Watch Dog: Legion guide: Tips for using the Spiderbot, the game’s best gadget

No matter how you play Watch Dogs: Legion, you should get the Spiderbot, arguably the best gadget in the game. The Spiderbot is a perfect proxy for the player, and it can scale from reaching high rooftops to shooting down nearby enemies. It’s a gadget worth investing your Tech Points in.

In this Watch Dogs: Legion Spiderbot guide, we’ll take a look at the things we learned early on and offer you some unconventional tricks along the way.

Combat and Infiltrator Spiderbots: two delicious flavors

The Spiderbot in Watch Dogs: Legion has two flavors: The Infiltrator Spiderbot and the Combat Spiderbot. If you love the Spiderbot like we do, you can even upgrade both of these varieties of Spiderbot and swap between them depending on your mood.

Infiltrator Spiderbot

The Infiltrator Spiderbot is best for players who want to explore and play stealthily. It has a melee takedown for enemies, and you can upgrade it with a double jump and sprint.

After your upgrades, this thing really moves, and you can even use it to jump into unreachable areas or over certain barricades. We’ve managed to jump through parts of a fence in certain ways that we think is unintentional. It’s very powerful.

Combat Spiderbot

The Combat Spiderbot is more of a combat buddy — although it’s still capable of the sneaking and creeping of an Infiltrator Spiderbot, though it’s not as fast. You can deploy the Combat Spiderbot to act as a mobile turret if you get in a gunfight, attacking enemies that get too close to you. You can even upgrade this bot to work as a manual turret, so you can jump up to a hidden vantage point and start taking enemies out.

The Lakitu Method

Image: Ubisoft Toronto/Ubisoft via Polygon

We’ve coined a special name for our favorite way to play Watch Dogs: Legion: The Lakitu Method. To perform The Lakitu Method, you need a Infiltrator Spiderbot with double jump and a Cargo Drone (which construction workers can summon). Take your agent and hop on the Cargo Drone. Now fly around the city and drop your Spiderbot onto various bases and locations.

With the double jump, you can slow your fall, meaning your bot can survive a massive drop. And once you’re on the inside, you can complete objectives and explore safely. And when it’s time to go, you simply exit the Spiderbot and pilot your Cargo Drone to a new location. It’s super efficient, really safe, and a ton of fun.

It can do everything you can do

Part of the reason The Lakitu Method works is because the Spiderbot can do a lot of what your DedSec agent can do. Need to hack an object in person? Spiderbot can handle it. Need to pick up a collectible, Tech Point, or quest item? Spiderbot can do that too! It’s an excellent proxy for a human character. And while it doesn’t have quite the combat capabilities that your agent does, it makes up for it in size and speed.

But the best part of this proxy Spiderbot is how safe using it is. If your agent dies, they’ll go to jail or the hospital until their timer runs out — or they’ll die forever with permadeath. But if your Spiderbot dies, you just have to wait for it to respawn. And by the time your Spiderbot has cooled down, your enemies will have forgotten all about the last one.

When all else fails, recall

At any time, you can exit your Spiderbot and hold the gadget button to recall it back into your inventory. This is awesome for a few reasons.

It lets you recall your Spiderbot and leave an area, meaning it won’t go on cooldown, saving you some time. But you can also recall your Spiderbot quickly if you get in a scrape, potentially saving yourself the respawn time. It’s also just a great way to reposition your robot to a new area.

Spiderbots stick to cars and other moving objects

Image: Ubisoft Toronto/Ubisoft via Polygon

If you don’t feel like recalling your Spiderbot, you can instead stick it to your car. All you have to do is control the Spiderbot and position on top of whatever you’re driving. When you take off, Spiderbot remains unfazed and will hang out on the roof of your speeding vehicle. If you have the Combat Spiderbot, it’ll even shoot at enemies driving by.

This is a really useful feature if you’re hunting for Tech Points and don’t feel like getting out of your car. Throw your Spiderbot on the roof, drive to your location, and hit the hack button from inside of your car to transfer to the Spiderbot. Use your Spiderbot to do your business, return it to the roof of your car, exit Spiderbot, and drive to the next location without ever getting out of the driver’s seat. Use Spiderbot to work smarter, not harder.