LEGO 2K Drive Preview: Embracing the Spirit of Imagination - IGN

The latest LEGO racer is an arcade-y romp in an open world.

I admit that when I first sat down to play LEGO 2K Drive, I was skeptical. After all, Forza Horizon, which long ago mastered open-world arcade-y driving, already did the whole LEGO thing with Forza Horizon 4's stellar LEGO Speed Champions expansion from 2019. But LEGO 2K Drive won me over fairly quickly thanks to its fuller embrace of the LEGO universe.

What do I mean by that? For starters, it leans harder into the power of imagination that defined my meatspace LEGO experience as a kid and probably yours too. When you leave the pavement in 2K Drive, your LEGO car automatically transforms into an off-road ATV, just like you’d imagine it when you were a kid. And if you go in the water, you don't "drown" and get respawned along the shore. Instead, your vehicle transforms again into a boat. These are the things I would imagine while I was playing with my LEGO vehicle creations as a kid, but here that spirit of play is baked right into the game on the screen. And it’s this vehicle loadout approach – yes, you earn multiple vehicles in each category and can create custom loadouts depending on the biome you're in and the activity you're participating in – that differentiates LEGO 2K Drive from the four-year-old Forza Horizon 4 expansion pack.

It's not the only thing, though. This is a LEGO experience from the ground up, unlike Forza. There's a story mode, voiced by appropriately cheesy announcers and featuring goofy characters with silly names like Clutch Racington and Parker Carr (get it?), along with mini-games, and a garage in which you can build your own LEGO vehicle creations (though sadly not share them, the developers confirmed. Update: 2K reached to to clarify that this feature will be added after launch). 2K Drive also includes two-player split-screen and six-player online play.

I started my playtime with LEGO 2K Drive in Turbo Acres, the introductory region where you'll learn all of the basics, like turbo boosting, drifting, and handbrake turns. It's all standard arcade-racing stuff. But 2K Drive takes away a lot of the literal barriers that can impede your progress as you cruise around the area by allowing you to simply smash through them. Everything is made of LEGO bricks, after all. You can't barrel through everything, naturally, but a lot of the obstacles that would hold you up in other driving games become fodder for the front end of your vehicle.

Naturally, you'll need to complete lots of races and activities in order to unlock the next biome, Big Butte (LOL). One early sidequest has you drifting through a field of LEGO-fied giant mushrooms in a concentrated area until you've smashed them all. Another has you using your vehicle to push a giant egg into a giant skillet. And, obviously, there are lots of races. In them, you pick up and skillfully deploy Mario Kart-like powerups such as homing missiles, an EMP blast, an invisibility device that will let you pass through rivals for a short time, spider webs to slow up your opponents, and more.

But for me, the most fun aspect of LEGO 2K Drive was that three-vehicle hook. When you hit the water, you feel like you’re playing Hydro Thunder (which, perhaps not coincidentally, 2K Drive creative director Brian Silva worked on). Off-road, your traction eases up and you can go for big jumps and drifts, and when you’re on the streets, speed and handbrake turns become the focus. And you’ll hardly find any real-world cars here, aside from a LEGO McLaren I saw. Instead, it’s stuff the developers at Visual Concepts have cooked up along with some classic LEGO car builds of yesteryear.

In all, LEGO 2K Drive has an even more all-ages appeal than Forza Horizon 4’s LEGO Speed Champions DLC does. It has the LEGO DNA in every pixel you see on the screen, and if there’s enough to do in the open world over the course of many hours as you try to ultimately qualify for and win the Sky Cup Grand Prix, then it’s got a good chance to find success. Creating your own LEGO vehicles is a nice addition, but as I mentioned, it’s downright criminal that you can’t export and share them with your friends at launch. Nevertheless, LEGO 2K Drive stands a good chance to be a welcome addition to all members of your household regardless of their age when it’s released on all major platforms on May 19.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN's executive editor of previews and host of both IGN's weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He's a North Jersey guy, so it's "Taylor ham," not "pork roll." Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.