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Over the past week or so I've been playing Lego City Undercover when I'm at home, Nicholas is asleep, and Animal Crossing isn't calling.  I was loathe to leave New Super Mario Bros U before completing it, but I was suffering from Mario ennui after 3D Land.  I will go back to NSMBU, though, as it's excellent.

Not quite as excellent as Lego City Undercover.  The quality of writing in the game is superb, and it's a sandbox game that's appropriate for kids and people who don't want to kill all the time.  I've mainly been following the missions, but occasionally getting distracted by some random brick or car chase - at the moment I've not unlocked enough abilities to seriously hunt every little secret, though.

The variety of missions is pretty good, with comedic touched throughout.  A lot of this comes from the sidekick character, Frank Honey, who is just a bit thick.


Frank pops up at the least appropriate moments and makes a hash of things over and over again.


The writing is utter genius, with many levels of comedy.  I know that Nicholas will laugh heartily at Frank driving a lorry into the police headquarters when he's a bit older; I'm more amused by him shouting that criminals are around so people should be quiet.

The main fault in the game so far is that the fighting is a bit disjointed and easy to win through button mashing.  Fights always end with Chase (the main character) handcuffing the baddies and them disappearing, but it can be tricky at times to see where they've gone when they've been thrown around.  I hoped this would change after my last missions, in which I learnt kung fu, but that doesn't seem to have changed much at all.


I did get to build a dragon, though.


As I've been playing this later in the evening, you can imagine my excitement when I saw an agility orb.  In fact, that's a listening post, and Chase can't jump that high.  Not yet, anyway.