The game design of the Lego series is a little…bland and creaky. Still this is a solidly rendered and lit open world with better visuals than it had in 2013, so visually it’s still mostly positive. I had one crash in my 13 or so hours playing the main story…and I lost about 15 minutes of progress, which kind of sucked. Loads between levels are more tolerable, but none of the loading performance is anywhere close to fast. The initial load in particular is kind of aggravating if you don’t constantly use the Switch’s sleep mode to keep from rebooting the game.

Now, it doesn’t take as stupidly long to load as the infamous original release did…but load times are still pretty darn long. Where the game falls short technologically is in the loading department. You’ll see a few rough textures here and there, and a few sharp edges on certain shadows…but overall I bet you’ll be surprised at the amount of nice-looking stuff going on in the city. It’s not the best-looking game I’ve seen, even on Nintendo’s new platform…but it holds up well to other modern games. There’s a noticeable resolution bump when the Switch is docked, but even undocked it’s a pleasant-looking game. For the most part the game sits around the 30FPS mark, and there’s plenty of foreground and background detail. Those chugs are pretty noticeable, but few and far between. The result is a sprawling, largely beautiful open world that only chugs in a few highly-detailed places. It’s quite a bit better-looking than the original 2013 release, with more detailed characters, landscapes, and effects.

The game has been upgraded to the newest version of the TT Games Lego Engine, which now supports full real-time lighting and physically-based rendering, which lends more realism to the different materials in the game world. Even though I played the game on Switch, I don’t feel like I got a raw deal visually.

Lego city undercover review switch