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  Believe it or not, this humble construction worker is a key figure in the hacker resistance.

It’s interesting how video games take a phrase like ‘non-player character’ for granted. This unwieldy phrase has become a ubiquitous term of art that highlights just how limited we are in most games by taking the point of view of a single protagonist (or a maybe a small team).

Then along comes a game like Watch Dogs: Legion, which aims to blow up that dichotomy with a simple question: what if practically every non-player character could become a protagonist?

The results of Ubisoft’s ambitious attempt are a little sloppy at points, and it doesn’t fix the open-world genre’s problems with repetitive quests. Still, Watch Dogs: Legion earns points for weaving together a coherent open world game where no one is the protagonist and everyone is the protagonist at the same time.

Everyone’s a hacker

Legion takes players to a version of London that has been utterly transformed in the well-established techno-dystopian near-future of the Watch Dogs universe. Things start off with a literal bang when a terrorist hacker collective known as Zero Day sets off a series of massive explosions around the city. Dedsec, the “good guy” hackers from previous Watch Dogs titles, get framed for the attacks, leading the city to grant sweeping police state powers to mercenary mega-firm Albion in the name of “security.”