LEGO City Undercover: The Chase Begins

The Chase Begins gets its best energy from letting rookie cop Chase McCain turn a case into a citywide excuse to drive, climb, fight, and poke around for a useful disguise. It has the cheerful LEGO sense of play you want from the premise, and its open Lego City gives the police work room to feel like more than a straight line from one mission to the next.

The limitations are easier to feel if you want a tightly focused detective game or a deep driving game. This is a lighter action adventure built around variety, and it works best when you are happy to follow Chase’s rise through the police ranks while using each new tool as an excuse to see what else the city lets you do.

Retro Replay Review

Gameplay

The Chase Begins starts from a simple, appealing fantasy: you are a rookie cop with a whole Lego City around you, and the job keeps expanding beyond ordinary police work. Chase can take cars from the streets, use martial arts against bad guys, scale buildings with parkour moves, and solve access problems by changing costumes. That spread of activities gives the game a playful, busy rhythm rather than locking you into one kind of challenge.

The disguise system is the clearest reason to keep exploring. Costumes have to be found, and each one brings a new ability, so a new outfit is more than a cosmetic reward. The thief disguise, for example, lets Chase use a crowbar on locked doors. That is a good fit for an open-world LEGO game because it turns progress into a reason to revisit the city and notice places that were previously out of reach.

Not every gamer will be won over by the mix. The driving, fighting, climbing, and puzzle elements make for a broad action-adventure package, but none of them is positioned as the whole point. You should come in wanting variety and a lighthearted scavenger-hunt feel, not a hard-edged mystery that demands close deduction at every turn.

Chase’s parkour skills help the city feel more usable than a collection of streets. Climbing a building facade and pulling off acrobatic moves add a vertical option when cars are not enough. Combined with the growing set of police equipment, the game has a satisfying sense of Chase becoming more capable as his assignments become tougher.

Graphics

Lego City is a brick-built urban playground filled with cars, buildings, and minifigure characters, with Chase at the center of the action. The chunky LEGO shapes suit the game’s playful police-adventure tone, especially when Chase is moving from street-level vehicles to climbs up a building facade.

Story

This is a prequel about Chase McCain before he is an established name. Fresh out of the academy, he joins the Lego City Police Department and has to earn his place through increasingly difficult cases. That rookie angle gives the adventure a useful forward pull: Chase is not simply saving the day because he is already a legend, he is trying to prove he belongs.

The story’s strongest promise is its connection to the larger LEGO City Undercover cast and its focus on Chase’s beginnings. Familiarity with the later game can make the setup more appealing, since you get to meet Chase and other returning characters earlier in their careers.

Do not expect the case-solving setup to turn the game into a dry procedural. The story exists to send Chase into a varied city adventure, where a police assignment can naturally lead to driving, disguise-based obstacles, brawls, and acrobatic exploration. The tone is better suited to a breezy origin story than a serious crime drama.

Overall Experience

LEGO City Undercover: The Chase Begins is easy to recommend if you like the idea of a LEGO action game that keeps changing activities. Its open city, stealable street cars, unlockable disguises, police equipment, martial arts, and climbing give you several ways to engage with Chase’s rise from academy graduate to more capable officer.

The payoff depends on what you want from the detective label. You get cases and a police protagonist, but the core draw is the playful combination of exploration and action rather than a tightly constructed investigation. If that sounds right, the many small reasons to roam Lego City should carry you through the tougher assignments.

It is a solid, likable fit for younger players and for LEGO fans who want an origin story for Chase McCain with more freedom than a purely linear adventure. More demanding action or driving fans may find the individual pieces too light on their own, but the game’s charm comes from putting those pieces together in one accessible city.