One of the biggest features of 2K and Visual Concept’s latest game Lego 2K Drive is the ability to create your own vehicles by placing them like actual Lego bricks. It’s an intriguing concept, though not entirely new (the old Lego Racers also let you create cars this way).
Still, it’s worth trying out and seeing how robust the vehicle builder is, and what better way to do that than by straight-up recreating actual Lego sets?
Lego has made tons of sets featuring vehicles, including the Speed Champions line dedicated to recreating real-life cars in Lego scale. So there’s plenty of choice to pick. But this is where I find the first hurdle in Lego 2K Drive.
When you build a car from scratch, you don’t start from nothing. Instead, you get to pick the chassis size which includes four tyres for street and off-road cars, and a boat hull for the boats.
This is a problem because not all Lego sets adhere to the standard chassis selection, especially the Speed Champion ones. Sure, there is a Street Champion and Dirt Champion that uses the specific chassis piece for 8-stud-wide cars introduced specifically for the line, but it comes with the tyres and axles attached. Some sets, like the Dodge Charger R/T based on the Fast And Furious movies, have this neat trick of where its rear axle is built lower than the front, which results in the car tilting slightly down on the front to give that aggressive muscle car look. It’s a neat trick! And a trick you can’t replicate here.
Also, from the handful of sets I tried, the rear axle placement is one stud too close to the front to replicate the sets I tried.
So, at this point I felt like I should give up, but then I figured that I could try an older Speed Champions set, which doesn’t use that specific chassis piece and is still in line with cars in the Lego City and Lego Creator sets being six studs wide. After some messing about, I settled for the Porsche 911 Speed Champions set, the one with the Forza Horizon 4 promo as it was also featured on that game’s DLC.
The build here, using the Ace Of Race chassis as a base, is replicable, but not 1-to-1. And this lies from the second limitation of Lego 2K Drive’s vehicle builder: you don’t get access to all the bricks right from the get-go. Some brick pieces are unlocked that you can find in the story mode, while others need to be purchased from the in-game store.
The Porsche 911 uses a specific fender piece that is more full- so while I can use it, it leaves visible gaps on the car’s side. The game has Technic pieces, so in theory I can recreate the 911’s iconic circular headlights using the 3×1 piece with a Technic pinhole and two circles perpendicular to the pinhole. There’s only a 2×1 piece with one circle- one stud short.
At first, I thought that some of the brick pieces are just not in the game, which is a shame. But I don’t know if it’s more annoying or less when I did find some of the missing brick pieces I need for the 911 build. One of them is a 2×1 grill, which I found on one of the pre-order cars (the Aquadirt ones with the 2K logo). The other is a 6×2 thin piece where one row is rounded off with only 4 studs, used to recreate the round back-end and taillights of the 911. That piece exists in the starter car, a Lego City set.
And there’s also the 4×1 thin piece which only has two studs on top, used to create the rear bumper. That one I managed to unlock from doing one of the many quests in Story Mode.
So, you can’t just recreate all your MOCs or any Lego set from Lego 2K Drive right from the get-go. Some brick pieces need to be unlocked first.
But the builder itself? It’s pretty powerful. Bricks can be auto snapped in a satisfying manner. And interestingly, as long as it’s a legal way to snap the bricks together, you can place them. So if there’s a gap between two bricks that you need to plug in, a brick can be magically attached to that gap, rather than having to rip apart the parts that block it like in real life.
Rotating and placing the bricks in 3D space with a controller can still be a bit fiddly, but it becomes easier over time. You can individually select bricks to group move or colour them, or use the “select up” bit which handily selects all the bricks that directly attached to the current selection, and then you can grab the whole cluster like if you’re doing it with your bare hands which is need.
You can also change colours easily. Ever wondered if a particular Lego car would look nicer if you give it a different paint job? In real life, that’s going to be a hard and expensive task sourcing out the same pieces in different colours. Thankfully the game makes repainting placed bricks easy.
Finding brick pieces can be time-consuming, but the brick filter is great. Just set the how long and wide the pieces you’re looking for and the search should bring up the piece you want (should you have it unlocked). It could be further improved. Like, have the brick pieces labelled with the category they are in, should you want to just tab through the categories to find them later. I have a few brick pieces that I can only find through the filter despite my efforts inspecting the tabs of categories over and over and failing to find them there.
I also wish that the game allows you to just make a separate build on the side rather than having each brick place be legally attached to the vehicle. Modern Lego instructions always have you go make separate mini-builds only to attach it to the main set afterwards. So building trickier builds that are just not normal brick-laying, say working with Technic pieces or making parts that attach to interesting angles, requires a workaround. Like placing a couple of temporary bricks that are attached to the vehicle but far enough to not interfere with the current mini-build.
The other thing I figured out is that you don’t need to follow all the instructions to recreate a Lego set. Some of the build techniques are done for structure rigidity, and the coloured pieces, especially the internal ones, are just there to make the building process easier. There are many other parts of the 911 build that are either locked or to specialised to be in Lego 2K Drive at launch, which I improvise replacements for.
And so, the result of this three-hour build is the Poorsche. It replicates the Porsche 911 Speed Champions with whatever the starter pieces that are made available at the start of the game. It’s close enough. The cabin is one-stud too long, the rear spoiler doesn’t line up well as one solid piece like the real set, and the front lights are off. But it’s close enough.
In conclusion, Lego 2K Drive’s vehicle builder has all the tools that will allow you to recreate Lego sets and your own MOCs. But there are limits. The chassis restrictions constrict a bit of the freedom, and if you know exactly what to build you probably don’t have all the right brick pieces accessible to you until you progress further in the main game.
Still, I can’t wait to see the wild creations the community has made. A post-launch update will add the ability to download creations by other players, so I’m betting someone have made a better Poorsche by then. Or the game just released these licensed cars in its post-launch updates.