LEGO City Undercover

Lego City Undercover is a bold new direction for the Lego series. In many respects it is a successful first try, but there are quite a few technical mishaps. The open world concept needs some work, the load times are horrible and the lack of co-op is very disappointing. The game-play is still as simple and entertaining as ever though, and some of the missions and puzzles are among the greatest in the series.

Lego City Undercover borrows heavily from Grand Theft Auto IV, and mixes it with the fun gameplay we know from other Lego games. It's great fun to explore Lego City and the plot has some really clever twists that will keep you interested throughout the game. It's time for Traveller's Tales Games to come up with some new puzzles, though.

Lego City: Undercover is a good idea – it just hasn’t been built in quite the right way.

Ultimately, Undercover is basically another LEGO game. Although it could have done a lot to sway non-fans like LEGO Batman 2 did, it sticks to preset conventions far too often, and doesn’t take nearly enough risks.

LEGO City Undercover isn’t the Wii U savior everyone is waiting for, but anyway it’s a fresh, funny and LEGO-based game that requires lots of fantasy and humor to be appreciated. If you’re ready to unleash the enchanted player that is in you, it could be the one you’ll play for the coming weeks.

Ultimately, it’s kind of hard to judge Lego City Undercover as a typical open world effort, because in truth, Lego City Undercover isn’t actually that much of an open world game. Some missions do let you smash the place apart in a car chase or pootle about in a chopper, but outside of this there’s little to do.

Considering it has to avoid the salacious scenes and hyper-violence used to spice its genre brethren, Lego City Undercover is pretty darned impressive. But it's hard not to be a disappointed that Lego City Undercover doesn't play more to Lego's strengths, trading the carnal for the creative or the wanton for wonder.

For all its faults, charming is absolutely the word best describing LEGO City Undercover. While more could have been done to exploit the sandbox scenario, and while it sticks a bit too nervously to formula than it could have, Undercover is nonetheless a frequently pleasurable, occasionally hilarious little romp in a new LEGO world full of potential.

It’s a not a very good advert for the Wii U but this is still a hugely entertaining open world game, with one of the funniest video game scripts ever.

It's just slightly too bogged down in filler, slightly held back by some cumbersome and awkward systems, and just doesn't quite hit the mark all the time. When it does, though, it's a fun, hilarious experience, worth checking out if you own a Wii U, but not quite on par with the best TT has to offer.

The loading times and frequency that the game needs to load is immediately and consistently depressing too and for these reasons it all becomes hard to recommend. The thing is though does that really matter? Probably not because you know, it’s for kids.

Yes, the campaign is unexciting compared to the delights outside of it, but there's great promise too. It feels like developer TT Fusion is, quite appropriately, building towards something more with Undercover, something that really shows Lego games can stand on their own two leg blocks. It just isn't there yet.