LEGO City Undercover (2013)

Not the most well known Lego title, often compared to Grand Theft Auto but for kids, Lego City Undercover is a fun game but could have been better if it was better refined.

As this game is primarily aimed at kids, it’s not a particularly hard game, however controlling your character during some of the platforming sections could result in controller durability tests. My other experience with the lego games has been with the Star Wars entries and as far as I could remember the build animations used to be much faster in those. You can get a red brick that allows faster build animations but these tend to be found much later in the game. The slow build animations are not the only thing that make this game feel very slow paced, the vehicles are PAINFULLY slow. Even the sports cars or speedboats feel like they travel at a snail's pace. Some cars are fitted with a speed boost however this barely makes it feel like you’re going fast even with that. Some of the vehicle handling in this game can be frustrating like the cars being caressed by scenery or another car and they are on their arse. The stunt jumps are very forgiving though, approach at any speed or angle and it will correct you.

The city itself is not too big but can become annoying going from one side of the city to another multiple times during a mission. In the days of fast travel, being able to easily hop around the city was sorely missed. You can unlock this as an extra or “cheat” so I’m not counting it as part of the core gameplay. No fall damage in this game however is greatly appreciated. Exploring however was another pain. Take for example a popular exploration game Zelda, when you unlock an ability you think “oh I can now access that area I saw blocked off earlier!” you then go to that area, break open the blocked path and are rewarded for it. Lego City Undercover leads you into a false sense of security by making you think you can now access an area with a new unlocked ability but after you pass through the doorway, spend a few minutes clambering up a building, across a roof only to be greeted with a door that’s locked with an ability you don’t get until much later in the game! This destroys any enthusiasm to explore the city until you have finished all 15 chapters of the main story. I do enjoy the game mechanic of different jobs as professions to utilise skills to unlock areas but when you’re traversing a level and it takes 3-4 skills just to open a door that leads to another door that needs 3-4 professions to unlock it the game starts to feel like it’s deliberately wasting your time.

The cutscenes are unskippble and unpaseable until you clear the full campaign which can lead to the player becoming bored if they are just into this game for the gameplay like me. When the game’s camera slowly pans round an area or shows you where to go next if it wasn’t already blindingly obvious I found myself thinking “just let me play the game!”. Throughout the campaign missions you will receive video calls from other characters which can be tedious as fuck frequent, long and irritating.

I played this on an Xbox Series X and although it was not 4K it still looked fantastic. The only criticism I have for the graphics is that the Lego looked too shiny. At time of playing the helipad bug still exists. The bug soft locks the game when trying to select a helicopter at a helipad causing the user to reset the game.

An element of the gameplay I found funny was that as a policeman or undercover policeman you arrest the bad guys to get rid of them. This includes security guards of a museum. I would have loved to be in the police station when they are trying to charge security guards with doing their job. Completing the game without extras gives you around 25% completion. There are A LOT of extras to gather but as I want to move on and get on with other things I called it quits after the credits rolled.

I do recommend this game to all types of gamers: young/old, professionals/noobs and completionists.

Seeing as this is one of the only modern Lego games that isn’t just a retelling of a movie franchise, I didn’t pay it any mind. I figured it wasn’t much more than a little kid’s game, which granted most Lego games are, but at least we have lightsabers. Turns out, I was wrong about this game, well sort of.

Yes, Lego City Undercover still has very basic gameplay that is suitable for the whole family. You have different costumes that let you interact with different items in the world to solve puzzles. There’s all the usual gameplay suspects here; silver blocks that need explosives, memory games, sliding puzzles, races. & fixing things. All these costumes are themed as different service jobs around the city; policeman, astronaut, miner, farmer, etc. As the story centers on being an undercover cop, you have a criminal outfit that includes a paint gun, which may be the one new puzzle element in this game. You have to find stations to change the color of paint you shoot to activate or deactivate switches. All these puzzles usually aren’t tough, except the few occasions of “what the Hell am I supposed to do?” The other aspects of the game are driving and fighting. The fighting reminds me of the type of combat Lego tried with the Indiana Jones games. It’s got more of brawler feel, a very simplified brawler. You punch, counter, and grab enemies, that’s it. You don’t “kill” people in this one, instead to end the fight you have to slap the cuffs on them, which does help make you feel like a cop and not a rouge vigilante.

The other thing that very much shows this game’s kid-centric focus is the fact that every time you get a new collectible or complete a puzzle, the game has to stop for a few seconds to flash a big “yay you did a thing” notification to keep the young-ins engaged. Most of these collectible sets have 20 to 30 things to get, so seeing that pop-up every time is a little annoying. If you could keep playing while the award popped up, it’d be much better.

As the game is called Lego CITY Undercover, you spend plenty of time in the open world of a Lego city. While I never really felt the city played a role or had any real characteristics, when you stop to explore it on your own you see it’s a fun mishmash of a lot of big cities; San Fran, London ,New York, Miami, & Chinatown. The most this open world amounts to is giving you spots to drive to the actual levels & a place to put all the collectables. Half way through the game you unlock helicopters, which usually means better traversal, but this is a kiddie GTA. You can’t jump out of or land the copter anywhere and there’s a set of mountains that separate the city that you annoyingly can’t fly over.

So, I’ve beat this game up for being a kid’s game, but now comes the one reason I wanted to play this game & that’s the story and the comedy. This is where all the fun for the parents that are playing the game with their kids comes in. The actual story is basic, you’re an undercover, loose cannon cop that has to take down public enemy #1. Very quickly though, you see that this game still takes lots of inspirations from movies. Your fellow police detectives are Lego versions of Starsky & Hutch, Columbo, Sherlock Holmes, and my favorite, Dirty Harry. Obviously no kid is going to know these references, but I sure appreciated them. One of the first levels, you visit Lego Alcatraz and the whole level is a reference to Shawshank Redemption. You get help from “Blue”, who insists he isn’t Morgan Freeman even as another inmate quotes his IMDB history. After that there’s levels dedicated to the Matrix & Goodfellas. There’s even a Lego Joe Pesci, yeah kid friendly Joe Pesci references. As the game comes to an end, the movie references aren’t as often. One of the last I remember was the construction site level where the foreman is Arnold Schwarzenegger & all of his dialogue is a pun on his movie, “You must be a Running Man” “I’m going for coffee, then I’ll be back.” When you’re on the farm, an NPC starts quoting the Combine Harvester song. These are all the kind of lame references I would make, I may’ve sleep wrote this script. All the jokes that aren’t references for the parents are either some one liners from Chase that do get a chuckle or basic slapstick for the kids.

All in all, this game is a lot of fun just for the references, and it’s a Lego game so it’s solidly entertaining if you enjoy collectathons. I would recommend this game at a sale price though, it's still a kid's game, & playing through it in co-op. You can get a laugh out of the intentional & unintentional humor.

Great humor and an open world that is actually fun to explore. The main storyline has varied missions (although it still relies heavily on the Lego game crutch of destroying things around the level and using various gadgets to make your way through). The city's design seems to be a mixture of San Francisco and New York City with a few other set pieces cherry picked out of other cities which I love. You've got a Golden Gate Bridge replica, San Francisco's Pink Lady style houses and hills, the different boroughs of New York City, a Chinatown, a Statue of Liberty parody, and even a leaning tower of Lego.

The game was improved considerably by being released from the shackles of the Wii U. I started playing this game initially on that platform and never finished it. I blame the Wii U's terrible hardware limiting the game as a key reason why I abandoned it. The Wii U version had many problems that are now fixed in the PC version:

• Lego City Undercover ran at 720p on the Wii U
• Ran at 30 fps on the Wii U
• Had no anti-aliasing whatsoever on the Wii U so it was a jagged mess
• Horrible loading times of over a minute on Wii U; loading times now below 15 seconds on a SSD
• Obnoxious depth of field effect on the Wii U that could not be disabled and ended up blurring the entire city. In the PC version you can now see the entire city far in the distance.
• No more forced use of the Wii U tablet controller which was a gimmick for the most part and less comfortable to hold than an Xbox wireless controller.
• Multiplayer is back! This is one of the best aspects of the Lego games which was removed when this game was first released on Wii U.
• Now you can use a third party utility such as TriDef to play the game in 4K and stereoscopic 3D at the same time -- and let me tell you, this is a real treat, especially for the Lego games. The Lego games have always looked outstanding in stereoscopic 3D and this one is no exception.

The only downside is there were a few Nintendo related Easter eggs that have been removed.