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There have been a few missteps along the way, but in general the last decade of Lego games made by Traveller's Tales have been fantastic. The innate qualities of Lego - its universally understood design, its magnetic tactility and its inspirational capacity to be anything you can imagine - have been hitched to the deep worlds of licensed properties like Star Wars, Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings, and brought to life by the magical potential for games to let players build and destroy things in seconds, whatever the scale. It's become the formula where everyone wins.Even so, Lego City Undercover - an open-world matinee crime romp following an undercover cop's adventures in the plastic metropolis - was a risk. The Lego City line of models may be among the Danish toy company's top performers, but while fire-trucks and police cars may appeal to a seven-year-old on spec, the rest of us take more convincing. Even the kids may balk; past Lego games have involved collecting thousands - millions - of coin-like studs which can be invested to unlock new characters for use in Free Play, but how can a security guard, a limo driver or an ambulance worker hope to capture anyone's imagination to the same extent as a Han Solo or Professor Snape? Wouldn't you go straight to the exit rather than pausing to collect anything?
Lego City Undercover answers this challenge in a sensible way: it distracts you from it for so long that it becomes irrelevant. You still collect studs - millions of them - and you still use them to unlock alter egos and vehicles that you can have heli-dropped at locations around Lego City, but now there's another currency that takes precedent. Super Bricks, left behind when you smash items of scenery, can be saved up and spent on 'Super Builds' - large structures like fairground rides, ramps and suspension bridges, which often have gameplay implications and are assembled in fast-motion as a swooning camera salivates all over them.
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