These days, Lego is playing by the book more than ever. You buy a set that's designed to be the Death Star or The Shire or the Infinity Gauntlet, you follow the instructions, and at the end you get exactly what you asked for. Lego 2K Drive is a strange beast in this world. It feels a little bit like the devs have poured all three of these pre-made kits into a box, tossed out the instructions, and started building from scratch. What we have here is a game that is full of charm, a little bit chaotic, but ultimately doesn't know what it wants to be.
How you feel about the idea that video games are for children probably depends on your own ego, but the fact is that while video games are art, much like movies and television, some of them are made for children - Lego 2K Drive is one such game. This might not come as a surprise, but that’s underestimating just how much the game is for children. While the likes of Lego Batman are clearly made with a target audience in mind, they also have that Pixar-style appeal to all ages. 2K Drive lacks this. It's almost exclusively for kids, and it's a shame that some of the Lego magic has been flattened out in service of a younger audience.
There are still jokes, but they're goofy and generic. It probably suffers from being original - though I was initially intrigued by Lego branching out into the great unknown instead of brickifying existing IP, but without the framework of Iron Man's wit, it all seems a little too childish with no substance. Characters all have pun names, but they're not very original - the alien is called Hugh Mann - and that's the level of jokes you're dealing with here with not much else.
Of course, it's also a driving game. Some might even say that's the most important part of the experience, but I felt let down by the lack of Lego charm more than anything else. However, the driving has some decent depth to it. The basics of kart racing are nothing you haven't seen before - you drift, hit speed boosts, get (extremely reductive and not very Lego-y) items, but the fact drift and quick turn are two different mechanics adds a layer of thinking. Different tracks will pose new problems too.
So it’s a shame the basic campaign is laughably easy. You unlock various cars as you go, and while they have different stats, most of the time you're choosing for aesthetics alone as you're always likely to win. Once you get far enough, you’ll need to grind to buy more cars (in rather predatory fashion, you can pay real cash to skip), but mostly it’s plain sailing. Since the idea is to beat your rivals, you don't even need to win them all, only to finish higher than one random driver who, while invulnerable to items, frequently misses out on the podium altogether.
The game does have one extremely cool thing going for it though. As you switch from road to off-road or to water, your vehicle will instantly transform with a flourish of Lego bricks into a new one. Jumping into the river as a mechanical burger and watching the bricks flip around into a bat-winged speed boat never gets old. Unfortunately, winning every race without breaking a sweat did.
Side missions had some thought put into them, and while the variation of running over X things or collecting Y things might wear on you if you're racing through the game to see all it has to offer, I can see kids playing this at their own pace and enjoying themselves. It's way off the appeal of Mario Kart and Crash Team Racing, and even lacks the variation Sonic Team Racing offers, but the open world aspect does add the opportunity to ride around and make your own fun. With a highly robust customisation system that lets you tinker with cars right down to the individual brick, making your own fun is a big part of what works here.
Lego 2K Drive is a small game that expects you to play it over and over again. It's both simple and frustrating to make your way through the campaign, being constantly told you can't do the next race until you level up, yet getting buckets of XP by doing everything from substantial (by which I mean ten minute long) side missions to just running into a fence. Every five minutes or so, the game interrupts itself to explain a new system, menu, or mechanic, which is done with all the dazzling sugar rush of a kids TV presenter. It's natural as a reviewer to sometimes play games that aren't designed for your sensibilities, or where you aren't the target demographic, but children feel like a different species. All I can say is I found it annoying to constantly have to stop and learn things that didn't really matter, and I suspect I have a better attention span and impulse control than a seven year old kid.
There is a lot here for a young kid to enjoy, especially one who is tuned into Lego. The tracks have solid variety, both in terms of aesthetics, obstacles, and various challenges (like lacking destructible items to fill the boost bar), but it barely matters when you'll win every race until you hit a progression wall that asks you to grind out cash generation or pay to skip it, and then start winning again. It's creative, but it's also a bit of a mess. Lego 2K Drive mixes Forza Horizon and Mario Kart together, but it's not as good as either of them, and doesn't bring much new to the table either. There are building blocks here for Lego to use for future IP-less games, but this doesn't quite put them all together in a way that will interest anyone who isn’t still in primary school.
Score: 2.5/5. An Xbox Series X/S code was provided by the publisher.