5 Things Lego City Undercover does better than GTA...

Is it blasphemy to say I don't give a damn about GTA V? I haven't even looked at any of the trailers. IV looked pretty but it fell apart pretty damn quickly with the usual terrible combination of bad driving, camera and piss poor shooting along with being an errand boy for various annoying morons has really turned me off the series in general. I've honestly been pretty tired of the Lego games as well. Picked up Lego Batman 2 last year and quickly got bored with it. Surely a Lego game that's clearly a GTA clone would be a terrible choice, right? Well as the Wii U is sorely lacking in games lately and me needing a solid break from rpgs after finishing several in the last couple of months I gave it a shot as it had really good word of mouth. Turns out it's surprisingly excellent. In fact it does some stuff better than the GTA series ever has:

1.It's funnier: GTA started out as a satire. It's still got hints of that here and there, but it's gotten so serious the last few entries that's it's actually a little more absurd than titles like Saints Row that parody it. LCU takes pretty much every opportunity to make a joke or a pun and for the most part it works pretty well, especially newbie Frank Honey, who is pure gold.

2. Better Map: Holy crap do I get lost and turned around in GTA games. I have to constantly pause to check the map. I still get lost. Not in LCU. Thanks to the gamepad it's easy to see where I need to go and even see shortcuts plus an extremely handy trail of green lego studs to point my way whenever I'm in a vehicle. GTA has nothing on this.

3. The City looks better: GTA always has cutting edge graphics. For the time. The problem is cutting edge never ages very well. It's almost always better to go with something with a distinct style and Lego City just looks very clean with no glitches, not a lot of draw-in space and no pop-up.

4. Better Driving: Maybe it's far more realistic but the driving in GTA is absolutely terrible. All vehicles handle horribly, traffic is a pain to get through and cars really can't handle any damage. The vehicles in LCU don't handle incredibly well, but are serviceable and more important, incredibly durable. You have to actively work to destroy one. There's traffic, but not such a ridiculous amount it gets in your way and even if it does most of the time you can smash right through it.

5. It does a better job at distracting you: But most will say the real fun of GTA is all the extra stuff you can do apart from the main storyline. Problem is you have to work hard to find a lot of it and there aren't a whole lot of clues. LCU has shiny colorful things everywhere distracting you from whatever you are supposed to be doing. It's bad for your OCD, but way more of a fun time than most of the side stuff in any GTA.

OK that's the list. I won't say LCU is a game worth buying a Wii U for specifically but it's easily the best post launch game so far and you really should pick it up if your Wii U is just sitting there collecting dust. I will be back tomorrow with a review of Star Trek Into Darkness.