Earlier this year, 2K Games, in partnership with the LEGO Group, announced that it would be taking a fresh crack at the brick-built racing title. Officially launching today, LEGO 2K Drive races onto the scene to deliver a thrilling open-world adventure game, competitive kart racer, and garage to customize your very own vehicle. Detailed below, we’re diving into see just how the new brick-built world stacks up as well as chat with the game’s art director for a behind the scenes look at the experience.
Hands-on with LEGO 2K Drive
Right off the bat, I have to say what LEGO 2K Drive isn’t, mainly that this isn’t a reboot of the iconic 1999 game LEGO Racers. Friends, 9to5 readers, and other LEGO fans alike all shouted from their rooftops to ask me if I had any indication that this would be putting builders back in the driver’s seat for that nostalgic game. And just so you don’t get your hopes up, no this isn’t a spiritual successor to the over 20-year old racing game.
It’s actually so much more.
On top of getting to just play LEGO 2K Drive, the team behind the game was kind enough to give me a chance to talk with the title’s art director about the whole experience of building a LEGO game from the ground up. From that conversation, as well as exploring the world the team has created, it is very clear that the game has some of the most unique DNA that we’ve seen from a virtual collaboration with the LEGO Group.
It all starts with an open world to drive around as part of a main story campaign. Known as Bricklandia amongst the in-game universe, there are some sizable worlds to navigate around completing missions, racing new rivals, earning collectibles, and winning your way through mini games. Much like the other LEGO games we’ve seen in the past, the world itself isn’t entirely crafted from LEGO, yet embellished with tons of smaller brick-built models. There are entire buildings, trees, and of course cars that are all crafted out of bricks, all of which feature destruction physics that send pieces flying when you accidentally crash into them.
It very much continues the legacy of delivering a gameplay experience that feels like you’re playing with in a massive LEGO sandbox. I only ended up spending a few hours driving around the world, but did very much enjoy just how much life was breathed into the whole campaign. This might not be why many adult builders and up buying the game, but it definitely is worth playing through.
It may be called 2K Drive, but there’s plenty of competitive racing
Alongside the open-world, which is worthy of the AAA game title in its own right, there’s of course the actual racing element. So while it may be called 2K Drive, there is in fact still plenty of actual racing to be done.
Much like you’d expect from a typical kart-style racing tile, 2K Drive is packed with different modes for taking on opponents. There’s of course just racing through the tons of levels against computer drivers, but also local co-op to really keep up with the LEGO video game trends. Online multiplayer of course makes a cut, too. Aside from just how wide of a variety of tracks there are on launch day compared to some other racers out there, the actual gameplay is largely what you’d expect. There are power ups that let you do everything from shoot comically large rockets at other drivers to trap them in spider webs and even warp into hyperspace to go from last place into first.
But one thing that is different from other racing games I have played is just how intricate the actual driving mechanics are. There is a lot more to learn than just accelerating and drifting around corners. Each of the cars have their own advantages and disadvantages, leading to lots of different driving experiences. That variety and higher skill ceiling means that LEGO fans are going to be able to play 2K Drive for hours on end. Replayability is something that every LEGO game is known for, and the folks over at 2K have no signs of breaking the tradition.
Craft your own vehicles, too
Then there’s the garage, which is easily my favorite aspect of the game. As fun as all of the open-world exploration and co-op racing is, being able to dive in and craft my own vehicle was one of the more alluring parts. Even better than just some half-hearted attempted to let you do that, I really do have to say that this is one of the more complex and intricate systems out there for crafting with LEGO in a virtual setting. It’s like a more limited version of LEGO Digital Design, with some quality of life adjustments that make this actually usable with a controller.
Sure there is small learning curve for getting the hang of how bricks interact with the 3D space. But once you get the hang of it, you can easily start building out detailed creations. The very first thing that I set out to do was craft an X-Wing like the massive Star Wars fan that I am. It really didn’t take long to end up with a model that I was proud of – at least in the looks department.
One of the more interesting parts about making your own ride is that building different vehicles doesn’t just change the look of your ride, but also how it performs. The X-Wing that I meticulously crafted may look like it’s ready to take on the Death Star, but when it actually hits the track that is a very different story. The elongated design doesn’t handle turns very well and ultimately leads to a more difficult driving experience. So I may be getting more style points than anyone else on the circuit during online races, but there are actual mechanics in the game that adjust how cars feel on the road versus just how they actually look.
I easily spent half of the time that I played the game this week just messing around the garage. It’s such a fun experience in its own right, and only makes the rest of the game that much better. You can of course drive around the story mode in your custom-built hotrod, but also take to the online multiplayer side of things to leave opponents in the dust driving your own vehicle.
Chatting with LEGO 2K Drive’s visual concepts art director
Prior to actually getting my hands on LEGO 2K Drive, I was able to virtually sit down with the game’s visual concepts art director, Emmanuel Valdez, to talk about the title. Throughout our conversation, he detailed him and his team’s relationship with the LEGO Group and LEGO bricks at large, talking about the whole experience of assembling a game like this in the first place.
There’s been other LEGO games in the past, and what makes this different when we talk about a unique formula. For one thing if you look at just the name of the game – LEGO 2K Drive – it can speaks to a lot of what LEGO is all about. A lot of ties in with vehicles in the past – There’s Speed Champions and you can buy a City that’ll always have a vehicle in it – we looked at that and our art team has a real deep history on racing and driving games – specifically arcade racing games – so the challenge was how can we do something new and distinctive with the LEGO brand that people haven’t really seen before and for me as the art director – I have to focus on how I can visually make it different.
The thing with LEGO is that we know what LEGO looks like. LEGO Bricks have a style and the design philosophy behind everything from buildings to vehicles so we had to really understand all of that and at the end you’re going to see a interesting blend of real familiar stuff that you’ve seen from LEGO, but you’ll also see a bunch of new different ones – and that’s what LEGO is all about – it’s about creativity and imagination. So they gave us the opportunity to design our own vehicles and minifigure characters, and that was a lot of fun.
Emmanuel Valdez, Visual Concepts Art Director at 2K Games
Q: Is there any DNA of the old school LEGO Racers game that has survived for 2K Drive, or are you going for something entirely new?
It’s entirely new. We looked at a lot of games, and not just LEGO games, for inspiration. And it’s not just games, but also entertainment and everything with LEGO. When we looked at what we wanted to do with 2K [Drive] when LEGO approached us and said what kind of game do you want to make?, because our guys have a rich history is arcade racers, we were like let’s make a LEGO racing game.
So LEGO Racers didn’t come up – it’s all about bringing something new to the table.
There’s a reason that we’re calling it LEGO 2K Drive. It’s not called LEGO 2K Racing because you do more than race. We have a whole open-world. We like to call it a real AAA quality driving adventure game because we do have cart style races with power ups and you’re in circuit tracks, but we also have a ton of activities. We have mini games, we have collectibles, we have challenges, we have quests – things that you wouldn’t normally think to do with a vehicle, but in this game you can.
Q: Do you have any personal background with LEGO?
I grew up with LEGO. I am going to age myself, but this is before the days of having instructions and building kits a certain way. I’d say I’m more into classic bricks – what can you make out of it with your imagination. I think that was beneficial because when we started building stuff [for 2K Drive], it kind of reminded me oh I have the world here, what can I do with all these bricks.
So having a little bit of the LEGO background actually helps. Now I have four and a half years of experience building things, I know the part numbers, I know how things connect now, I understand the system intimately and I see LEGO in a different light now.
Q: Do you remember what your first set was?
I do remember having the old space command set, with the blue vehicles. Growing up in the 70s and 80s that was available, and then when they started doing some of the Star Wars lines I was buying up a lot of those kits.
Q: Were there any challenges with bringing ideas into the virtual LEGO world?
That was an ongoing collaboration, really understanding the brand and what they want to bring to gamers; want to make sure we’re aligned with that. So we collaborate and work on ideas. They’d tell us maybe that’s in line with what the LEGO brand is all about, and sometimes it isn’t. That’s the great thing is that they’re a great partner that we can openly share things with and they give us feedback.
9to5Toys’ Take
Leading up to today’s launch of the game, the 2K team was incredibly bold in the way they hyped up the game. There really is no other way to describe just how confident the folks behind the title were, especially when it came to getting a life-long LEGO fan like myself behind the virtual driver seat. So on top of just being excited to check out the latest LEGO game, I was so eager to see if it could possibly live up to the excellent that 2K was drumming up.
And after getting to play LEGO 2K Drive over the past week, I really do have to give credit where credit is due. The new racing game really is anything but just a standard kart racer. It’s full of life and charm in a way that makes this far more fun to play than just a typical racing title. Part of that is all the customization and actually complex racing mechanics, but also just how deep of an understanding of LEGO is built into the game from the ground up.
My conversation with the game’s art director was really all I needed to know that this was going to be a thrilling experience, and my time actually exploring the virtual brick-built world just confirmed that ten times over. 2K Drive as fun as I’ve had playing a game in ages, and easily a LEGO game that will go down in history as one of the best we’ve seen.
Over the past few months, there has been a lot of speculation and conversation in the LEGO community about the future of its games. Some of the previously reported on games are seemingly nowhere to be found, and a lot of builders have wondered just what the future of LEGO gaming looked like. If there was one at all.
LEGO 2K Drive enters at the perfect time to show that the future is so bright, and that the wait was more than worth it. It’s a love letter to fans who grew up crafting their entirely own creations out of piles of bricks just as much as it for more dedicated builders like myself who are after a more intricate.
Buy LEGO 2K Drive now
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