![]() ![]() This post contains affiliate links for your convenience. 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.One of the most educational toys available also happens to be one of the most inviting! The skills children learn from LEGOs are important and incredible! If you never really thought of them as super educational, you will soon see the benefits to letting children play with LEGOs. 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. It's creative, but it's also a bit of a mess. 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. There is a lot here for a young kid to enjoy, especially one who is tuned into Lego. 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. 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. 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 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. Lego 2K Drive is a small game that expects you to play it over and over again. 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. 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. 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. ![]() Unfortunately, winning every race without breaking a sweat did. Jumping into the river as a mechanical burger and watching the bricks flip around into a bat-winged speed boat never gets old. ![]() 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. The game does have one extremely cool thing going for it though. 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. 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. This might not come as a surprise, but that’s underestimating just how much the game is for children. 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. 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. 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. ![]() Lego 2K Drive is a strange beast in this world. 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. These days, Lego is playing by the book more than ever. ![]()
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