Developer: TT Fusion
Publisher: Nintendo
Genre: Sandbox
Players: 1
Console: Wii U
ESRB Rating: E 10+ (Everyone 10+)
Progress: Completed up to Chapter 8 out of 15
Since the first Lego Star Wars game came out in 2005 the Lego games have exploded in popularity to the point where they involve some of the industry’s top licenses and have become the sole product of the developer TT Games. The problem with a lot of the Lego series games is that if you don’t have a particular attachment to the specific license each one uses, then you won’t get as much out of the game as someone who is a big Star Wars/Harry Potter/Lord of the Rings/etc. fan. TT Games went ahead and surprised everyone with their first venture on the Wii U making not only an original IP, but also expanding the usually quite confined level structure into a full-out sandbox game. Does Lego City Undercover fall into the snares of its ambitious premise or does it revolutionize the way the world thinks of virtual Legos? Read on to see what dirt we were able to dig up during our time with the game.
Off the bat I have to address Lego City Undercover‘s outrageous load times. There is no reason a game made largely out of seemingly untextured blocks should take multiple minutes whenever it needs to load something. There’s a police station in the game that you need to go into whenever you want to customize a character, unlock something, or buy new characters/vehicles and these features are only available in the building’s basement so you need to stare endlessly at a loading screen when you enter the building, go down to the basement, come up from the basement, and exit the building making your rewards for playing the game feel more like unbearable chores to access. It has been posited that these outrageous load times are due to the fact that the game loads the entire freaking world/mission when you first enter it. While navigating the considerable overworld is indeed quite smooth without visible loads after the infuriating primary load, it really is inexcusable for a game like this to take longer to load than Crysis, GTA IV, and Saints Row 3. You don’t even get little “tips” to read or character models to view/control to pass the time like you do in games like Skyrim or Assassin’s Creed. You get a spinning shield on the TV and a barely moving progress bar on the GamePad, and that is your lot in life for a good portion of the playtime of Lego City Undercover.
Actual gameplay footage
Once everything is loaded and you’re actually playing, Lego game veterans will also notice one other large change to how things work in Lego City Undercover – the studs you collect have a very short draw distance and respawn quite quickly. When you’re driving, this roughly 15-20 “foot” draw distance can especially hamper your stud collecting capabilities as it’s hard to tell where they’re going to magically blink into existence. As you get more studs this starts to matter less as they really are everywhere and it’s quite easy to find the red blocks that give you multipliers on top of that, but modern games should really be able to manage draw distances so that they at the very least don’t affect gameplay.
Being a Wii U exclusive, TT Games saw fit to make the GamePad the sole method by which you are allowed to control the game and this leads to a number of shortcomings. Firstly, off-TV play is not possible in Lego City Undercover because of its constant use of the GamePad for various HUD elements and other things that could generally have been put elsewhere to avoid the problem. Secondly, in a series known for its ubiquitous and approachable multiplayer there is none to be found in Lego City Undercover. Mutiple GamePad support for Wii U consoles was introduced so late in the game that there still hasn’t been a game announced that will officially make use of that feature, so since you can’t have two GamePads you can’t have two or more players, period. Lastly, the over-emphasized use of the GamePad means that you can’t use the Pro controller, which I quite like and actually initially tried to start the game with to no avail. All-in-all Lego City Undercover’s use of the GamePad is both freeing and restrictive in roughly equal measures, but conspicuously precludes many features that the game is sadly missing.
Glaring technical issues aside, I actually found Lego City Undercover to be quite charming and witty. The cutscenes and almost all dialogue is completely voiced by great actors that really give personality to the game’s various characters. Chase McCain, the returning ace cop character that you control throughout the game is voiced by Joseph May and gives off a very Zapp Brannigan from Futurama feel throughout. Chase also gets a contemporary named Frank Honey whose voice and inane antics liken him to a more coherent Caboose from Red Vs. Blue. The dialogue filled with jokes, pop culture references, and self-referential humour will nearly always have you smiling.
Even though it’s been given a larger scope, the Lego gameplay that we’ve come to know and love over the years is present in full force in Lego City Undercover. There is an entire sprawling city with areas themed after different real locations like New York’s Times Square (complete with a Lego Store) (even though that’s technically in Rockefeller Center not Times Square) and Lombard Street in San Francisco. The game is crawling with collectibles of every kind including the series-standard studs, Lego pieces used in Super Builds scattered around the game that usually make something big or uniquely interactive, new disguises for Chase McCain, as well as sandbox-standards like Free-Run challenges, time trails, criminal chases, etc. Everything you would expect from a top-notch modern sandbox game is here including (once they’re unlocked) travel by boats and planes.
The main narrative has Chase returning to Lego City after an indeterminate time (presumably after the events of the 3DS game) to recapture an escaped criminal Rex Fury, who he was originally responsible for putting away even though the now police chief and doughnut enthusiast Marion Dunby took public recognition for the arrest. The story is progressed by playing more traditional-style Lego levels at certain locations with city traversal and exploration usually stuck in-between. At certain points you unlock new costume categories for Chase which give you the new abilities that character-switching provided in past Lego games. Once you have these new abilities, the possibilities of what you can do around the city grow exponentially as the game design encourages back-tracking as much as in previous games even though the play area has grown considerably.
It took me a total of 11 hours and 30 minutes (probably including most loading times) to get through the first 8 of 15 chapters in the game’s main storyline with a moderate amount of exploration around the city. If the game holds roughly the same pace that means that you can look forward to a 15-20+ hour playthrough of just the story with Lego City Undercover, exponentially longer than the Lego series games that have come before it. There is a staggering amount of content packed into Lego City Undercover and it’s sure to entertain both kids and sandbox game veterans alike. Given the fact that pickings are slim for the Wii U at the moment, there isn’t much reason for most Wii U owners to pick-up a copy of this game even considering its lack of multiplayer/off-TV play and lengthy loading times.
- Has insultingly lengthy load times for no good reason other than developer lethargy
- Game streams environments smoothly when in play (no extra pauses for loading)
- Changes some key elements of Lego game structure, not always for the best
- Conspicuously missing multiplayer and off-TV play due to over-reliance on GamePad
- Has a charming cast of characters all expertly voiced
- Game is constantly making jokes, referencing pop culture, and breaking the fourth wall
- Main storyline is lengthy and engaging, clocking in at 15-20+ hours depending upon how much extra you do
- Tons of things to collect/unlock and secrets to discover
- As all the makings of a top-notch sandbox game
- Recommended to all Wii U owners in spite of its technical faults, especially considering current game selection
A copy of this game was provided to us by its publishers.