LEGO 2K Drive Review

Blur Meets Forza Horizon.

Around 13 years ago there was a crop of games in the same vein as Mario Kart, but with more realistic racing. Blur was the most popular, straddling the line between being an unofficial Fast and the Furious game and Mario Kart; with realistic cars, lots of explosions, and powerups galore. LEGO 2K Drive is the spiritual successor to Blur, as well as being a ‘My First Forza Horizon’ and a Mario Kart you can build. It’s not perfect, and I do have some concerns about how it’s going to be monetised, but also this is the best LEGO video game of all time and I love it.

Going in, my expectation was that it was going to be like the LEGO expansion from Forza Horizon 4: lots of challenges, realistic graphics, maybe some wisecracks, but still more neutrally aimed at both adults and children equally. In reality, it’s about 10 levels of polish below Forza Horizon 4 (which is fine), far more sarcastic than I anticipated, and unapologetically aimed at kids around 7-13. This is a kids’ game for children, that adults will have a great time with, and there is some dialogue aimed at the adults in the room, but everything is aimed at making this the best video game a LEGO-loving primary school kid has ever played.

Remember the medium-good Pixar movies that used to throw a few jokes to the adults accompanying the kids so they still had a good time? This is that kind of level, which is completely appropriate.

Because it’s a game for kids, it’s really nice to see how naturally and easily concepts like waypoints, powerups, mini-maps and quest givers are explained. In a lot of ways, LEGO 2K Drive is made to be a kid’s first open world game, which is good to see given how few big kids games seem to get major releases these days.

Though, that said, the difficulty can be uneven and punishing in places. There is no easy or obvious way to adjust the difficulty, and I can imagine kids getting disheartened, particularly if this is their first game. Employing difficulty options, perhaps taking cues from Forza Horizon’s scale which includes extremely easy tourist mode (where the other cars basically wait for you to catch up) would have been a nice way to help kids ease into racing.

There are ways for a second player to join in, so a parent or older sibling can help out, and a win is counted as a win no matter which player gets it. But the way split-screen co-op is set up, only one player gets the achievements and saved career, which could cause problem for kids who want to jump into each other’s games, but don’t want to have to redo large sections when they return to their own. There are plenty of other games that handle this better, and it feels like a missed opportunity.

One area I think LEGO 2K Drive really nailed was making the open world seem fun and alive. There are three main different kinds of activities you can do across the four different islands (all of which have lots of fast travel locations): races, events and in-world activities. The in-world activities just come up as your drive through a checkpoint, similar to Trail Blazers in Forza Horizon 5, where you have to go from one place to the next in a certain amount of time (sometimes while also doing other things). Events will have a quest giver that needs you to deliver flowers to a crush, take gold from dolphins, or jump off cliffs to return bats to a tree, but unlike the in-world activities, you can’t just leave when you get bored. And you will get bored, because while the concepts are wildly inventive, the gameplay in the events is repetitive and feels like a chore by the time you get to the fifth one (not to mention all the ones that come after that).

Races in LEGO 2K Drive feel like the answer to the question “what if ADHD was a car race”. They are some of the most chaotic races I have ever played. There is so much going on at once. I like to think of myself as being pretty good at racing games, but at no point did I feel confident I was going to win any of the races until I’d actually won. (Though, there were some where a few mistakes meant I had almost no hope of catching up.) Each was exciting, frustrating and challenging in turn.

I do wish the powerups had taken more of a Mario Kart approach to equity, though. Your position in a race seemed to have no bearing on which powerups you got. There were multiple times I got the teleportation powerup while in second place. But, that aside, they were all pretty fun, with different levels of helpfulness, without any feeling redundant.

There is a lot to do in this game. I spent around 9-ish hours getting to the credits, and there are still plenty of things left unfinished in the world, so there’s enough there to justify the premium price if kids get into it.

The gameplay is great and all, but the writers and voice actors should all get flowers for how excellently they did their jobs. Both my wife and I laughed all the way through the game. There were the obligatory ‘number 2’ and Big Butte (pronounced Big Beaut) jokes, but also some pretty funny henchmen banter, the commentators having slow breakdowns, and the frat bro vampire. The best LEGO games are always the ones where LEGO has full creative control over the characters and are able to make them say or do anything, like that LEGO City Undercover game from a few years back. You could tell how much fun the writers had thinking of the most ridiculous things they could get these characters to say.

The artists in the game should also be celebrated, because I love the way they’ve mixed brick-built set pieces with sticks, pot plants and other items kids might use to populate a world when they’ve used up the contents of their brick bin. It contributed to that feeling of being a ten-year-old in your PJs at a sleepover building a big LEGO world and coming up with elaborate stories with your friends.

One thing that felt like a bit of an odd afterthought that wasn’t properly explained or utilised was, surprisingly, building and customisation. You can build your own car design if you want, it’s fiddly and a bit frustrating with a controller, but presumably there is going to be a dedicated, hyper-focussed community that will make some extremely cool stuff. But it didn’t feel especially accessible to me, and any time I tried to change the colour of my custom-built car it told me that I’d used too many bricks.

I am pleased that there really doesn’t seem to be too much advantage associated with which car you drive, and that they all have pretty similar stat levels, so you can find the car that suits your driving style best, rather than just the over-powered one. But, I am really worried by how much the cool cars and custom parts cost in the shop. At the end of finishing the main story mode, I had around $16,000 in-game.

One car in the Unkie Monkey shop costs $10,000. So, unless kids feel extremely dedicated to the grind, completionists are going to be pestering mum and dad to drop real world money to finish their garage. At the time of writing, I can’t see how much $10,000 in-game currency would cost, but judging by the scale of the currency packs advertised, I would hazard an uneducated guess at around $10 AUD.

Given that this is a full-price, premium game aimed at children, one that is designed to encourage children to buy real-world LEGO bricks, locking content behind season passes and micro-transactions feels gross. It’s not on the level of NBA 2K, but it’s still pretty bad. It’s a black mark against an otherwise excellent game.

LEGO 2K Drive is out 19 May on Windows PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X, PS4, PS5 and Switch.

LEGO 2K Drive was reviewed using a promotional code on Xbox Series X, as provided by the publisher. Click here to learn more about Stevivor’s scoring scale.

LEGO 2K Drive 19 May 2023 PC PS4 PS5 Switch Xbox One Xbox Series S & X   Buy on Windows PC via Steam Buy on the Microsoft Store Buy on the Nintendo eShop Buy on Amazon: PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series