Lego City Undercover

I know a lot of people might not have a Wii U, or really understand what it’s about. My step-son has one and four different games for it. Right now, the best integrated game he has with the system is Lego City Undercover. People say this game is basically an open-world sandbox like GTA, and it is, but it borrows heavily from previous Lego Games like Lego Batman and Lego Harry Potter, etc. We own three Lego games for the 360 and the play style is very similar. You play and unlock “costumes” that the character Chase McCain used to access new abilities. For instance, the criminal can use his crowbar to pry open doors and the fireman can use his extinguisher to put out fires. You have to switch costumes in their wheel to access each new power. The farmer seems like Poison Ivy from Lego Batman. He uses his watering can to grow plant that you can then climb up to get to higher areas, just like Poison Ivy.

Lego City looks an awful lot like Liberty City (which itself is New York City). There’s two main islands connected by bridges, and you have to keep playing to unlock more areas. You have to travel over land by “borrowing” other people’s cars. You simply press X to hop in, like a toned-down Saints Row instead of going through the long, “I need this!” animations that GTA uses where the driver gets punched in the head. Chase politely says, “Police emergency!” and the driver will switch places with you. As your car gets damaged, you lose bricks until it’s destroyed. Cars have their own health bars as well, and car damage isn’t tied in with your own health. Pedestrians will jump out of the way as you try to mow them down. If for some reason they don’t, they don’t receive any damage. You can’t “kill” ordinary citizens. You can only combat criminals and you defeat them by beating them up with your hands then putting handcuffs on them. The last bad guy in a group will always be taken down in an animation sequence.

Entrances to mission areas are found on the world map, which is displayed on the tablet portion of the Wii U. The Wii U pad, or whatever it’s called, it basically your GPS and phone. You receive calls from Lego characters where the audio comes out of the pad instead of the monitor. You can also use the pad as an audio scanner and camera, which forces you to stand up and rotate your whole body to use it, like an AR game. When you access car menus, you pick the car you want on the pad screen.

That’s better and different from other games like Super Mario Wii U and Scribblenauts. Those games give you the option of playing on your TV or pad, without giving you a lot of reason to have the pad at all. In multiplayer in Super Mario Bros., the player with the pad can touch the screen to create temporary blocks, which isn’t as useful as being able to play as Player 2. The same goes for Nintendoland, where in multiplayer, the person with the tablet is king.

Lego City Undercover, unlike the console games on the 360 that encourages you to have two players, is single-player. It’s like the inverse of the 360/Nintendo dynamic. 360 games are mostly single-player affairs when not connected to the internet, and Nintendo games are mostly about local multiplayer.

There’s some serious problems with the game, though. I only noticed one glitch where a car got stuck in the ground, but the big problem is load times. It takes a long time to load up the game. Probably around three minutes. Then, saving the game is another problem. The whole game involves going between missions in an open world, but if you quit in the middle of a mission, you have to restart the mission. Saving in the open world is only possible by going to the police headquarters (which also takes time) or collecting certain blocks.

Puzzles are ridiculously easy to solve, but also frustrating. You’re constantly running into areas where you’ll need a new costume to solve, which is only possible by playing through the missions then coming back. You’re better off, then, by leaving everything to the very end of the game, which defeats the purpose of having the open world. It’s like the opposite of Saints Row 3 that gives you everything you could want right off the bat.