Submit a news tipThe Legend of Zelda: Breath of the WildSwitch and Zelda: Breath of the Wild impressionsWill you play Switch more as a console or a portable? Impressions of the final Switch hardwareTomorrow Corporation on initial Switch games, future projectsWill you still pick up Zelda: Breath of the Wild on Wii U?Sumo Digital shares more details about Snake Pass, talks Switch Batman: Arkham Origins cuts down on GamePad features, but apparently runs best on Wii U Posted on October 27, 2013 by Brian(@NE_Brian) in News, Wii U Warner Bros. never managed to share any concrete details about the GamePad features implemented for Batman: Arkham Origins’ Wii U release. It wasn’t until players started getting their hands on the title over the past couple of days that we started to learn how Origins takes advantage the controller. As it turns out, there are fewer GamePad features compared to last year’s Batman release on Wii U, Arkham City. It’s mainly limited to map usage and communications with Alfred.
Origins doesn’t support weapon select and leveling up on the GamePad, and the same goes for decryption sequences previously present in Arkham City. Perhaps the dip in GamePad functionality was worth it, though. Reports relayed through player experiences indicate Batman: Arkham Origins runs the best on Wii U with fewer framerate drops than the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions. There’s also no screen tearing, fewer glitches, and apparently better lighting as well. Batman: Arkham Origins may not be as fully-featured as Arkham City from a GamePad perspective, but it sounds like it turned out rather well on Wii U. Although you won’t get the multiplayer mode found in the other versions, it’s $10 less, supports off-TV play, and even allows for achievement posts to be distributed through Miiverse. Source 1, Source 2 More: Batman, top, Warner Bros. Platform: WII UGenre: ACTION, ADVENTUREPublisher: Warner Bros. InteractiveDeveloper: Warner Bros. MontrealRelease date: October 25, 2013
OWN IT: 0 [I own this game] BEAT IT: 0 [I beat this game]Lego City Undercover Launches April 4 With Co-Op Mode2/23/17 9:00am The updated version of the Wii U’s Lego launch title is coming to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and PC on April 4, and this time you don’t have to go it alone.11/22/16 1:14pmThe Wii U-exclusive Lego City Undercover will be re-released for the Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch in 2017, the game’s Twitter account announced today. In another tweet, they added that it will also come to PC.The Best Lego Nintendo Easter Egg We've Found So Far3/14/13 5:30pm The delightful new Wii U game Lego City Undercover has a bunch of Nintendo Easter eggs. I found a few of them during the 22 hours and counting that I've played the game. The one in the video here is my current favorite.Lego City Undercover: The Kotaku Review3/14/13 1:00pmIt's an excellent, brand-new year-one Wii U game.Are You Hitting on Me, LEGO City Undercover?1/23/13 11:15am With the latest trailer for LEGO City Undercover my desire for an open world brick-based game for my Wii U reaches dangerous new heights.
At the risk of sounding vain, I'm pretty sure TT Fusion has crafted this game for the sole purpose of seducing me.Wii U Launch Line-Up Dries Up As Several Big Games Slip1/17/13 9:00amAs with just about every other major console that has ever launched, promises and plans for the Wii U's first few months are thinning into the reality of a system plagued with a lack of early releases.Nintendo Spring Line-Up Brings Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon to 3DS on March 241/17/13 8:50amLuigi's Mansion: Dark Moon comes to the 3DS on March 24, one highlight among several release dates Nintendo announced for its spring lineup this morning.The Wii U's Lego Game Appears to Use the GamePad Well12/05/12 12:37pm Untethered to any movies, comics or TV shows, the Wii U's Lego City Undercover will be -gasp- an entirely original Lego game from Traveller's Tales and Nintendo. We saw it at E3 and today we've got a new look at it. It's slated for an early 2013 release, though it's unclear if that means it will…Preorder LEGO City Undercover for the Wii U, Get an Exclusive Minifig9/13/12 10:32am It's never too early for preorder bonuses!
At today's Nintendo event it was announced that folks that put their money down on the Wii U's LEGO-powered launch game will secure an exclusive minifig, which is all LEGO fans really need to know.Lego City Undercover Is Basically Grand Theft Auto With Cops. And Legos.6/07/12 11:30am You can run around a very blocky open world in Lego City Undercover, an upcoming Wii U game with some cool new features. Don't expect any blood or prostitutes here, but City Undercover really does feel a lot like a brickified Grand Theft Auto: you walk and drive around an open city, following missions and…When it comes to cleaning up Lego City, top cop Chase McCain is going to need some help — and that's where upcoming video game Lego City Undercover is ready to deliver, with a new two-player co-op mode. The latest trailer for the game showcases the mode that will allow friends and family to dress up in ridiculous disguises and fight crime while hunting down the root of all evil in the block-centric city, the wonderfully named Rex Fury.
If this all sounds particularly dramatic, then you should take a look at the Lego vehicle and minifigure brand it's based on. Lego City Undercover is a remastered edition of a game originally developed for the Wii U platform in 2013. This time around, the open-world game — which features more than 20 different districts to explore, complete with car thieves, aliens and escaped pigs — will be available for PlayStation4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and PC, all available on April 4. With The Lego Batman Movie currently in theaters and Lego Ninjago readying for release this September, can it really be that long before the cinema-ready Chase McCain is headed to the big screen? 'Logan' Premiere: Hugh Jackman Thanks Fans for 17 Years as Wolverine Why 'Nightwing' Might Signal a Change in Direction for DC's Cinematic Universe Carrie Fisher's 1978 Oscar Date Recalls His Unexpected Evening With 'Star Wars' RoyaltyMuch like the toy these days, Lego City Undercover is both familiar and unfamiliar.
Or, more to the point, it's two games masquerading as one, the first new and the second old.The introduction of a tremendous open world, a plastic parody of a city full of whimsy to discover, and more importantly to collect, is what should define Lego's Wii U debut. This miniature metropolis sits alongside an almost wholly separate campaign, its tight, linear missions shuffling to the break-it-rebuild-it rhythm which has long been the Lego beat.The first game, the exploratory open world collect-a-thon, is not just fresh, it's on the verge of greatness. It's unfortunate, then, that to fully enjoy it you must wade through the second game, the campaign, and all its relatively drab, through-the-motions familiarity. Gallery: Lego City Undercover (12/17/12) | The first impression of Undercover is a Lego version of Grand Theft Auto, and the game certainly riffs on Liberty City and the locations' common inspiration of New York. However, to play it, explore it, and in particular find a plethora of items to collect in it, evokes the spirit of Xbox 360 gem Crackdown.
This is not a bad thing at all.Like Crackdown's Pacific City, Lego City has something to find in every nook and cranny, both high and low. While it isn't as visually obvious a collect-a-thon, there are 450 gold bricks to find in the game, comparable to the 500 agility orbs of Crackdown. The difference is the bricks aren't just dotted around waiting to be grabbed, but are obtained by doing various things around the city.Most of these unlocks are, in terms of method, really no different from the bricks just being there, like watering a hidden flower bed or drinking a cup of coffee secluded on a ledge. While the methods are simplistic, and there isn't any drive to collect the bricks beyond ticking the completion percentage over, the allure lies in a consistent variety. One second you're unlocking a block by rescuing a cat stuck on a mall's roof, the next you're blowing up a silver statue in Chinatown, or floating across rooftops by holding onto a chicken, or sending a pig back to the farm by riding him to the nearest pig cannon (yup).
There are other things to collect too, like Lego skins and vehicles, as well as deeper, more GTA-like gold brick missions such as chasing down bad guys or driving a time trial. While there isn't the attribute-boosting compulsion of Crackdown, there is the naturalness of it simply happening as you explore Lego City – and you want to explore Lego City. It isn't a technical marvel, but the setting does a great job of playing to nostalgia and wonder.Walking and driving around Undercover feels like how childhood imaginations (and big kid imaginations) would conceive living in the Lego City playsets. From the Octan fuel tanks to the very specific curve of the pine trees and the just-like-the-box accuracy of the buildings, the city itself is an authentic love letter to Lego. More than in any recent entry in the series, Undercover's setting reaches into the soul of Lego and finds something to hold onto – even if its ethos is still miles apart from the constructional freedom of the toy.What a shame, then, this other game in Undercover, the plodding, uninspired, seen-it-done-it-got-the-red-brick campaign, gets in the way.
It's not awful by any means, but compared to all the newness of the city it's just so ordinary and insipid. The campaign is essentially the same game we've been playing since Lego Star Wars, except now there's no associated franchise to riff on, and spoken dialogue is very much en vogue. You'd think that might give Undercover room to evolve, but you'd be wrong.The campaign follows the story of the wonderfully named Chase McCain, a cop returning to Lego City under the storm cloud of a murky past. The plot's a nice enough play on the cop hero genre – as nice as a tale about plastic people can be – and its pitch is almost on the money for its intended audience. The humor, however, is less convincing. If anything, Undercover exposes how the previous games got by on the fun of giving franchises the Lego treatment. Without an array of licensed assets to play on, Undercover tries to generate laughs through its own characters, like McCain's bumbling sidekick Frank Honey. Too often, the end result feels strained, louder than it is funny.
Honey, for example, could be great, with his enthusiastic boneheadedness reminiscent of Pope candidate Dougal McGuire from UK sitcom Father Ted. Instead, by the end he's more like an annoying child - "I think the robbers are still around so BE QUIET" - ho ho ho, shut up already.It's no surprise Undercover is funniest when it sticks to what the Lego games have been doing for ages: riffing on popular culture. There are many cute nods to movies, with everything from Titanic to Scarface getting the yellow brick treatment. The show-stealer is an Austrian-sounding foreman who speaks only in overemphasized references to Arnie movies – even the customary drop of "I'll be back" earns a guilty guffaw.As for the meat of the campaign, its 15 chapters aren't completely separate from the city, but they may as well be. As with GTA, you have to get to where you're supposed to be, and along the way you might have to chase cars down, escort someone, whatever. The missions themselves, however, are in closed environments external to the city, and as such not only fail to take advantage of the game's best feature, but repeatedly draw you away from it.
The missions take to familiarly small, linear environments to reprise the series tried-and-tested hit-and-fix gameplay. As ever, you're breaking everything in sight into little bits, and then building anew what you can from the wreckage. With its audience in mind, the missions fall back on the series' join-the-dots puzzle-platforming and simplistic combat. There are stand-out moments, sure, particularly towards the end as the plot speeds up and the locations loosen up, but for the most part this is the Lego you've come to know and love/hate/be disinterested in. It wouldn't matter so much if the freedom of Undercover's open-world half wasn't intrinsically tied to the campaign, but it is. To unlock all of Chase's abilities, like pig launching, fowl floating, pavement drilling, and jetpack-boosted jumping, you have to unlock their associated disguises – hence the whole "undercover" thing. The farmer disguise, for example, lets Chase load hogs into heavy artillery and use poultry aerially.
Recent reviews Ridiculous Fishing Castlevania - Mirror of Fate SimCity MLB 2K13 Etrian Odyssey 4 MLB 13: The Show God of War: Ascension Tomb Raider Runner 2 Crysis 3 Unlocking them is the issue. To get every disguise, you'll need to play through the entire campaign. Trying to go about Lego City without all the disguises frustrates every single time you pass something that's inaccessible because you don't yet have the required ability. It's not because of any impatience, but simply the knowledge that what you're currently doing isn't working towards acquiring that ability – this is something Crackdown nails. If you really want to enjoy the content-stuffed, open world Undercover game, you're first going to have to play through the linear, same-as-ever Undercover game.Other issues that don't help include the series anomaly that is the absence of co-op – again, see Crackdown for why it's a galling exclusion this time around – and the mind-meltingly annoying loading screens. They seem to vary between thirty seconds and a minute, and tend to be absent for ages before clumping together like a line of mischievous traffic lights stop-starting you one after the other.
Guess which half of Undercover they appear most in.If you can get through the campaign – this likely depending on how you've fared with Lego games in the past – then there is a vast, different, wonderful, and simply fun city to explore and drain of all its stubby, blocky resources. Developer TT Fusion wasn't kidding when it put 100 percent completion at around 40-50 hours. It's no Liberty City, but Lego City is big.It's also why Lego City Undercover, while disappointing in some respects, is far from a total disappointment. 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. This review is based on a retail copy of Lego City Undercover, provided by Nintendo.Joystiq's review scores are based on a scale of whether the game in question is worth your time -- a five-star being a definitive "yes," and a one-star being a definitive "no."