Lego 2K Drive Preview: Pedal To The Plastic

Where we're going we can just build the roads.

There are some ideas so obvious that when you eventually stumble across them, you can hardly believe nobody has tried such a thing before. Lego 2K Drive takes the eternal appeal of building your own eccentric creations and combines the results with a fun and surprisingly robust open world racer. It's a game with tons of potential for user-generated hijinks and crossovers that welcome every single license under the sun into its burning rubber arms.

Racing games are often too reliant on simulated realism or too concerned with arcadey simplicity to appeal to everyone, but 2K Drive manages to strike an appropriate middle ground without ever sacrificing depth or humour in favour of a single vision. The driving is akin to Mario Kart with its rewarding drift system, and the ability to switch between vehicles designed for roads, off-road, and bodies of water in seconds pulls straight from Sonic All-Stars Racing Transformed. Your vehicular loadout will construct and fall apart in front of your eyes in a way that exudes childlike Lego charm, made more impressive when it isn't just pre-fab creations dished up by the game reacting to the world, but your own. After three hours across its myriad biomes, my nostalgic heart thirsts for even more.

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Modern Lego games are so reliant on existing properties that 2K Drive is initially daunting in its originality. In a similar vein to classics like Lego Island, Visual Concepts has created what appears to be a whimsical yet fully-fledged universe filled with all manner of dudes who love nothing more than to race cars and stand irresponsibly in the middle of the road until I end up running their poor asses over. I’m thrown straight into Turbo Acres, the very first zone, which is seemingly designed as a place to earn your wheels and glide through tutorials.

This is also where you meet your first rival, specific characters who match the general theme of a new area in order to teach you the ropes or justify the clichéd trope of a certain course. Cowboys will drag you through sprawling canyons and bumpy dunes, while scientists can rope in ideas like time travel and even battle-esque stages where you need to defend certain points on the map from enemies by charging into them. Races are simple for the most part, normally involving a few laps, usable items, and some nifty shortcuts to learn after repeat sessions.

It isn't particularly challenging, but it isn't meant to be. Lego 2K Drive is all about making you feel like a badass driver who is constantly progressing, whether this is by earning new vehicles or climbing the ranks to access new regions. It's a live service in its execution, and I wouldn't be surprised if 2K will build (wahey) on potential success with new expansions, quests, challenges, and other goodies to keep us coming back. Since its initial selection of biomes - no matter how much I adore their originality - won't have staying power.

I’m taken to three distinct regions during my preview session, each of which seems to function as a contained open world with its own mechanical quirk and escalating difficulty. The one I mentioned earlier is flooded with tutorials and recognizable iconography, while other towns like Big Butte and Hauntedsborough are clear riffs on clichéd yet effective themes. 2K Drive is the foundation of something more, so it makes perfect sense for its initial offerings to flirt with the familiar instead of dooming its presumably casual audience to convolution. I loved its immediate charm as I raced through caverns filled with blocky tarantulas or tried my best to outrun a soaring UFO flying overhead. Races aren't complicated, and sometimes too easy when playing against the standard AI, but it all feeds into this power fantasy of occupying a world that is quite literally built around you. It's easy, breezy, and pretty damn fun to boot.

The building tools are comprehensive, and you will only get as much out of them as you’re willing to put in. You pick a standard blueprint for each vehicle type and are then given all the freedom you could possibly ask for to create the car of your dreams. It's all curated down to the placement of blocks and components, including a bunch of complicated axles and mechanical parts I didn't have enough time to mess around with. I can see this becoming a huge part of the game's overall appeal, especially once seasoned creators get involved and start building accurate models of iconic vehicles we’re all familiar with. I’m curious to see exactly how 2K aims to tackle this level of creative freedom when it inevitably looks to release expansions with its own versions of vehicles and sets.

It seems a shame to follow the paid expansion route instead of just rolling with user-created versions. With any luck, the monetisation won't be egregious, since it will make or break a game that, on the surface, is all sunshine and rainbows. 2K's history with predatory microtransactions is very much the opposite, and it could easily truncate the base experience into a husk of its original intention by holding future content hostage. Right now though, what I’ve played and seen teases an open world racing adventure that anybody can pick up and play, while its wider reaching challenges and meta-progression seem to provide hardcore players with more meat to dig into.

Moment-to-moment gameplay is utter chaos, and so scattershot in its delivery that you never have a chance for boredom to set in. A single race is an orgy of flying bricks, laughably huge explosions, and a constant back-and-forth of whose winning and losing. There's a serious bit of blue shell bullshit going on here though, and a single item can send you from first place to the bottom of the leaderboard as it sends you flying off the edge of the map and right back to an awkwardly placed checkpoint. Each open world is filled with optional challenges and rare collectibles too, so even small amounts of exploration are compounded by experience points and similar rewards that keep the serotonin ticking. Doubly so when you jump into a shared world with friends or strangers, where any and all events can be taken on together.

Lego 2K Drive is incredibly cool, and I’m excited to see what the full package has to offer when it arrives in just under two months. Visual Concepts is filling an achingly obvious gap in the market with ample room for expansion, and I hope this initial wholesomeness isn't swiftly wiped away by corporate greed and excessive monetization. Imagine Lego Island was an open world kart racer with limitless creative freedom, and you’ve got 2K Drive. To people like me, that's nothing less than a nostalgic fever dream that I hope can stick the landing.

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Jade King is Lead Features Editor for TheGamer. Previously Gaming Editor over at Trusted Reviews, she can be found talking about games, anime and retweeting Catradora fanart @KonaYMA6.