Lego 2K Drive attempts to combine the best of Mario Kart and of Forza Horizon in a good-natured racing game. But, by wanting to force the line too much, it becomes annoying. To be reserved for a younger audience, provided you protect yourself from microtransactions.
It’s really hard not to love Lego, especially when you’re a kid — or still a kid at heart. In the world of bricks, everything is done to make you crack. We challenge anyone to go to a Lego Store without making an impulse purchase (a key ring often does the trick). Over time, the Danish brand has diversified to reach other horizons and the world of video games is no stranger to it. Associated with the publisher 2K Games, Lego is trying a new bet: getting out of the adaptations of popular licenses (Star Wars, Harry Potter, etc.) in order to offer a racing game called Lego 2K Drive.
Lego 2K Drive welcomes us with a deliberately humorous tone (do you like puns?), sufficient to support the intrigue that can be summed up in one sentence: roughly speaking, the objective is to win the ultimate trophy by climbing the ladder of motor racing. To bring his project to life, Visual Concepts, known for its NBA simulations, tapped into the very best in terms of inspiration: Mario Kart for the wild and sometimes unfair races and Forza Horizon for the argument. of the open world. The result is a somewhat messy experience.
Lego 2K Drive looks like a box full of bricks: it’s a mess
From a visual point of view, Lego 2K Drive deserves enormous respect. It moves pretty well in environments spread across different biomes. The charm of the Lego bricks does the rest: it’s cute, colorful and welcoming – and the overall rendering shines brightly. As a bonus, the feeling of speed is there, so much so that our cars go so fast that it is difficult to follow what is happening on the screen. This is all the more true since the developers place no limits on the players. We can therefore ride on roads, go off-road and even navigate on water with exemplary fluidity, our means of transport changing at will depending on the situation. It’s a little confusing, but the show is there.
The show is on
However, if we add the many visual effects that flood the screen, linked to powers that can hinder the course of the race of others, we end up getting lost. Lego 2K Drive ends up becoming messy, knowing that the gameplay, necessarily arcade, is a bit too nervous to provide total control. This results in races whose outcome is sometimes difficult to control. Then, paradoxically, a little too easy to win once you’ve mastered the art of skidding (just hold the brakes and the stick at the same time). For a young audience, the challenge seems ideal, with undeniable fun. Nevertheless, we still have the feeling of quickly going around the owner. To make matters worse, the various characteristics affiliated with the vehicles are struggling to be felt, from the moment there is a significant amount of randomness in the races.
In sum, Lego 2K Drive, it’s a bit like a box full of bricks: you never know what you’re going to come across. There is still a clear structure that emerges: the main races mix with walks populated by encounters and side quests. The content offered is varied, even though some objectives are a little off topic with the gameplay. Worse, Lego 2K Drive sometimes forces us to chain secondary missions to claim sufficient progress to advance on the main road. Freedom is therefore far from total.
10,000 banknotes a car…
… or 5 €
Lego obliges, it is possible to build your own vehicles, using a complete and well explained editor. And, capitalism obliges, 2K Games sees it as the ideal opportunity to fill its game with microtransactions. What to transform Lego 2K Drive in a virtual Lego Store, where the smallest car already created – and prettier than yours – will cost you around €5. It is possible to obtain it by the sweat of your brow, but it already takes a few hours of play to amass even just 10,000 banknotes (the equivalent of €5 in real life).
Fortunately, the publisher protects children by first requiring the creation and association of a 2K account – which requires parental authorization. At least it will avoid a controversy at the Fortnite. It prevents, Lego 2K Drive reminds that money is never far away when there are Danish bricks. It’s too bad.
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