Believe It Or Not, I Think GTA 6 Could Learn a Few Things From Lego City Undercover

GTA 5 has three playable characters. Nice one. Lego City Undercover has over 300. Look, my tongue is firmly within my cheek here; I don’t actually believe that Rockstar’s much-heralded efforts were surpassed by this once Wii U exclusive Lego game that came out just months before Michael, Franklin, and Trevor’s story. But while Undercover is by no means a masterpiece, there are some areas where it genuinely shows ambition beyond Rockstar’s. Please stick with me. I haven’t gone mad.

Yes, we’re all clinging on through this multifaceted apocalyptic present to make it to GTA 6, and you’ll no doubt have several recommendations about what to play in its place over the months preceding its launch. Red Dead 2 is my favourite game ever, but that’s an obvious one. The Saints Row games are fun, but we’ve already got a new Scary Movie coming this year if you want to revisit that puerile place in time. Sleeping Dogs will forever be the hipster pick thanks to its stylish Hong Kong action, but have you played it recently? It’s fine. That’s why I come here bearing the gift of Lego City Undercover — a good, if not quite great, take on the open-world city genre, but one that was forgotten all too quickly.

GTA 4’s Four Leaf Clover, you are not going to get here, with Rockstar’s trademark sprawling, cinematic missions not part of Undercover’s offering. Missions instead are limited in scope, with chases short and rarely taking advantage of the scope of the larger city map, instead taking place in small puzzle-filled pocketed environments outside of the free-roam area. The same limits can be seen in combat, which almost entirely consists of hammering down the attack button and putting plastic fist to face. In that regard, though, it's very similar to a Rockstar game; Let’s face it, you’re not playing GTA for its rudimentary cover-based gunplay, but for those high-stakes set-piece events that you rarely find elsewhere.

Whether it’s Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead, the very first gunfight or car chase will ultimately feel almost identical to its first, albeit with slightly more exotic weaponry. What you will discover in Lego City, though, is greater systemic progression when it comes to problem-solving than that found in any Rockstar game. Abilities unlocked throughout the story mode can then be taken advantage of when exploring the open world, providing the key to unlock its many secrets. This approach gives you a genuine reason to switch up which minifig you’re playing as, since each harbours its own unique skill.

What you will discover in Lego City, though, is greater systemic progression [...] than that found in any Rockstar game. GTA 5 may have had three protagonists, but outside of each having their own story missions, there was little reason to switch between them. Sure, they each had special abilities, such as Franklin slowing down time while driving, but those skills weren’t effectively integrated into the gameplay. Lego City Undercover, meanwhile, makes great use of characterful, unique abilities which are directly tied to problems and objectives. There are some genuinely nifty detective-like quirks, such as scanning heat signatures in a surrounding area when searching for suspects. Could the bank-robbing clown be the orange silhouette sporting an oversized curly wig hiding in a shed? Probably. In that sense, its crime-stopping borrows as much from L.A. Noire as it does GTA, just without the often unintentionally hilarious interrogation sequences where you can falsely accuse foreign diplomats of major offences involving minors. That wouldn’t quite fit the happy-go-lucky Lego mould, I guess.

Undercover, just like every other entry in TT Games’ library, is made for the whole family to enjoy, and so takes that rock-solid Rockstar open world base and tweaks it with every age of player in mind. There’s a charm to every interaction, such as a film noir-ish, jazzy double bass being plucked while you sweep an area for footprints using a UV light. Nearby chattering NPCs, meanwhile, provide a PG version of what you may hear on a Los Santos street corner. In great Lego fashion, each item you collide with along the city’s roads is packed full of studs, just like the backstage area of a Magic Mike show.

With hundreds of golden bricks, disguises, and vehicles to unlock across its map, the collecting in Lego City Undercover seemingly never ends. It’s something GTA has never quite cracked. Yes, some of Rockstar’s games have had their list of collectibles, such as Liberty City’s horde of lost pigeons, but they always feel like stumbled-upon surprises, rather than rewards hidden behind puzzles in the style that the Batman Arkham games kicked off with their Riddler trophies. Perhaps this makes the city feel a little too artificial for Rockstar’s tastes, but Lego City’s embracing of all things plastic means its metropolis is stacked full of things for its 300 minifigs to find.

I’ve always had a soft spot for the Lego Games. Indeed, Undercover’s precursor, the Lego Island series, formed many of my earliest gaming memories, as pizza boy Pepper Roni tussled with The Brickster in very limited open worlds. Lego City Undercover feels like the natural evolution of those turn-of-the-century adventures; a grown-up version of that idea — not necessarily tone-wise, but certainly mechanically. It was also an opportunity for developer TT Games to tell a story and build a world outside of established licenses, like Star Wars, Marvel, or Harry Potter, and while I’m not going to pretend Undercover is a crime opus akin to GTA's finest, its solid original story does help make it a genuinely legitimate GTA clone for all ages. Even its titular metropolis is a mishmash of American cities such as New York and San Francisco — something Rockstar has been doing for decades with Grand Theft Auto.

Beyond the fact that this is a Lego game we’re talking about, there are reasons why Undercover isn’t typically discussed alongside more enduring open-world crime games. Lego City Undercover came out in the Spring prior to GTA 5’s release, and it shows. 13 years on, it's perhaps easy to forget just how far forward Rockstar’s masterpiece pushed the open-world genre. Instead, it would be far fairer to compare this plastic city to earlier Grand Theft Autos such as the PS2’s Vice City and San Andreas, and 2008’s GTA 4. In fact, it commits many of the same crimes as those now somewhat dated cities do. Perhaps the most egregious is the fact that the whole of its map isn’t open from the get-go, gated off until certain events in its story occur in an effort to prevent you from seeing all of its many locations straight away. It’s somewhat frustrating, especially, I can imagine, if you’ve got a younger child who just wants to drive around it all without worrying about story. Thankfully, this approach is something open-world games have almost entirely put behind them in the years since.

Something more positive Undercover takes from the 2000s “3D universe” era of GTA games is their larger-than-life tone, which, while remaining somewhat intact across 4 and 5, was much less nuanced back in the day, resulting in their caricature-led stories. Its crime tale crucially puts you on the other side of the law, but is similarly cartoonish, playing out like a Lord and Miller take on The Departed as performed by the cast of Anchorman. It goes big on laughs while not really attempting to pull any other emotion out of you, which is no bad thing at all. Whereas Rockstar opts for classy homage, TT Games go for whole-hearted plastic parody: less satire, more spoof. That difference in comedic values perhaps most emphasises the difference in the games, with GTA the memorable cinematic experience you’d sit down to watch with popcorn, and Undercover feeling more like the snackable popcorn itself: sweet and fun, but with no real nutritional benefit outside of the moment.

Undercover first came out just six months prior to Marvel Super Heroes, which I’d argue approaches its open-world even better, but otherwise doesn’t relate to GTA anywhere near as much, so we’ll park it to one side here. It was a real golden age for Lego Games, though, and one where it really felt like TT Games had cracked the formula as to how to pack open worlds with collectibles and opportunity, while also making getting around them a joy in itself, whether it be via police-issued grapple hooks or superheroic flight. It’s something I’m hoping the imminent Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight can recapture in its Gotham setting. Would I be so brave and bold as to suggest that it could eclipse GTA 6 this year? No, the only way that could realistically happen is if the latter doesn’t actually hit its November date.

Could GTA 6 learn from Lego City Undercover’s approach to packing each playable character with unique skills that unlock different aspects of its world? Do I honestly think Lego City Undercover is better than any modern GTA game? No — there’s a pure, undeniable, blockbuster sense of cinema to Rockstar’s creations that’s hard to resist, especially in the way they tell their stories. Would I actually prefer to play it in 2026 over Vice City? Maybe. It’s certainly more ambitious when it comes to mission design. So, could GTA 6 learn from Lego City Undercover’s approach to packing each playable character with unique skills that unlock different aspects of its world, improving the quality of its collectibles, or maybe even introducing co-op? I’d be surprised, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to see it. Imagine if Lucia were an explosives expert, but Jason specialises in safecracking, and depending on who you pick to play as on a certain mission, it dictates the events of each.

More than anything, I just want to let you know about this game that didn’t get quite the amount of love it deserved when it first arrived 13 years ago. If you need any more convincing, you can check out our fully deserved 8/10 review it got at release. It’s now on your radar in case it passed you by. Embrace the brick. Thank me later.

Simon Cardy is a Senior Editor at IGN who can mainly be found skulking around open world games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing at the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.