LEGO City Undercover: The Chase Begins (3DS)
After the LEGO brand hit it big with a video game based on Star Wars it was rare to see a game based on the building block toys that wasn’t tied to some huge franchise. LEGO games were originally often based around the potential of the toy for creation or specific LEGO original ideas though, and after many years of relying on outside brands to bolster their game concepts, LEGO City Undercover sought to not only adapt one of their own toy lines again but also attempt to bring the potential of open world play into a world built from the famous interlocking building bricks. Nintendo was partly responsible for this shift by approaching developer Traveller’s Tales in the hopes of having a game for their then-new console the Wii U, but they also requested the team put together a 3DS version as well, the handheld not having the power required to realize the same kind of vast 3D environment with plenty of side activities to engage with. Still, an effort was made despite the limits of the hardware, and so LEGO City Undercover: The Chase Begins was released.
Positioned as a prequel to LEGO City Undercover, LEGO City Undercover: The Chase Begins immediately makes good on the pun in its title as rookie cop Chase McCain has just joined the police force of LEGO City. Eager to make his mark despite Deputy Dunby being just as eager to make him look bad, Chase quickly attaches himself to the case of Rex Fury, a hard to pin criminal who has just busted a group of his underlings out of prison. Chase must travel to the different areas of LEGO City to learn what Rex’s associates are up to and foil their part in the master plan, all the while trying to win the affections of news reporter Natalia Kowalski. Luckily for Chase he goes from barely knowing her to mutual attraction in short order without any scene really showing that shift from being acquaintances to growing their budding romance, but generally the plot is present to give you goals to shoot for and provide a few moments of levity. LEGO City Undercover: The Chase Begins doesn’t have many voiced cutscenes but when they do crop up they can be delightfully silly and a bit indulgent with the amount and variety of props they’ll whip out for a joke, the crime-busting activities mostly about stopping people from stealing things or causing property damage rather than anything too dark or serious. Perhaps the general structure of the story is a little odd though, the game having you assist with a space shuttle launch Fury’s men are attempting to foil and then following up that section of robots and lasers with a trip to the woods where you’re saving squirrels. It could perhaps be seen as a breather before you go after Rex himself in the next area, but unfortunately the space shuttle rescue is about where the game reveals that even when it’s breaking away the most from its urban environment it has too little to offer in terms of things to do.
When you begin LEGO City Undercover: The Chase Begins, there is of course some allowance for the simplicity on show. When you have your first run in with criminals and need to actually fight them, it’s easy to assume things will get more complex later. In a fight, Chase won’t directly punch anyone or pull a weapon, instead relying on throws and simple counters where he can get a bit flashier with special kicks or using a person’s momentum against them. You are only pressing Y to throw and X to counter though, and even when you’re surrounded the best approach is to mash Y and then press X if the counter indicator appears. Over the adventure the main change to the enemies you face though is that they just take more throws to put down, the player needing to press A to arrest them once they’re floored or they’ll get back up and require another throw before you can try to arrest them again. Despite this battle system being so basic, there are many times the game keeps throwing more and more enemies at you for you to simply throw around until it’s over, this system only getting the mildest bit more complex during the unfortunately few boss encounters. Boss’s usually have some mild puzzle element to them where you need to weaken their position of advantage like one boss who stands atop plants you need to agitate into hurting him or another where you need to blow up nearby pillars to break his machine. Some foes also try to run away and platforming about is at least a bit more interactive than standing around pressing Y, but once a major enemy has been pulled down from their positional advantage, you now need to throw them about too. Since they’re stronger than a regular criminal you press A and mash it a little to weaken them before the toss, but this segment of the fight is never interesting and its unfortunate when a boss leans on it more than the small puzzle solving of their specific battle’s setup.
Battling is thankfully more of the secondary form of play in LEGO City Undercover: The Chase Begins, more of the focus given to navigating areas and using a small set of skills to investigate or overcome obstacles. While LEGO City is not entirely made of the toy bricks it is named after, many destructible objects can be bashed for currency or can even be reshaped into something relevant to the work at hand, the player needing to use parts of their environment both as an adjustable tool and as a means of getting to new spaces. LEGO bricks can only be built into prescribed objects though, but exploring around a little area to try and find how to jump up to an important place or interacting with little objects does keep the movement challenges mildly engaging, usually because they tie to the game’s disguise system in some way.
As Chase begins to explore different parts of LEGO City, he’ll find his police officer equipment isn’t always what he needs to proceed. Thus, he’ll pick up a disguise from someone in the area, be it a criminal while infiltrating the prison or a construction worker while helping near the bridge. These disguises each come with a unique ability or two that grants you a new way to interact with objects like the farmer outfit able to water potted plants so you can scale up the vines that grow out of them or the criminal guise that lets you bust open locked areas with a crowbar. These disguises can be shifted between with presses of the D-Pad despite the game only telling you to use the touch screen to shuffle through them in a slow to open screen, but the D-Pad almost feels like a necessity since the game will have you frequently swapping outfits in short order to get past small barriers in your way. While a few of these like the fireman uniform require you to aim to put out fires blocking your path, for the most part these outfits simply give you the ability to press or mash A in front of an obstruction to get past it. Sometimes you need to press A with the right timing for an ability, but mostly they are shallow interactions where the costume is more like a key opening multiple similar doors across the adventure, there rarely being any thought or challenge to swiftly putting it on and then continuing on your way.
The simplicity of the disguise system is unfortunate because most of the extra activities to do around the city are actually tied to them. Rather than having a truly interconnected open world, LEGO City Undercover: The Chase Begins settles for small sections of the city presented more as open spaces. You can explore around the current chunk of the city for extra goodies like different identities for the costumes, red bricks that unlock cheats, and different vehicle types than the ones you can just pop in while they’re driving down the road with no consequences. A lot of extras must first be found and then bought though and the game expects a pretty penny in the game’s stud currency to even get a few interesting ones, but the actual act of finding these goodies is again incredibly basic. Find something that requires a disguise interaction and do the requisite costume swap and A presses and then you have your little bonus, and while on occasion sometimes you do need to do a little platforming or throw a guy around instead, these activities aren’t very interesting to seek out for their own sake and are perhaps better treated as a minor aside while walking to your next mission of importance. Having to aim a set of binoculars to find an appropriate landscape view for a postcard is at least a more involved optional interaction even if sometimes the game’s poor draw distance means that the LEGO Mount Rushmore knock-off is shrouded in mist. In fact, that issue with rendering objects applies to more than far off objects as even when driving around you can end up having cars appear when you’re just about to hit them, and throw in long load times on occasion and you can feel the game struggling to make even its reduced idea of an open world work.
THE VERDICT: Even if LEGO City Undercover: The Chase Begins could have pulled off a truly open world, the gameplay systems in place would make it a hollow world to explore. While the plot has some chuckle worthy moments and some of the platforming or boss fights can briefly hit on some creative idea or setting, most of the game boils down to pressing Y to throw around criminals who barely pose a threat or pressing A to use your special costume abilities to keep moving forward. Far too much of the action leans on moments that don’t require any thought to overcome, the shallowness of it all making it feel fruitless to explore the open spaces or play through the mildly amusing story.
And so, I give LEGO City Undercover: The Chase Begins for Nintendo 3DS…
A BAD rating. Perhaps if it was shorter it would be easier to stomach how you just keep tossing criminals around with little thought and using disguises that don’t really give you any new skills beyond clearing some barrier, but not only does LEGO City Undercover: The Chase Begins have a bit too long a story for you to brush aside the tedious play, it also tries to build spaces that hint at there being more to do only for them to be just as basic as the plot’s activities. Some good will is earned through the silliness of the story and bosses can be a little interesting before they get up close and personal so you can blandly toss them around, but it is the navigating of areas that prevents its many bad ideas from truly becoming a slog. It keeps you active and doing a little bit of special action like chasing an escaping perp or doing small jumping challenges, but these don’t really excel so much as they ensure you’re not doing something more basic and dull. I singled out the space shuttle launch section particularly because it introduces things like lasers, robots, and astronauts only to reveal that for the most part you’re still pressing A and Y to overcome things in your way that don’t even register as challenges, the most exciting set piece conceptually just as bland as the squirrel saving in a forest afterwards. If more of the disguises had true interactive challenges like the fireman having to aim his extinguisher then both progressing in the plot or going out of your way to use them to get goodies around town would be a more interesting prospect, but it’s mostly a lot of surface level variety rather than exciting breaks from a norm that really needed to evolve at some point into something more.
LEGO City Undercover: The Chase Begins would be left behind on the 3DS as the main LEGO City Undercover game would continue to receive ports to newer and more powerful systems than the Wii U, but an underpowered system wasn’t the reason this prequel failed to make its open spaces work. It can be bothersome to crash into a car that just appeared in front of you, but the driving is mostly a means of conveyance while what you do when you arrive is often far too basic to really challenge or entertain the player. Even if it had no load screens and perfect visibility it wouldn’t change the fact that so many fights are extended periods of mindless throwing, the gameplay mechanics truly making Chase’s early days on the force not worth experiencing.