery drones that fly over buildings, surveillance cameras on every street corner, self-driving cars that have become the norm and ctOs, the computer system that links all of the capital's infrastructures.

But no giant holograms, androids with human faces and other

fantasies 

.

This London just might be the one of the 2020s and that makes 

even more interesting (and terrifying).

A game of great richness

All the salt of the game lies in the manipulation of this ultra-technological environment to fulfill different missions.

And on this point, Ubisoft has offered players great freedom.

If you have to infiltrate a building to access its computer servers, you can sneak discreetly through the entrance, rush into the heap with your gun, climb on a drone so that it drops you on the roof, hack surveillance cameras to operate remotely or even pilot a

, a robot spider capable of electrocuting guards and connecting to systems.

A pleasing diversity of approach that well compensates for the slight redundancy of the missions.

It must be said that the scenario is not particularly striking.

After a few hours, you can see the strings a little too much.

The second wind therefore resides again in the city of London.

There's always something to do.

And for those who have already visited the British capital, the precision of the detail is disturbing.

Beyond the unmissable monuments, alleys, metro stations, iconic pubs: everything is there!

The first game of such magnitude designed to make the switch between the current generation of consoles and the next (it will be released on Xbox Series X and PS5 in November),

offers an exciting glimpse of the richness of universes that the video game in the future.