“Lego 2K Drive” sounds like a charity event: a two-kilometre fun run perhaps, sponsored by, or with the goal of donating, Lego. It is, in fact, a video game – an open-world racer, richly encrusted with bricks – but its mission is no less in the spirit of giving. The aim of any Lego video game, surely, is to provide us with something to do with our completed creations. In real life, the joy (or at least the contended, driven quiet) is in the building. After you have plugged it all together, and you’re left with your Death Star, your Batmobile, or whatever, they wind up trophied on the shelf, to be lightly trimmed with dust. Not so in Lego 2K Drive, where life is bright, pre-assembled, and anything but still. If only it were more than the sum of its parts.
What are those parts, exactly? For 2K Drive, developer Visual Concepts has looked to the likes of Forza Horizon, Mario Kart, and Crash Team Racing. This is a wise decision, kitbashing with the choicest of kits, but it invites harsh contrast. The weapons that you collect during races, for example, lack the wit of those in Mario Kart. Take the spiderweb, which fastens onto foes and causes them to come unstuck. It’s a spin on the Blooper, the wide-eyed squid that squirts ink on your opponent’s screen; but it lacks the slippery humour, the slight taunting pause before the Blooper gets down to his murky work, letting your enemy know that they have been suckered just before it happens. Instead, the web is spring-loaded and instant, cocooning them in bad handling until they hop it off.
Then again, not every comparison is a damning one. The structure of the adventure here may crib lovingly from Forza Horizon, with its stretches of open country and its heavy strewing of activities, but I wasn’t in the least bit surprised to learn that the inhabitants of Bricklandia, as it’s called, are actually less plastic than the staff at the Horizon Festival. I adore that series, but I always shudder at the assault of dead positivity, all halogen smiles and stale encouragement. What a relief, playing Lego 2K Drive, to be sped into the tutelage of Clutch Racington, a stubbled grin in a helmet, hands clipped to the wheel at ten and two. We hear, via a news report, that Clutch is an “Ex-bigshot driver, now charismatic mentor who trains rookie racers. Which is lucky for you and convenient for the story!”
