Lego City Undercover: The Chase Begins (3DS) Review

I’ve commonly talked about how much I enjoy the fact that we’re moving away from the “port it to every console” mentality of gaming and instead focusing on each individual platform for its own individual strengths. After all, it makes more sense to design a product that works rather than try to shove a hypothetical square peg into a circular hole. LEGO City Undercover: The Chase Begins is one of these games – it is a companion story to LEGO City: Undercover that doesn’t require any knowledge or experience with the Wii U version and attempts to stand entirely on its own. There are a few issues with just how this has been done, however and it’s definitely not all good. The biggest issue is that the developers have essentially tried to shrink the Undercover experience into a 3DS game, but have had to make several concessions to do so.

Lego City Undercover: The Chase Begins is a prequel story to Lego City: Undercover. Players take on the role of Chase McCain during his early days in the force – a far cry from the heralded legend he is in Undercover. A literal nobody on the force, Chase is tasked with chasing down criminal mastermind Rex Fury.  It’s a pretty, well, lax story that probably doesn’t’ add too much to the mythology of the universe. Players of Undercover will notice and pick up the subtle nods throughout the game, and it’s worth noting that the great dialogue and writing has carried over from Undercover.

Rather surprisingly, the driving controls in The Chase Begins are much tighter than those found in Undercover. The camera controls are this time mapped to the shoulder buttons, and despite controlling well there are too many moments where the player will have to manoeuvre it in order to get a proper view, which does get annoying after a while. The touch screen is used for menus, and like the Wii U Gamepad displays important data including a mini-map.

The gameplay itself is largely similar to Undercover, although missions are shorter to “gel” better with the handheld style of play. There is a large open world (which is segmented into regions) and several missions to undertake to progress the stories. Each region is separated behind a loading screen, and is punctuated with a boss battle. Boss battles are used to better effect than expected – with players requiring their most recently acquired items to defeat them. These battles feel more like simple puzzles rather than battles but still provide a nice way to “close” a region and not just mash one button to win. Speaking of which, players will get into battles with other criminals, and most of the combat boils down to pressing a button to counter an attack – it’s incredibly simplistic and rarely poses a challenge.

Given this is a Lego game, there are also “super bricks” to find and collect, which create new buildings or vehicles that can be used to progress further. These super bricks were dreadfully geared towards grinding in the Wii U version, but the collection of these in The Chase Begins feels more organic and very rarely will you find yourself just grinding to collect things. To top this, there are also several costumes to collect which each grant Chase new abilities to help him progress through the game. While it’s great to have so many items, there are some control issues with selecting them during more intense moments of the gameplay – and it’s rarely a challenge to actually decide which disguise or ability is best suited to the situation, as there’s almost always only one way to approach a situation.

In terms of longevity, Lego City Undercover: The Chase Begins is quite arduous with its value for money. The main story can take anywhere from eight to ten hours to complete, and following that it’s very hard to justify backtracking in order to collect new costumes and vehicles for Chase. The greatest reason for this is the loading times, which for some reason are very long and happen way too often. While this problem plagued the Wii U version of Undercover, it’s a little bit odd to see this issue carry over to the 3DS version. This might be exacerbated by a large load time at the beginning of the game, but instead the developer chose to segment the city and make it really off putting to travel between regions without meeting a long loading splash screen. New costumes can also be traded via StreetPass, should you decide to do some travelling yourself.

The game’s presentation also takes a bit of a dip in quality, not only when compared to the Wii U version but other games of a comparable calibre on the system. While the artistic direction is bright, vibrant and colourful – there is generally less visual detail on the characters and their world. Draw distance in the open world is quite limited, and many players will be wondering if they stepped into the town of Silent Hill with so much fog rather than a much more alive Lego City. And, the biggest kicker here is that even with such a short draw distance, the game still suffers from rather jarring frame rate drops and even characters sometimes materialising out of nowhere. The 3D effect is used quite well, though those who are sensitive to the more in-depth 3D (think Pilotwings: Resort on full strength) may find it quite nauseating when moving around the city.

In terms of sound, the soundtrack for The Chase Begins matches the Wii U version with some very upbeat, cheesy tunes that you’d find in a buddy cop action movie from the 80s and 90s. It works well, given the tone of the game. What doesn’t work well, however, is the voice work – or lack thereof. The Chase Begins only uses voice work in some very select pre-rendered scenes, and most of the dialogue (and as a consequence, good writing) is delivered through text based dialogue. This really detracts from the game’s jokes, many of which fall flat as they don’t have that delivery that made them special in Undercover – instead relying on poor animations and expressions to rely the humour. This has another big consequence on the city itself too – it feels incredibly dead, with no street conversation and instead just the odd traffic noise or too. It’s a bit sad.

When it comes down to it though, Lego City Undercover: The Chase Begins’ biggest issue is just how many compromises it has to make in order to run on the Nintendo 3DS, which leaves me thinking if an open world game of this magnitude was really an appropriate fit for the console. It’s a fun game that manages to carry over just enough of what made Lego City: Undercover so great, but at the same time it’s also incredibly disappointing on a technical level. Usually, I am one to look past these technical issues, but there are just so many in The Chase Begins that I can’t bring myself to look past them. The Chase Begins doesn’t feel like a game released today, it feels like a second wave, poorly optimised title that doesn’t manage to reach the ambition of its bigger brother. This might (and I say might with great apprehension) be great for kids who might be able to overlook its technical problems, but unlike Undercover, many older audiences can safely give this one a miss.