They don’t mind, they just jump out and say “Hey, that’s my car!” It’s very friendly in LEGO City. It’s also the same when it comes to getting into other people’s vehicles, because you’re a cop and you’re kind of famous. You can smash into other vehicles and bits of LEGO fall off them until it’s just down to the shafting with the engine and a seat and a steering wheel, and the person that’s driving doesn’t really mind, they just carry on about their business. The citizens of LEGO City have put it all back together again, because, well, they don’t mind. Then when you leave the area and come back, it’s all been rebuilt. If you drive down the road, it’s got lamp posts, bus stops and everything’s made of LEGOs, so yeah, you can just drive into it all. The great thing is that since everything’s made of LEGOs, it all just gets rebuilt again. How off the rails can you go in the game? I mean, technically you’re a cop, not one of these seedier Grand Theft Auto type antiheroes, so what happens in LEGO City Undercover if you start crashing into stuff and running people over? There’s humor in the game for both children and adults, very much like The Simpsons, so that sort of difference in comedy levels I think both sets of audiences will appreciate. Our scriptwriter used to be a standup comedian so he’s got loads of one-liners in the game as well as puns and gags. But it’s definitely got a lot of humor in it. There’s essentially an overall evil bad guy and a hero cop and a lot of fun characters you meet along the way. That said, it’s a proper story with quite a lot of depth to it, and it took us a long time to write. We really, really go to town on the parody side. For example, we parody The Shawshank Redemption, The Matrix, Goodfellas, Titanic, Starsky & Hutch and that’s just to name a few of them. We do a lot of parody in the story that you might not expect. Yeah, there’s definitely a bit of that going on. Should we expect more of a sandbox-gaming roast with LEGO City Undercover? Your last game, LEGO Lord of the Rings, felt a little weightier mood-wise, which made sense given the subject matter. Obviously with the other IPs you have very strict guidelines on what characters are like, what they sound like, how they behave, how they interact with other characters, so it was really cool to be able to create a new story with these characters as well. We could create lots of cool characters from scratch without worrying about sticking to what other people were telling us to do, so that was quite nice. It’s also our first open-world game as well as our first non-IP game, which meant that we had a lot of freedom with the story. That’s a big departure for us, to basically do it the other way around. We have some levels as well, 15 in all, but the majority of the gameplay and story takes place in the city itself. With LEGO City Undercover, the game takes place in the city, so it’s all about the city itself. In LEGO Batman 2 we had a big city, and then LEGO Lord of the Rings obviously had Middle-earth, but they were both very much hub-based as a means to access the levels and go after unlocks. With our last two games we had quite a big hub area. This is by far the biggest LEGO game we’ve done, and while it’s quite easy to say that, it’s also completely packed with gameplay. It’s also the inspiration behind both upcoming Nintendo-exclusive games LEGO City Undercover for Wii U (out March 18) and LEGO City Undercover: The Chase Begins for 3DS (out April 21). I spoke with TT Games executive producer Loz Doyle about both games last week.įor those who’ve never played a LEGO game, tell us a little about LEGO City Undercover and how it’s being utilized uniquely on the Wii U.
#LEGO CITY UNDERCOVER 2 SERIES#
It’s a reminder of just how broad-reaching the LEGO-verse is, and the LEGO City series is just the latest incarnation of one of LEGO’s oldest, most popular building-block sets - one that dates back to the 1970s. No, I’m not playing a LEGO video game I’m actually describing the cover shot of LEGO’s official tie-in play kit for LEGO City Undercover, a medium-sized cardboard box harboring 283 tiny discrete pieces of colorful, LEGO-ized plastic. A Snidely Whiplash-mustachioed bandit in domino mask and knit hat races a red convertible down a highway, smashing through a police barricade as hundred-dollar bills go flying like confetti. Follow policeman pokes his school-bus-yellow head from the side of a Hummer, waving a pair of handcuffs like a cowboy winding up a lariat.