Lego City Undercover Review

Chase McCain returns to Lego City right after criminal mastermind and all around bad guy Rex Fury has escaped from prison. McCain is the… umm… man (?) that did most of the work to bring Fury to justice and lead to his arrest. The man that actually made that arrest was Marion Dunby, an incompetent policeman that rode that success to the office of Chief of Police. Of course he does not care for our hero, that would require admitting he doesn’t deserve the acclaim and praise.

Anyway, with McClain back in town, the Mayor wants him on the case to hunt down and re-arrest Rex Fury. Since Fury’s escape, a massive crime wave has gripped Lego City, seems logical to think that Fury would be spearheading this operation.

But before McCain can bring Fury back to justice, he needs to arrest some burglar clowns, scale tall buildings, break into prison, go mining, among other adventures and assignments. Along the way he’ll have the help of fellow cops Frank Honey, inept as he may be, and Ellie Philips, as well as Natalia Kowalski, who testified against Fury and got him sent to prison in the first place.

There are a couple of features that really set Lego City apart in my mind. First is the use of various costumes, disguises, and uniforms. Depending on the set of clothes, McCain will different abilities and special equipment. For instance, when you acquire the robber disguise, you can use a crowbar to pry open certain locked doors in the city or on missions. Or as a miner, you use the pick axe to break open piles of rubble. Personally, I’m looking forward to getting the astronaut uniform since that has a jet pack. That should be kind of awesome I think.

More awesome though, is how the Wii U gamepad is utilized. The gamepad, depending on circumstance and the outfit you are wearing, serves as a map, a communicator, a scanner, and, when prompted while wearing the police uniform, you can use the scanner to follow tracks and find hidden clues in the area. Using the variations of this tool is necessary to find these clues to complete missions and track down suspects.

While the gamepad and Chase McCain’s costumes are unique and innovative, Lego City also lets you break things apart and collect Lego blocks needed to build things, such as vehicles for transportation, leaping platforms, and ledges for climbing. Vehicles require the most blocks, and in order to have enough, you will have to acquire Super Blocks that are hidden throughout the city and in mission areas. These blocks vary in value between 1,000 blocks, 5,000 blocks, and 10,000 blocks.

Seeing as I am not a wordsmith and did not do very well in my eighth grade Creative Writing class, words are going to fail me here. With that in mind, I’ll keep it short and simple, this is a fantastic looking game. Very sharp, very crisp. As a child, I had actual Lego’s that didn’t look this good. In the hours I have spent with the game thus far, everything has looked incredible, nothing out of place. Again, simply fantastic in every aspect.

The audio is high quality here as well. Sound effects are great, and the script, while cheesy, is fun and entertaining. I’ll be honest, I don’t feel like spending a lot of time talking about audio, sometimes I wonder why I even have this section, so we’re going to move on.

Lego City Undercover does just about everything good. Great graphics, entertaining game play, innovative and creative use of the new system. Just a fun game to play, and when you boil everything down, that’s the most important thing when it comes to gaming. A game can have all the bells and whistles, but if it’s not fun, then it doesn’t matter. This game is nice and shiny, and it’s fun.

Since everything is good, there’s not much bad to be found here. The dialogue/script is kind of cheesy, but it works and will leave you chuckling more than rolling your eyes, so that is just fine. There’s really nothing I can even nit pick about, so let’s move on.

Lego City Undercover is a great game. May be the best game currently out there for the Wii U. I had a lot of expectations for this game, and I was not let down. I feel like the Wii U really needed Lego City to deliver after some games that came out at the launch seemed to miss their mark. Mission accomplished.

As I’ve stated before, Lego City is a fun game. I can not stress that enough. If a game is not fun, it is not worth my time, but this game is well worth my time. Thus, I believe it is well worth your time… if you have a Wii U of course.

If you were going to buy a Wii U and ask me what games to get for it, my recommendations for your first two titles would be New Super Mario Bros. U and Lego City. I’ve got those two games as 1a and 1b for the Wii U right now.

Lego City Undercover gets a four out of five: GREAT.