LEGO 2K Drive is just around the corner. This colorful arcade racing title makes the most of its license and lays a great foundation for a fun and chaotic drive. But despite what the Lego brand has brought to games like this, publisher 2K Games has clearly found a dollar sign for its monetization potential. The end result is a very interesting racer, slightly stifled by the push for microtransactions.
Before we go too deep into the rabbit hole, let’s talk about the positives first, as there are a lot of positives. Again, LEGO 2K Drive is an arcade racing game that takes full advantage of its eponymous brand to deliver hours of fun, freewheeling fun. You’ll spend most of your time in story mode, but you can also play cup series, single races, and of course, action online. In other words, you have a lot of work to do before using your garage’s awesome building tools.
So it’s story mode. As a rookie driver, you are tasked with racing in Bricklandia to participate in his championship. This championship culminates in the Sky He Cup Grand Prix. The winner will be awarded the best racer in all the land. You’ll soon meet friends and foes along the way, but their characterizations are as silly and hilarious as you’d expect. As with all LEGO games, there is a sense of humor here that will appeal to players of all ages.
The race itself is the main element of story mode, but there’s a lot more to enjoy outside the track. You have space to drive a total of 4 sandbox maps for as long as you like, which is happily infinite. Perhaps inspired by The Crew 2, the vehicle automatically switches between trams, off-roaders, and boats as you go through different types of terrain, allowing you to go basically anywhere. The open world is also full of objects, traffic and pedestrians, all of which can be passed through without penalty. In fact, breaking these Lego props has some advantages. Gain boosts, restore vehicle health, and feel incredibly satisfying.
Each map contains a unique set of collectibles to encourage exploration, as well as ready-to-run On-the-Go events, quests, and other challenges to keep you entertained. . Some of these are mandatory and not as much fun as just racing, but they are all not very offensive. There’s enough side content to justify a sandbox map, and again, it’s fun to fly around without worrying about it. Whether you’re cruising the open world or taking part in a race, the driving itself is easy to understand and a lot of fun. Big, meaty drifts charge up his boost meter and give him decent maneuverability with quick turns and generous jumps.
Once out on the track, racing feels more like a kart racer.This is mostly due to the choice of power-ups and weapons used Mario KartA style that paves the way to the top. Some are very standard, such as homing rockets and forward-rolling bombs, while others are more imaginative. Ghost powers are evasive tools that can quickly turn into attack tools, while teleporting feels like a throwback to PS1’s Lego Racers.
You can swap your vehicle set with any other vehicle you unlock, all of which have their own stat bonuses and weights that affect how you treat them. In addition to that, the Perks system allows you to apply various passive effects. It’s not overly complicated, and I honestly don’t see much need for it in a game like this, but I’m sure some people will appreciate the slight added depth.
If you don’t like the pre-made vehicles, you can create your own using the very robust building mode. In the garage you can choose which axel to build and after that there are no limits. Choose from hundreds of LEGO bricks and pieces and place them one by one wherever you like. You can change the color of each piece, apply special effects, equip and drive as much as you like. If you prefer, you can also assemble your unlocked vehicle with step-by-step instructions. This one also uses real-world Lego pieces. The camera controls in this mode can be a bit cumbersome to build, but it’s still a very impressive toolkit overall.
The only real downside is that you can’t share your creations online right now, but this seems like a huge lost opportunity. That means those who don’t want to build new cars and boats should instead rely on unlocks or head to his Unkie’s Emporium, an in-game store where you can spend your hard-earned money.
Rewarded for winning races, discovering new events, and overcoming challenges, Brickbux are the primary currency of LEGO 2K Drive, where you can buy new vehicles, drivers, and even LEGO pieces for build modes in Unkie’s Emporium used for This seems fine at first, but the rate at which he gains Brickbux is pretty slow, especially online where he gets 5 Brickbux with a 1st place result. New build pieces usually cost 4,000 each, while characters usually cost 6,000 and cars mostly his 10,000. After playing for about 15 hours, I collected about 25,000 Brickbux.
Clearly, the slow delivery of this currency drives microtransactions. You can buy large amounts of coins and convert them into Brickbux. 500 of them (priced at £4.49) will transfer to 10,000 Brickbux. So that’s about $5 for your average in-game vehicle if you don’t want to do story mode racing.you do You can get coins as part of the Premium Drive Pass season, but obviously it costs real-world money to access these as well. Everything feels very offensive, especially for a game that is primarily aimed at children. A balance change to allow more Brickbux to be earned through normal play would address this issue to some extent, but the whole thing is a bit too much at the moment.
As I mentioned earlier, this is a shame because the core game has a lot to offer. LEGO fans will love Creation Mode, but there’s a lot to enjoy about the simple but open-world design and racing itself. It would be a lot of fun if we could ignore the microtransactions and just focus on the fun. However, slow currency payouts (and the game costs up to £60/$70 from the start) make it difficult to play in-game. A store that is hard to ignore.
Conclusion
Whether you’re a fan of Lego, arcade racing, or both, this game is highly recommended by us, with the unfortunate caveat that it also features very aggressive monetization. The tactile open world has a fair amount to discover, the story mode is perfectly atmospheric, and driving itself is a blast. On top of that, the impressive build mode lets you build your own crazy cars, which is a shame you can’t share them with your friends. Unfortunately, microtransactions are hard to ignore and make a creative and engaging racer less appealing.
