1. In 2009, Rockstar released Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars for the Nintendo DS and proved that by adjusting perspective, you could successfully bring your open world sandbox game onto a lower powered handed and still provide the player w/ a compelling experience. W/ Lego City Undercover: The Chase Begins, TT Fusion proved this approach still worked in 2013.
2. Just kidding. This game is terrible.
3. Most reviews focus on the game's technical issues--notably the chugging frame rates and extreme sprite pop-in--but I think this overlooks a greater problem: The Chase Begins is unceasingly boring from start to finish.
4. This said, its technical issues do merit some further mention. In addition to the performance issues, nearly all the voiced dialogue that made the Wii U and other versions of this seems so lively was removed and cut scenes are compressed to a messy blur along the lines of 2006 YouTube. It's also the only game on 3DS that crashed so hard on me that I had to restart the entire console.
5. My favorite overall glitch though is one where some particular sound gets stuck in an infinite loop, turning the cheerful Lego setting into a sonic hellscape where the wails of a long grieving man can be heard in every corner of the city.
6. I would like for someone other than me to do some serious journalistic research into how exactly things went wrong on the development of this game. The Chase Begins is so half-baked you just have to wonder if maybe they originally intended to port the entire Wii U release of Lego City Undercover to 3DS then realized at the eleventh hour that they couldn't and so had to slap something together for whatever release date.
7. I think this uses the same exact map as the home console releases at least but I quite frankly don't care because every square inch of this map is unceasingly boring.
8. Following the main quest, you essentially just walk from one boring map marker to the next occasionally doing some boring driving, some boring fighting or solving a boring puzzle. This is all in between boring cut scenes.
9. You can die, crash your car or otherwise fail in many ways but there is never any setback for doing this at all. You literally re-appear in the exact spot you died completely healthy and with a brand new car. Real life should be like this!
10. The only real challenge is the platforming. It's not actually hard but the crappy camera makes it a challenge not to chuck your 3DS through a window. During some of the few moments in this where I was not bored, I was frustrated because I had to re-climb the same wall for the fifth time and try a slightly different angle on the joystick to make a particular jump.
11. The combat in The Chase Begins is even more remarkably boring
than anything else. You can stand there idly pressing
a singular button and you win automatically because you are literally invincible. Throwing someone
off a ledge significantly reduces the
amount of time you spend doing this and it's pretty hard to get these
tosses lined up just right so, ultimately, I found this very slightly satisfying to do correctly.
12. This has the exact same soundtrack as the Wii U, which is awesome. They
seem to use oddly little of the music though. As the songs played during
the end credits, I kept wondering why they use more of these songs more often. In game, you hear basically the combat music and the loading screen music.
13. A lot of the problems w/ this are a problem w/ all Lego games. It is designed as if in order to appeal to kids, it has to be devoid of challenge. I think this is a
wrong-headed approach to making a game for a general audience but most
Lego games get away w/ it because the moment-to-moment presentation is
so charming. You reduce that quality and polish and you are left w/ a
real dud. This is what Lego City Undercover: The Chase Begins is: everything bad about Lego games w/o most of what makes them good.
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