Best known for working on the publisher’s WWE and NBA games, Visual Concepts has been behind the wheel of 2K’s latest licensed experiment. Lego 2K Drive is a high-octane competitive racer full of destructible brick environments to overcome and a kid-friendly story full of fourth wall breaking fun.
The game’s best feature is Bricklandia, the fun Lego landscape in which 2K Drive is set up. It’s a world begging to be destroyed by squealing tires and your custom mast. Speeding up on the open-world playing mat (which humans would never want to step on) is a thrilling experience, made better by carefully animated auto-morphing. When traversing different terrains, from road to terrain and on water, players will automatically switch between vehicles to suit the context.
Tires and water noodles frame the scene of the world and act as captivating obstacles, and it is the mix of real-world objects with Lego structures that amplifies the toy box atmosphere. interesting. As a budding racer drops into this striking open world, you deal with an onslaught of spinners, grabbing their flags to claim the title of Sky Cup Champion. The egotist Mohawked Shadow Z acts as your opponent in this endeavor, popping up from time to time to remind you of how mean he is.
To get close to knocking him down, you must explore Bricklandia in search of rival speeders, each with their own unique driving skills that they hone in on. Mario Kart style race. From a real horse to an alien in a suit, they make up a glamorous ensemble and offer new cars and perks to play with, as well as Brickbux, where you can buy machines and new parts. You can also build your own vehicles brick by brick at the garage, which allows me to create some truly cursed rides. While the build system isn’t the most intuitive, it feels like an appropriate nod to Lego’s humble brick-building roots.
Across Bricklandia’s diverse biomes, you’ll also encounter On-the-Go Events, ambient quests that you can join and join for silly fun, such as: Jump over houses or drift across minefields. Conquering the criteria to earn XP and resources is like getting your license in Gran Turismo on the school field.
The Lego 2K Drive’s constant barrage of dialogue kept me giggling the whole time, although the intensity of some missions, such as rescue expeditions or wave defenses were less enjoyable, kept me from getting focus on jokes. This is always disappointing, given the obvious talent of the screenwriters and voice actors who bring effective satire to casual racing games.
Smashing and traversing the map is easy fun with junk food, but races must be won which can be punishable by some brutal pickups and brutal slows when you go off course. Some open world missions require you to drive skillfully and try to maneuver skillfully while cornering rockets or crashing through tiny robot invaders, which can lead to frustration, where I often feel too fast for my own good. While I enjoy how it makes my heart pound, I still yearn for a softer approach to exploration.
Though it’s a bit buggy, another nice surprise is the Lego 2K Drive’s couch co-op feature, which lets you and a partner explore the open world together, synthesizing XP as you go. I find myself getting in the way of my partner’s bombardment or dash to ensure that one of us gets the top spot. Notably, this feature makes dull rescue and defense missions much more tolerable thanks to the cooperative nature of the gameplay.
Unfortunately, the elephant in the room, or in this case a monkey, is the game’s store, Unkie’s Emporium, featured in the tutorial by its eponymous primate mechanic. Here you can buy premium currency with real money that can be exchanged for cars and characters formerly locked behind an expensive Brickbux wall. Of course, you can earn all of these items by honing, but the temptation persists, which makes it difficult for a game that is clearly geared towards a younger audience.
Lego 2K Drive builds an incredibly immersive world where speed and madness reign supreme as you race and morph across its exciting destructible backdrop. Despite some nasty mission designs and some minor bugs, Lego 2K Drive quickly conquered me with its goofy story filled with irreverent dialogue and more open-world challenges. If only the specter of microtransactions didn’t appear so big in this kid-friendly game, it would make for an even smoother ride.
