Chris InglisLEGO 2K Drive is an open world driving adventure developed by Visual Concepts Entertainment and published by 2K. It launches on May 19, 2023, on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, Xbox and PC, and this review is focusing on the Xbox version. Aimed at a younger audience, this still had plenty of humour and puns that got me chuckling as I raced across multiple biomes, completing story mode and modifying the builds of cars I unlocked. For the LEGO creative players, your imagination can go wild constructing your own vehicles or modifying existing presets. It was a heck of a lot of fun and one I could play splitscreen co-op with my daughter.
The game feels like a LEGO version of Forza Horizon with four open world maps to explore, main events to race, minigames and quests to complete. The game’s tutorial/help system is very good at explaining each of the new mechanics as you come across them. Still seeing them a few hours in got a bit grating for myself but they were good reminders for when my daughter hopped in to play splitscreen. The voice acting is great across the board and accents change slightly as you move through the different biomes available to explore.
There are main story races that you need to defeat a rival character who will give up their checkered flag for being defeated. You don’t necessarily have to win, so long as you beat the rival but, in my experience, they were usually the one I was fighting with to get first place. Races are short and usually last a few laps, but there are jumps, powerups and boost pads to hit. Finishing races nets you XP and Brickbux (in-game currency) as well as unlocking the loadout for your rival’s vehicle and sometimes you’ll unlock LEGO pieces to use in free form car builds, stickers and the like.
At first, I was trying to avoid hitting objects on the side of the track, however smashing into objects is the only way to build up your boost power – so get your smash on! There is terrain that slows you down though so keep an eye out for that. Powerups have good variety such as throwing a spider web that players must mash Y to get out of, there’s rockets you can shoot (both direct shots and homing missiles), and several other powerups. You can drift around corners, and you can press X to do a pinpoint turn which is more than just a hand brake. I found X useful in minigames but not necessarily races.
One great gameplay element in races, and open world exploring, is the seamless changing of your vehicle when you run over different terrain types. When you’re on a road, you will be in a road vehicle. When you switch to dirt, your vehicle instantly switches to a 4WD buggy, and when you hit water, you change into a boat. It’s fantastic and feels very dynamic. The only bad thing I can say is that when you’re trying to cut corners and you’re in the water as an example, you could sway onto the sand which switches you to the buggy, then you hit water and you’re back in the boat. It doesn’t slow you down, just disoriented me a little bit.
You only need to complete a few races on the starting island before the game’s help system moves you to the next island. It’s here where new races are set at higher level than we were, so a slight grind comes into play as you complete other side quests and minigames to earn XP. Much like in Forza Horizon, map challenges have gold, silver and bronze objectives and you’ll earn a certain amount of XP and Brickbux depending on the level of completion. Minigames were of good variety too and don’t last too long, so were a good fun mechanism to get some more XP. Sometimes you had to round up some pigs that had escaped or protect three points from exploding alien robots. They were good to break up the intense racing events and change the pace a bit. Map challenges were great too as you learned to negotiate the terrain better through the various race types.
You will also unlock garages which firstly act as fast travel points within islands and connecting to other islands you have opened. The main feature of garages though is to modify current vehicles or to build your own from scratch. We start the game with hundreds of LEGO bricks to build with, and there are over 1000 unique LEGO pieces available to unlock as you play through the game. I’m the kinds of LEGO builder that needs an instruction manual. For some reason I can’t just build something from nothing, so I was thankful that there is an instruction manual section of the garage that allows you to construct preset vehicles that you have unlocked.
Following the instructions was a lot of fun, though even on my 110” projector screen, I sometimes struggled to see which brick and which orientation I needed to put in place. The cursor highlights green when you can place a brick, I just sometimes struggled to see finer details though I imagine this is more about my old man eyes rather than the game’s design. I did attempt to make a vehicle from scratch and there are several base templates to utilise, and then it’s up to your imagination as to what vehicle you want to build.
I’ve seen some vehicles from streamer teaser clips that wouldn’t be very aerodynamic in real life but look awesome in-game. Interesting to note here though that given the aim at a younger age demographic, any player-created vehicles get submitted online for moderation first before they can be used in online multiplayer. I really like this system as we know that untapped imaginations open us up to untapped possibilities and this protects our children from inappropriate content. Given I have been playing in the review period, I was unable to test the full online multiplayer functionality, but the splitscreen co-op racing was a lot of fun with my wife and daughter.
There is a cash shop in Unkie’s Emporium where players can unlock new vehicles, racer minifigures and decorations for vehicles. You primarily use the in-game earned Brickbux to unlock items, but there are also coins that you can purchase with real money to buy bulk Brickbux. It does give you the ability to throw cash at the game to unlock a heap of vehicles which is an advantage given vehicles have weights and classes. I haven’t tried buying anything myself so don’t know if it has a competitive advantage in-game, but I don’t think so as perks, which upgrade the vehicle’s stats.
Overall, LEGO 2K Drive is a fantastic racing experience within a destructible LEGO world, with the ability to build or modify your vehicles. Despite being aimed at a younger age demographic, I felt there is a decent challenge in the races and chuckled at the puns. It certainly wasn’t a breeze to coming first and beating the rivals. I am also very glad to have instruction manuals as a build options.
This review utilised an Xbox key provided by 2K ANZ and LEGO 2K Drive will launch on May 19, 2023, on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, Steam and Epic Games Store.
#roundtablecoop
