Lego City: Undercover
Like Stepping on Mega Bloks
Sometimes you shouldn’t 100% complete a game. If you stick with just beating the game—doing only what you need to do to reach your happy ending—you walk away from the experience satisfied. For those who yearn for more, you look to finish all the side quests, collect all the doohickeys, and earn all the achievements. You get to intimately know the game, and for some games, their positive traits shine more brightly as your romance deepens. For other games, you’ll find the more you get to know them, the more you discover their ranker sides, their obsessive clinginess, their toenail hoarding tendencies, or their underground tickling torture rooms.
I should have kept my distance with Lego City Undercover (LCU). If I had just completed the main story missions, I could have set it aside believing it to be a quirky and fun (albeit shallow and repetitive) game. Instead, I chose to pursue 100% completion, tasking myself with combing over every inch of Lego City and replaying every damn stage. After 40+ hours, I achieved the coveted 100% completion, but in doing so, I was baptized in vitriol and hatred. May Lego City melt to the ground.
What is it?
LCU is Lego Island doing its best impression of Grand Theft Auto. From the start, you can tool around the entire city, which is riddled with collectibles, side challenges, and buildable structures the same way a hotel room is riddled with no-no yucky stuff. Because you play as the undercover cop, Chase, you are free to “borrow” anyone’s vehicle for as long as you need it. Just like police officers do in real life. And just like real life, almost everything is breakable, so you are free to rampage, reducing various Legos to smaller pieces of Lego.
If you feel more virtuous than that, you can follow the main story mode across 15 chapters to rid the city of crime. These chapters find Chase transported to self-contained levels which follow his pursuit to capture a convict, Rex, and discover the reason behind said convict’s recent crimes. Like the main open world, these levels contain sprinklings of platforming and combat along with a heaping dose of kleptomania.
As you progress through the game, Chase will find new disguises which unlock new abilities that cannot be executed by just any costume. A robber getup equips you with paint gun. A farmer’s outfit magically bestows you with a chicken to glide from one point to another. A construction worker’s clothes allows you to take coffee breaks. These abilities are necessary to complete tasks littered throughout the game, and if you strive to reach 100% completion, be prepared to revisit every single stage and location to finish all objectives that were previously inaccessible.
What’s good?
- The acting is mostly solid, and the writing is entertaining. Pop culture references and absurd humor abound, but it’s endearing how ridiculously PG everything is. Some of the antics may induce eye-rolling, yet LCU earns its charm through its kiddie jokes and Chase’s overconfident yet clumsy nature.
- Lego City offers some fun exploration opportunities. Each district feels distinct from the others, and unique landmarks (tunnels, camping grounds, farms, etc.) pepper the locales with enough frequency to incentivize straying from the beaten path.
- Vehicles are worthy collectibles. Although the majority of automobiles you encounter handle similarly, you will come across quirky or stylish ones that offer a change of pace. Some will enjoy speeding around in a sports car while others will take pleasure in crossing Lego City on a Segway, moving slightly faster than you would have if you had just walked.
What’s bad?
- LCU offers a shallow experience. Combat is little more than button-mashing or waiting to button-mash at the right time. Platforming rarely poses a challenge because Chase will often steer himself to the next platform automatically. Even unlocking new costumes changes very little because most costumes simply allow you to press A at a certain location where other outfits can’t. Lego games have never been paragons of complexity, and LCU doesn’t buck this trend.
- Replaying levels and revisiting locations grows tiring. This isn’t an issue for those who just want to beat the main story, but as I stated before, completionists are forced to slog through everything again to find every McGuffin or take a dump on every porch or do whatever the game tells you to do because that’s how you add hours of gameplay to your barebones ditty. Save yourself a headache by not striving for completion, but if you’re that special kind of masochist, have fun visiting every grime-ridden corner of Lego City.
- Co-op is a buggy mess. Frame rate drops significantly (just as it does in undocked mode); the game crashes almost every time you play; context-sensitive platforming or actions are unreliable or unresponsive; and car chase sequences are laughably easy because the game renders your pursuers long after you pass their spawn points. I won’t gripe that co-op mode offers nothing new to LCU because co-op struggles to even replicate the quality of single-player.
What’s the verdict?
Now that I’ve spat enough bile all over my keyboard, I can recognize my stance on Lego City: Undercover is comparatively harsh. Younger gamers should be able to ignore most of the game’s faults because they have yet to feel the apathetic, crushing weight of age. Hell, even older gamers can probably get a kick out of LCU if they overlook the cooperative mode and set the game aside after completing the final chapter. However, like an aged ass, I am too curmudgeonly and stubborn to budge from my opinion. On its surface, LCU is a sufficiently attractive person with a semi-large nose and some noticeable love handles. However, once you get to know each other a little better, you realize that this person is a god-dawn home-wrecking, soul-sucking bitch. I mean, holy hell, Cindy.
Arbitrary Statistics:
- Score: 5.5
- Time Played: Over 40 hours
- Number of Players: 1-2
- Games Like It on Switch: Lego Marvel Super Heroes 2, Lego Worlds