But in co-op London, as in the pandemic version, there's almost nothing to do with a mate on a Saturday night.
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Outside of missions, you can launch a 'friends only' free roam session, and have the entire city to yourselves. But that mode has yet to arrive in Legion. Ironically enough, there is a Watch Dogs multiplayer mode perfectly suited to public sessions: the Invasions that encouraged you to blend with NPCs while hacking data from a player in the open world. If you're matchmade with a gang of fellow newcomers, you're not going to have many surprising spanners from Legion's toolkit at your disposal. It doesn't help that the more creative solutions for direct combat, like hijacking combat drones or planting a turret on the roof of a car, are locked behind the online mode's grindy progression system. They're simply paired with the wrong sort of infrastructure. It's easy to imagine the same objectives tackled in a variety of more satisfying ways.
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And there's nothing wrong with the mission design, which largely sticks to series principles. I don't blame the players, who have no realistic hope of thinking through a scenario they've just been shuffled into on a playlist, like a free-for-all match in Nuketown. It's a game I don't recognise, despite the familiar sights and sounds-a humdrum co-op shooter that can't match COD Zombies in the heft of its weapons or ferocity of its opponents. What could have been an intellectual obstacle course is bulldozed in five minutes flat. More than once, I've loaded into a mission to the sound of gunfire-my teammates already shooting up the joint before I've even had a chance to scope the place out.
In public matchmaking, where voice chat is rare and players are understandably blind to the intent of their peers, any coordination swiftly breaks down.