LEGO City Undercover – 9/10
I had zero expectations going into this title, and the game gave me so much fun! It might not be the GTA you want, but it is definitely the GTA you deserve! The atmosphere, humor, and characters in LEGO City are simple but brilliant! The number of pop culture references—from martial arts cinema to iconic lines from The Matrix and The Terminator—is exceptionally well done. Hearing the brick-built versions of legendary lines like "I'll be back" or "I know kung fu" feels absolutely great! For me, this is like my own little Vice City (ha ha). Everyone is waiting for GTA 6 right now, but this game is still top-tier!Chase is a very cool character, and the romantic subplot is almost always broken up by great humor. Whenever a joke lands, nobody takes things seriously anymore, and I loved that—the brilliant humor beats the romantic clichés typical of action movies. I also didn't expect this production to be so old (it dates back to 2013) and that it was originally created for the Nintendo Wii U console. To sum up, the biggest pluses are the atmosphere, the humor, and the gameplay itself!I didn't expect the gameplay to be overly complicated. My only real complaint is the fact that you have to scan the area manually—if you aren't close to an item, it won't show up on the map. I only found out about this around 90% into the game, after I had already searched for most of the secrets manually. It's a shame the game doesn't explain better how to effectively use the police scanner.Additionally, a massive downside for me is the instant vehicle summoning feature (unlocked by the red super brick). Even after obtaining it, you cannot map this option to a specific button on your controller. Free directions on the D-pad or other buttons could easily handle this. This is a big oversight by the creators—they should change or update this in this game or in future titles.Even though the PC port seems ambitious, it can be very unstable. Due to Windows 11, the game would crash to the desktop every now and then. To fix this, I had to change the settings and run the game in compatibility mode for Windows 8, but that is to be expected with older open-world games. Interestingly, the closer I got to the end of the game, the higher the chance of a crash. The situation was saved by the fact that the game auto-saved after almost every collectible, and the map was full of vehicle spawn points—just like in classic GTA, you can also just grab a car straight from the street. As for technical downsides: every single time the game crashed and I restarted it, I had to watch the unskippable developer intros all over again and manually reactivate every red brick individually, which annoyed me and disrupted free exploration.My final score is 9/10—I would easily give it a 10/10 because, despite having zero expectations, so many aspects were executed in a simply fantastic way. It's a huge shame that, knowing Nintendo games and the current direction of LEGO developers, we will probably never see a sequel to this game or original ideas in general—like the iconic LEGO Racers in the past. I would absolutely kill for the return of LEGO Exo-Force or Bionicle in the form of video games!
