Without question, I would have hardly been hyped for The Lego Movie had I not already played through Lego City Undercover. I purchased that game on a whim, a prayer, last year. The Wii U, like most systems after launch, was suffering a drought, and I needed another game to compliment my purchases of StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm and Ni No Kuni during a serendipitous B2G1 sale at Target. HotS had just come out, and being a fan of BLIZZARD and RTS games, I knew it would be one of the few purchases that I would make at full price at launch. It just-so-happened that Target would have a sale at that time, and I could get two console games with my PC game.
At first, Sonic All-Stars Racing Transformed was my third game, but then Steam had a Spring sale on it for like $5, so I took it back, languishing over the slim pickings available. I practically owned everything that was worth owning, or at least, I had owned everything that I believed to be reasonably priced.
I had read a few things on message boards concerning Lego City, and given the relatively warm reception of Lego games in general—which I have never played because I felt Lego Star Wars, Lego Harry Potter, Lego Batman, Lego Lord of the Rings, etc. etc. were for the puerile if not actual children and not worth my money—I took a chance on Lego City, taking comfort in both my elitism and also the possibility that my kids would enjoy the game if I did not.
I was pleasantly surprised and completely wrong in my prejudice concerning this Lego game.
It wasn’t the story, even though it was pretty good despite the cardboard cast of characters. This game will seriously test your pop-culture knowledge, with references and/or parodies of Starsky & Hutch, The Shawshank Redemption, Einstein, Schwarzenegger, etc. Actually, the story is great, but that’s not the reason why I love the game.
It wasn’t the driving, the least-developed part of the game where despite featuring about 100 vehicles, they mostly “handle” the same.
It darn sure wasn’t the PS1-era loading every time you started up the game or enter or exited an “indoor arena” for a mission.
Well, at least the song is catchy.
No, this game actually clicked for me in the post-game. That is, after I beat the game and unlocked the final disguise to compliment my cop, astronaut, farmer, fireman, and construction worker ensemble. If I hadn’t 100% every mission, I came as close as I could without having unlocked the appropriate costume, and by the time I beat the game, my total progress for the game was somewhere between 45-50%, and that was after twenty hours or so of gameplay. I swore I wouldn’t try to 100% this game like I have every GTA and Saint’s Row game I’ve ever played, but when I went back to re-clear some of the missions for 100% (the missions are a separate statistical category from the entire game), I discovered that this game is not only a Wii U-exclusive, but it was brilliantly designed with the Wii U in mind.
That seems redundant, but it isn’t. I mean, I own/played enough Wii U games to know when the gamepad is an afterthought. It certainly wasn’t for TT Fusion.
I can’t imagine how it would be possible to play this game without the gamepad, and in hindsight, it’s tragic that the Wii U may never see an official sandbox game such as GTA. In this image, you receive a mission briefing from “Southern Belle” Ellie Phillips, where muting the sound on the gamepad will prevent you from audibly hearing what she has to say. I am unaware of an option to have the sound come from the TV, but why would I want that? This is a really cool feature that I would like to see more often, but it’s still not why found myself falling in love with this game.
This image cannot do justice to how much I was using the gamepad to find things around Lego City in the post-game. I mean, the gamepad did not just serve as my controller or tool, it became as integral to living in the world of Lego City as my smart phone became integral to living IRL. I am convinced that this is what Rockstar was going for when they introduced the “cell phone” in GTA IV, but it was much too contrived in a world were you spend most of your time committing crime. Anyone who has watched The Wire knows that being a crime boss with a phone is a faux-pas. In Lego City, however, you’re the good guy in a sandbox game for a change, and you’ll find yourself scanning around towns looking for suspects about to commit crimes.
The image above indicates that when you find something, you can “lock in” on it and an on-screen arrow will guide you to the approximate location of the object sought. This way, I don’t need to do like I did with GTA and print out the hidden packages FAQ or watch a bunch of YouTube videos to discover how to acquire or unlock this-or-that. The game contains all the tools you will need to make it easier to 100% the game. Not to say that it is actually easy to get that 100%; it is still a time-consuming process, and months down the road, I’m still only at a 70% after pouring HOURS into a game that, again, I swore I wasn’t going to try to 100%!
This game is humongous!
This is the list of primary objectives to beat the game 100%. See that red section touching the purple section on the right-hand side of this image? Lego City is divided into “towns,” and those are the borders of two sectors. Whenever you are standing in a town, you can use the gamepad to see which one of these objectives you have yet to complete in that particular section of the city before you 100% it and can move on to the next sector. This is genius game design, because if the player becomes frustrated or bored with trying to discover everything in one sector, they can move on to the next without having to worry about much overlap that would jeopardize achieving completion. This is a more advanced gameplay element than what you saw in GTA: San Andreas where tags, horseshoes, oysters, and snapshots could only be collected in different sectors of the town. Lego City, however, avoids the confusion and exasperation of worrying about collecting “hidden package #11” out of sequence, and, should you decide to get all fifty, you would not know which you have or have not collected. The Wii U gamepad keeps track of all that stuff for you so you can put the game down for months (like I did) and pick it up again without having to remember what you did the first time.
Of course, this game provides plenty of those endorphin for the OCD sandbox game player like myself. I didn’t care for all the different masks or “heads” that could be collected, but my kids sure did, and would do perform a dragon punch like Chase does whenever I solved a puzzle to unlock something.
The sheer amount of post-game content in this game combined with the seamless integration of the gamepad for the purpose of accomplishing the player’s goals is what made me fall madly in love with this game. I would go as far as to publicly shame anyone who owns a Wii U and not this game.
*harshly shakes finger*
There’s plenty to do even if players choose not to complete the story missions, but the real game “unlocks” after the last disguise is required, and it is at that point that the game transforms into the traditional sandbox game that offers less limitations to the player. My wife and kids will emphatically remind me not to swim in deep water.
But yo, if all of that doesn’t impress you, the Easter eggs will. The game will DEMAND you find them all. As if I didn’t already have enough images in this post, I’ll close with a few more (unfortunately high quality because the gaming industry apparently hates the Wii U).
And these just scratch the surface. They are just the obvious ones. YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW! YOU REALLY DON’T!!!
**Feel free to follow or make requests for me to play through games on my backloggery for future articles. You can also hit me up on Twitter @AbsoluteZero0K**
