It only took a few minutes Lego 2K Drive to put his hooks in me. The second I left the road, my sports car was converted into a road buggy. Just before it hit the water, the car’s Lego bricks shook and became a speedboat. These satisfying changes are what you’ll see after exploring multiple open spaces and competing in tournaments that play out in ever-changing environments.
This racer is the first Lego game from Visual Concepts, a developer that has focused on WWE games for the past few years. The studio did not touch on the humor and similar jokes like the Lego game TT (to be fair, Visual Concepts does not), but 2K Drive they are still full of wonder and brilliant ideas.
It’s fun to put together and Mario Kart. Driving through open spaces can explode and drop bricks from your car when you crash with a good touch (smashing broken objects restores your health and increases your meter). So, it’s a shame that real colors can be so offensive.
Visual Concepts has designed the competition to make them feel as close and exciting as possible, the good and the bad. No matter how overpowered your car is, every competitor in the race comes ahead of you when the light turns green. At first, finding a way to beat your opponent and other Lego drivers to win is fun, but the game quickly shows its hand. You can’t create too many leads. If you turn the track in a tight corner, enemies will slow you down a bit. It works both ways, but it makes the colors feel a bit over-produced. More than once, I was on the verge of victory only to have the enemy overtake me at the last minute.
There are Mario Kart-style Powerups that you can grab during races and in the open world. On the surface, the powerups seem to add another dimension to the races, though every enemy vehicle I destroyed quickly bounced back. They can also fight you. In one race, I almost took the checkered flag when an opponent shot a spider to distract me and slow me down.
Winning races is essential to progress through the story, and it’s annoying that there’s no way to quickly restart when you’re unsuccessful. You must return to the open world before attempting the race again.
Other than that, the game is a lot of fun. There’s tons to do when you’re campaigning, even if you don’t care about online competition. There are many challenges, side missions and collectibles for you to find. You may find yourself smashing alien robots to protect other towers or traveling around a small town to collect residents and protect them from skeleton invaders. There are also many quotes. The story missions and challenges can be quite challenging – you have to reach a certain level to unlock certain modes – but there was enough variety to keep me smiling.
Visual Concepts / 2K
The most interesting part of Lego 2K Drive because many players will be car builders. You can use Lego bricks to build anything you want, including pre-made cars that you unlock or toys that you’ve built in real life. The one car I built is pretty cool, but it works, unlike most junky cars I’ve seen. .
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the game forces you to resort to microtransactions on pre-made vehicles. You will earn money slowly, but it will take time to unlock the cars in the store for free. After playing for seven hours, I didn’t have enough Brickbux cars. As it happens, you can pay real money to unlock cars and drivers faster, and more types of bricks for your construction.
Lego 2K Drive almost too much game. Most of the relevant pieces are in place and younger players can find more than experienced players. Hopefully, Visual Concepts can fix the AI quality and other minor bugs to make it sound real. In the meantime, I’m still trying to figure out what’s going on in the Big Butte County Sheriff’s Office.
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