A Review Of Lego City Undercover For The Wii U

We love the Wii in our house.

We love the Nintendo party compilation and pitting our Miis against each other in Nintendo tennis and we like to tell ourselves that we have completed a real work out after running a virtual 100m in London 2012 - Wii style. The Wii is a genuinely family centred console.

So you can imagine our excitement when we were offered the new Wii U and one of it's most exciting new offerings - LEGO CITY UNDERCOVER - to trial.

The box was excitingly large and the packaging suitably difficult to break into to indicate that the Wii U was a very good thing indeed.

The Wii U pimps itself as the family's all in one entertainment centre.

And in a way it is.

Aside from the obvious gaming potential you also have the ability to connect to the internet, pick up Love Film and/or Netflix with a free 30 day trial, make video calls and laugh at your Dad trying to immortalise himself in the pixelated art of the Nintendo Wii-U (why do I always look like a ginger Joe 90?)

And there are many things to love about the Wii-U and Lego City Undercover.

We love the fact that you have 2 viewing screens - the TV and the screen within the controller which acts as a sort of command centre for the Undercover game.
We love the fact that the controller is easy to use.
We really love the fact that our old Wii games can still be played on the Wii U. It is genuinely refreshing and very rare to see that Nintendo did not decide to throw the baby out with the bath water and make us go out and buy new games for our machine.

In Lego City Undercover you play the part of "legendary police office Chase McCain" on the trail of hardened criminal Rex Fury. Using an array of disguises, Chase McCain's free-running skills and over 100 vehicles you have to capture him and bring him to justice.

This offering has all the features you would expect of a Lego game. The controls are intuitive, the game play relatively easy to understand and the Lego men and women walk and run in the stiff legged way you would expect them to. They also break into pieces when hit by cars - which is always amusing.

The one drawback is the game was only designed as a one player game. The Dubmeister loved the PC version of Lego Star Wars. One of the reasons for that was the dual player potential of the game. It was great fun to go on missions en famille, armed only with a light saber and a mouse. Lego City Underground does not have that facility which is a surprising oversight.

But that criticism aside this is an imaginative game which will keep your kids (and yourself) amused - especially if you have any lego nuts in your house.

Speak soon
JH