Lego 2K Drive is an awesome new racing game from 2K and Visual Concepts (WWE 2K, NBA 2K), bringing four finely crafted Lego biomes and dozens of customisable Lego vehicles to life. After five years of development, we finally got our hands on Lego 2K Drive on PlayStation 5 and discovered that everything can indeed be awesome. With four different game modes and the ability to build your own vehicle using over 1,000 unique Lego blocks, Lego 2K Drive may be the perfect family racing game.

Set in BrickLandia, Lego 2K Drive is a third-person arcade racing game that Visual Concepts have called ‘casual and approachable’. There’s a story mode where you race your way to the Sky Cup Trophy, a Cup Series that has you racing multiple tracks back-to-back in a Grand Brix Cup Series for each biome, Race mode which lets you set up any race and Licence Class level and get racing quickly, and finally Minigames which you experience throughout the story mode, but can also play at your leisure.

There are four awesome biomes to explore in Lego 2K Drive, each with their own collectables, missions and races to complete. The first biome, Turbo Acres, is the smallest and introduces some of the key elements of the game, such as drifting, jumping, turbo, the three terrain types (road, off-road and water) and how your Lego car will morph into each terrain-type automatically. The next biome, Big Butte County, takes racing to the wild west with canyons and ravines while the third biome, Prospecto Valley, offers a pristine highland environment where you’ll find some of the biggest jumps in the game. The final biome is hidden behind a cloud until much later in the game, so we won’t say too much about it other than that it being a permanent night-time theme with monsters lurking around every corner.

On the surface, Lego 2K Drive sounded like it has the potential to be an awesome game, but the more we sunk our teeth into it the less substance we found. Each biome has just three races to complete and the fourth and final biome is locked behind repeating the first ten races three times. For a game that has been in development for five years, we’re not sure how they only managed to create ten main races with a few additional races in the post-game content. There is more content on the horizon, but it almost feels like 2K has released an incomplete game in the hopes of people buying the Year 1 Drive Pass or future expansions.

Handling of the numerous vehicles in Lego 2K Drive is a typically evolving experience. Each car has four different statistics to toy around with including top speed, acceleration, health and handling, and as usual, the vehicles you acquire later in the game have far better stats which allow you to revisit the ten cup races and win them on the higher difficulties. It seems a lot of the development hours have gone into the vehicles, and Lego fans will appreciate that more than ever in the awesome Garage mode.

If you’re a fan of building Lego (who isn’t?) then expect to spend hours in the Garage building your custom Lego vehicles from scratch, or customising all of the existing vehicles. There are over 1,000 unique blocks to build from and the building side of the game has been done as well as any Lego game we’ve played. There are three main features to building a car: Perks, Stats and Weight. Each car gets one perk from each of the three difficulty ratings, and they can range from increasing specific stats to decreasing the amount of time it takes for your vehicle to morph between different terrain types. Stat packages range from ‘Neat’ to ‘Super-Awesome’ and unlock as you progress, once again allowing for faster and better cars to be used later in the game. Weight classes affect your health and speed accordingly, and with six classes, you’ll likely be refining your custom vehicle to the block to squeeze it into your preferred class.

The last selection from the main menu is Unkie’s Emporium, an awesome mixed-currency store where you can cash in your Brickbux and Coins for new Minifigs, Vehicles and more. Both currencies can be acquired in-game, though Coins are premium and can be purchased using real money. At launch, we found that every item could be purchased using Brickbux but at the time of this review there have been no promises from 2K as to how premium the future content on Unkie’s Emporium will be.

The entirety of Lego 2K Drive can be played in couch co-op which is honestly where it really shines. There’s also online crossplay, meaning you can be playing against people from other consoles or even PC. There are options to play with friends online, while the Play With Everyone mode will matchmake you with other players of your skill level. Having crossplay means that we didn’t really notice any shortage of players online, though it will be interesting to see whether this game can create an awesome community or if it dwindles post-launch.

Whether it’s because the game launched across all platforms including the previous generation (PlayStation 5 is nearly three years old now) or because Visual Concepts took five years to make it, Lego 2K Drive is far from the most awesome looking game of 2023. Disappointingly, the environments aren’t filled with anywhere near as much Lego as we had hoped, with large real-world items like hoses and pick-axes dominating some of the vistas. The Lego vehicles are well-made, and we recognised some from our own collection, but when the recommended CPU requirement is a 9 year old i7 and videos showing framerate issues on the Switch version making the rounds online, we were left feeling less than impressed by Lego 2K Drive’s graphics.

Lego 2K Drive is a mixture of awesomeness and missed opportunities. The core of any racing game is races, and we felt let down by the variety of races and environments on offer at launch, particularly with one of the three non-starter biomes being locked behind game completion. Our score for this review bounced around a bit, but despite Lego 2K Drive lacking in some areas, the Garage mode is very well polished, and the ability to play the game in splitscreen co-op or take your custom-built cars online separate it from other arcade racers. Lego fans that are looking for a fun racing game should definitely check out Lego 2K Drive, and we’re expecting to see some awesome wacky and outrageous vehicles online in the coming weeks.

Developer: Visual Concepts & 2K

Release date: 19/05/2023

Rating: G