LEGO City Undercover was originally released as a launch title for the Wii U in 2013 and was the first lego game from TT not based on a movie. It is also has an emphasize on driving and a large open world which led to it being called lego GTA.
The level/"special assignments" will be very familiar to anyone who has played a lego game before. It's slightly different since you only control one character, Chase McCain, who is a cop who goes undercover as among other things a robber and fire fighter. You can at any time switch between these roles giving you different abilities. It's not a major change but it does make the game feel unique.
The open world is quite good for a lego game. There are collectibles everywhere, in total I believe there are around 600 and nice details can be found everywhere. Characters actually use the taxis, they can buy cotton candy and their apparence is adapted to where you are. For example there are a lot more fire fighters around the fire station. Getting this many collectibles does however get repetative eventually there are ~20 different tasks all ~600 open world collectibles fall into and you will quite quickly have done all of them many times over. It's a bit like collecting koroks in botw, but here you're supposed to get them all and the world isn't S tier but rather more of a B. They never have any significant challenge and when I've failed one of them it's usually because my car decided that physics shouldn't apply anymore and it falling over. At the end it mostly felt like a chore.
The story is not the most memorable thing ever and mostly an excuse for Chase to go undercover as a bunch of different occupations, but it is chock-full of jokes and one liners, a lot of which really landed for me. It's probably the funiest voice acted lego game ever.
Even though I for the most part had a good time with this game bugs and technical issues really dragged down the experience. The first thing I was greeted with when starting the game was a miscolored cutscene with a ton of horizontal lines which required me to install a mod to fix since all cutscenes apparently look like that on modern AMDs. When I got into the game proper it was a stuttering mess which I managed to resolve with some more googling and then the physics had to act out at times. One mission I couldn't even complete without more messing around since everytime I pushed a block it flew up into the air. I also had regular crashes, probably once every 4-5 hours. At times these could be really annoying since you may need to redo story segments in the open world.
Because of this I can't recommend this PC port to anyone who isn't comfortable troubleshooting and installing mods. It may work better if you're running intel, but for me it was in an unacceptable state without mods. When I played it on the Wii U in 2015 I would probably have said it was the best lego game, but since the open world was way more repeatative than I remember and there were major technical issues a 3/5 seems about right to me.
3.0