Wii U's first genuine must have game
| Platform | OVERALL |
|---|---|
| Wii U | 9.30 |
| Overall | 9.30 |
|
If all things were equal this would be seen as Wii U's first system seller, a bag full of exclusive fun that washes particularly well with the Nintendo audience. Unfortunately most gamers on message boards have brought certain tainted perspectives when viewing LEGO City's worth. You can't blame them, TT games have put out numerous licenced Lego games over the years and some of us have tried them. They've always been rather light, rather limited experiences. When Lego City was announced at E3 in the Wii U stageshow, most of us shrugged or winced - this was not what we wanted and why did Nintendo choose to publish this? Reading the credits of the game it's clear that Nintendo had a good deal of producers and QA, with Mario Club being involved. The game was in development for over 3 years and it really shows. TTFusion, the portable sister developer to TT games have made a ridiculously addictive game, ram packed full of secrets and collectables. To whet your appetite, remember the opening sequence of Mario Galaxy where Mario was in a toad town at night with fireworks? Lego City feels somewhat like what Nintendo might do with a Mario sandbox game. The thing about this game, how can I put it? I have played a lot of great games over the years, but this game actually feels like it must have taken years to make. You know in a GTA game there is a lot of real estate but a lot it goes unused, you can for instance drive through large swathes of the city that are just there as scenery between where you are and your next mission? In Lego City it feels like they have densely packed the whole game world with things to do. Whenever you are on your way to a story objective you spot something in front of you or in the corner of your eye and you jump out of your car like a kid who just spotted a candy shop - thinking, what's this? What can I do here? And you're nearly always rewarded. You might stop at a basketball court and throw some hoops to earn some cash. Or climb to the top of a pagoda to find a golden brick (equivalent to a mario star) or a hidden audio scan point which unlocks a chase sequence. You might wonder what happens if you bounce off the top of that parasol, or climb the environment Prince of Persia style across the white and blue blocks. From any viewpoint in the city for instance I can immediately see many areas in the world with things to do. The bottom left of a screen might house a childrens playground where you can build, then ride the attractions there, go down the slide, swing on the swings etc The game is so varied too, there is so much stuff to do. One minute you might be having a karate fight in a dojo. The next you are hunting pigs on a farm in a little Majora's Mask tribute, using chickens to glide off of rooftops and using the tractor to plough the field. Then you have the indoor sections, unlike GTA where your on foot action usually (but not always) occurs in and among the city streets - Lego city has bespoke created sections which you enter and playthrough which are much more satisfying. Bad guys to smash, minor puzzles to solve, items to build, all well laid out with a great camera. The game has a certain flow which keeps up the pace marvelously. The flow is usually you scouring the open world for gold bricks (which build major cool structures), then when you get bored you go back to the campaign - then back to the open world. A lot of the buildings are multi-levelled and scalable, you won't often pop up on a boring flat rooftop with nothing to do, most of the scalable buildings have actually been designed for you to scale, with Prince of Persia like platforming and there is always a reward at the end of it. And you even unlock free run time trials too, so you can go back and beat your best times or just explore at leisure. There don't appear to be any side missions in the traditional sense (i.e cutscene > gameplay sequence > cutscene) Instead the game has objectives, for instance there are 17 high speed chases hidden in the city, find one, do a time trial, with a gold brick = 1 race out of 17 beaten. You might have to steal one of 17 cars throughout the city - outrun the cops - get car token to unlock new car etc. The amount of stuff to do in this game that they track is insane, you may have a certain number of ATMs in the city so smash, or aliens to catch, gangs to beat up - yes there are gangs around the city and you have to break up their skirmishes, if you can find them. There are car chases where you are trying to stop car thieves, there are time trials with super cars, 17 of them but I have only found 4 for instance. There are many objects to be squirted with a paint gun provided you can find the paint stations. The amount of collectables is insane - if you thought Rare overdid it in Banjo Tooie or DK64 then you have to see and play this. Collecting becomes an obsession, with 450 gold bricks (mario stars) hidden throughout the city and viewable via Metroid like scanner. You start working out in your head how to get to it, what building to climb, what door to open, what item to build. Then you have cash laying around the city, lots of cash, an INSANE ABOUT OF CASH in studs and of course you just have to run over all of it. It lets you buy things like cars and new disguises but you can only do this once you unlock each one by collecting the bajillion tokens hidden around the city. Then you collect normal bricks for breaking things then there are small, medium and large superbricks and gold bricks. All contribute to your brick count which lets you build large, special objects in the gameworld (superbuilds) like a giant fun fair ride or a station where a helicopter will bring in cars you call in. You find something to do around every corner. The game parodies many movies and TV shows, it's not a licenced game (outside of lego) but it pulls in so many references from films like Goodfellas, Shawshank Redemption, Starsky and Hutch, Aliens. And because Nintendo semi-produced the game and published it there are some Nintendo references too, like giant mario star balloons, an odd ? brick to find or invincibility stars complete with music. These are almost always rare items and don't have an overbearing influence. Let's talk flaws, the frame rate in the open world isn't always solid, it drops frames sometimes, looking messy but the game is not hard or challenging so it never impedes gameplay or makes you curse. The game is also quite jaggy on a 1080p tv and fairly jaggy on a 720p TV. Considering NFS Most Wanted's graphics are about 3X as good and runs at a solid 30 FPS, you would at least expect Lego's relatively simply graphical style to have crisp edges. Also the loading times are long, butt munchingly long - but one of the benefits of having a screen on the U pad, is that the loading bar is displayed there - you can flip channels and then when the bar is filled up flip back. I must point out that that once the open world has loaded it never has to load again until you enter a building. In the open world there is really only one building to enter outside of the main campaign levels and that is the police station. As long as you only frequent the police station when and if neccessary the loading is not as much of a problem as you might think. The only real gameplay flaw the game has to the colour gun mechanic, there are items in the city which have to painted the right colour. You have to work out via the surroundings what colour you want. The problem is that your gun only carries one colour at a time, one out of 8. And you have to change colours at colour change stations. And wouldn't you know it, the colour you want is never anywhere close. There are a couple of colour hub stations with all the colours in one place but it's a long journey there and back again. Your best bet it to find the red brick (these unlock extra's, or cheats) there is a brick that makes your gun shoot multiple colours and gets rid of this hassle. In conclusion let me try and lay this out for everyone. When Lego City was unveiled most of us either shrugged or grimaced. When it was released and reviewed as a 9/10 great game we mostly assumed it was just getting that because it was a good kids game or because there was nothing else in Wii U's dry season. Rayman got delayed THERE IS NOTHING ELSE TO BUY. Turns out that it got great reviews because it's actually a great game, TTFusion was right, it's probably the best game on Wii U, not Zombi U, not NSMB U. Not even NFS Most Wanted which I just reviewed as a 9.1 game. If you like GTA and want a lighter toned, densely packed game with tremendous value and fun to be had, you need to get this game. One of the most telling moments was finding a wheelchair outside the hospital and being able to ride it - just those little details. Another little detail is the disguises, there are probably 100 or more? Some of the special costumes include stuff like the Lizard suit from the A-Team. But what is great is that some of them have custom animations and sound effects. Change into a zombie and the animation will lurch and the sound will groan. Wear a clockwork toy robot outfit and it will squeak like metal rubbing against itself. It's that little attention to detail, where they have gone the extra mile - it just feels like it must be years of work at play here. It's not very challenging game - aside from the challenge of getting everything and achieving 100% - the city is like one massive easter egg hunt. Whilst I can't say that any one area outside of the driving excels, as a whole the sum experience of Lego City is almost wholly positive. It's a giant sack of fun. The end mission is beyond epic - if you're wondering if the U can do epic compared to the more powerful upcoming consoles, check out the end free fall in the this game. For me, this is seriously a GOTY contender, not just because it's early in the year and nothing else has released; any year this came out it would be one of my favourites. So much fun, the walking on sunshine music at the end just sums up the feeling from the whole game. I haven't had so much fun from a game in a long time. Only 42% complete too, so much more to do and I'm 38 hrs in. |
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Posted by gamingeek Mon, 29 Apr 2013 12:46:54
Recently Spotted:
robio (5m)
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Enter this at the Police Garage
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