While I do not like how silly the term is, I definitely fall under the AFOL banner, that being an acronym for “Adult Fan of LEGO” that separates the older members of the toy community from the kids.
It’s because of this affinity for the brick building system that LEGO 2K Drive arrived on my desk for review, but only on the public launch date. Since its launch on 19th May I have been playing the latest LEGO game and I can now report on what it’s like as a game in a vacuum, and as a LEGO product for LEGO fans.
But first: what is LEGO 2K Drive? Well that name is really rather awful as “2K” is the publisher. It’s already a stretch to put the publisher name in games like NBA 2K but here it’s just plain bad. This inclusion already puts a sour taste in my mouth of corporate nonsense and that only gets worse once we discuss monetisation later.
Name aside, this is a racing game featuring LEGO vehicles. The game most people think of now is the classic LEGO Racers.
LEGO 2K Drive does some things to separate itself from LEGO Racers and other games with its vehicle switching mechanic. Vehicles in the game are grouped into street, off-road and water. You can manually or automatically switch between these three types of vehicles on the fly. If you have the transformation set to automatic, then you can recklessly drive into any terrain and your vehicle will rebuild itself on its own.
This is accompanied by a loadout system. Each loadout has three vehicles (one for each terrain type) and up to three powerups. On top of all of this each vehicle has its own unique stats that you need to balance.
While it’s not really highlighted by the game, you can use this loadout system to tackle the game’s various missions. For example: say you have to do challenges that need you to cover distance in a jump, so you can equip only vehicles with high speed and jump stats. On the other hand missions where you take damage will benefit from vehicles with high HP that maybe aren’t the fastest.
On the topic of jumping, all vehicles here can go quite high. Other games, especially kart racers, usually have a hop button, but this is on another level. Vehicles can jump right over other competitors in a race or clear a house in a single bound.
The jump joins the standard drift and boost system seen in many other racing games. Brake into a corner to drift and balance the wheel to keep going. There’s also powerups that can destroy or slowdown opponents, add hazards to the field or increase your speed.
Playing LEGO 2K Drive feels like a hodgepodge of racing mechanics we have been seeing for decades. Kart and arcade racers influence the majority of the overall structure while the vehicle switching mechanic is akin to The Crew and The Crew 2, although much downgraded.
It feels like a downgrade because there are no flying vehicles in LEGO 2K Drive. It would have made much more sense for the three vehicle types to be wheeled, water and air, but that’s not the case. Air vehicles would have added a much-needed vertical element to the game which massive ramps and boosts just can’t compete with.
Putting on my tinfoil hat and I would say that air vehicles may have been planned at some point. The main aim of LEGO 2K Drive’s singleplayer is to win the “Sky Cup” an elite race that is held in the clouds.
On top of this, a LEGO jet was even repurposed into a boat in this game.
If I’m overreaching and flying vehicles were never planned for this game then the Sky Cup and jet “boat” just feel like a slap in the face.
My flying dreams crushed, the driving in LEGO 2K Drive is pretty good. The controls are, for the most part, easy to understand and smooth to control. What really surprised me is the utter chaos that each race turns into. Trying to balance all the controls, powerups, track hazards and more make each challenge a mad juggling act.
While that sounds fun – and don’t get me wrong, it is a lot of fun at times – it is too much. Effects can fill the screen to an insane degree that makes it impossible to see. The controls needed a second look at because doing certain actions like boosting and jumping at the height of a ramp required hand placement that was not great, to say the least, and the camera has an awful habit of freaking out at the worst times.
Compounding this problem is a massive lack of playtesting. There are so many elements of LEGO 2K Drive that should have been caught in testing before release. Racetracks have elements that snag your car because of bad layout and hitboxes, the respawn for being pushed off the track struggles to work, audio cues play on repeat and make you want to deafen yourself. A lot of the game requires pinpoint precision that is simply unfun.
It really feels like a slap in the face that, for example, flying objects you need to catch with your land vehicles have tiny hitboxes that need to be perfectly aligned with your car to snag. Why not just make either box slightly bigger so everyone has more fun?
I’m really not the rage quit type but I found myself routinely frustrated and exiting the game because of needlessly annoying missions. I can only imagine a lot of parents finding their kids similarly peeved when all they wanted to do was have fun with a LEGO racing game. Again another round of testing should have found these niggles and ironed everything out.
And I saved possibly the worst for last: the most awful rubber banding I have seen in years. LEGO 2K Drive maybe has the worst rubber banding in any videogame. It is completely demoralising to race what feels like a perfect lap with good race lines, great powerup use and full boost meters, only for your opponents to go right past you regardless.
This problem also completely and utterly kills any fun that can be had with the powerup system in the game. It should look and feel amazing that I turned my enemies’ cars into a pile of LEGO bricks with a huge cartoon rocket, but when that powerup only slows those opponents down for a split second, what’s the point? It’s a complete failure of game design to create functions for the player to use that are essentially useless, or feel so bad to use that they seem useless.
These frustrations are compounded, once again, by the audio. If you play LEGO 2K Drive for more than say 30 minutes the music simply stops. I’m not sure if this is some memory leak problem or an issue facing only me, but it happened so often I forgot this game had any music. That being said the music is pretty bad, so it’s not a big deal.
What is a big deal is the characters incessantly talking. Characters will not shut up and if I have to hear the one robot character telling me to “go faster” as an AI opponent rubber bands into first place at the last possible second in a game, then I will lose it.
This game desperately needed some kind of radio station system like so many other racing games have. Listening to tunes while you drive is a no brainer and I can’t help but feel like this wasn’t done as a cost cutting measure because music can be expensive to licence.
As promised we need to talk about monetisation. LEGO 2K Drive is a full priced game that gets even more expensive with two more editions. On top of this there are microtransactions in the game to buy all manner of items including new vehicles to drive.
But now we need to talk about one mechanic I haven’t discussed yet: the ability to make new vehicles (and customise existing ones) using an in-game editor. You may think then that buying vehicles with real money would be inconsequential and only a time saver since you can just build whatever you want, right? Well that’s not the case either because you don’t have access to all the pieces to build when you first unlock the editor.
Pieces can be unlocked by playing or by, you guessed it, spending real money.
I won’t get too far into the editor itself as I feel like I need more time with it like I have put into Studio (basically free and official LEGO CAD Software) but I can point out some more terrible design with it. The biggest example is likely the fact that the instructions to build in-game vehicles with real LEGO doesn’t work as you want. Instead of giving you actual step-by-step instructions, the game breaks vehicles into chunks and tells you which pieces go into said chunks.
The game itself calls this a “puzzle”. I had no idea that “puzzle” and “instructions” were interchangeable words. In fact I could almost say that “puzzles” and “instructions” are antonyms.
This final headscratcher really sums up LEGO 2K Drive for me as a whole. It has glimpses of genius, passion and love for LEGO that are immediately snuffed out by countless bad decisions, backwards game design and a massive lack of polish.
On top of this, there are so many little annoyances for hardcore LEGO fans like myself. Why do so many vehicles use retired parts that people will struggle to find if they want to make the vehicles real? Why doesn’t the game stick to the standardised 8-wide cars of Speed Champions, especially when the Speed Champion McLaren cars are the star vehicles for the game? Why aren’t the streets using the Road Plates system that LEGO introduced? Why is only 25 percent of the world made with LEGO and the rest of generic 3D videogame models? The list goes on.
This feels like a game that can only be redeemed with a sequel and while I will be there to play that sequel, I likely won’t return to the current version of LEGO 2K Drive.
