The spirit of 80s racing games lives on in Lego 2K Drive | Games

Classic video video games by no means actually die. Whereas they’re nonetheless remembered by designers and producers, their affect lives on and so they can crop up in probably the most sudden locations. 2K Video games has introduced a brand new settlement with Lego, which can start with Lego 2K Drive, an open-world racing sport created by veteran studio Visible Ideas. It combines the explorable world and discoverable challenges of Forza Horizon with the enjoyable dealing with, weapons and power-ups of Mario Kart – however its origins lie in a totally totally different set of automobile video games.

Government producer Mark Pierce began his video games profession at Atari within the late Eighties, engaged on the corporate’s basic racers RoadBlasters, Street Riot and San Francisco Rush, and was round whereas one other staff was crafting the legendary 3D racing sim Laborious Drivin’. “I used to be so lucky as a result of a whole lot of the unique Atari guys had been nonetheless there,” he remembers. “David Sheppard, who was the second software program engineer employed and Peter Takaichi’s group who did all of the mechanical design. I knew Jed Margolin, one of many guys who invented power suggestions steering. It was unbelievable, the tradition was simply so sturdy, so artistic … Lots of us at Visible Ideas South have a heritage in making arcade racing video games. We actually needed to make an arcade-style sport that will be straightforward to be taught, however exhausting to grasp.”

Pierce’s ambition has been to convey the arcade design mentality of Eighties Atari to fashionable open-world racing sport design. Gamers drive across the lusciously vibrant world of Bricklandia, unlocking races, duties and missions. There are Lego cities full of vibrant retailers and eating places, Lego canyons and Lego farms (stuffed with cute Lego pigs). You possibly can race by means of gothic castles populated by ghosts and large spiders. All over the place you go, mini figures wander about, usually with little challenges to offer to you. Taking part in an early demo of the sport, I discovered myself leaping over rocky chasms, searching down and retrieving misplaced characters and working over robotic invasion forces. The story mode has a lot of cut-scenes that seize the everyday knockabout humour of the Lego motion pictures and video games.

The Atari affect will be most keenly felt within the tremendous accessible dealing with mannequin. There’s a giant emphasis on drifting – faucet the brake on entry to a nook and your backend readily glides out, permitting you to slip by means of acres of tarmac, controlling the angle with the analogue stick. There are three totally different surfaces to drive on – avenue, off-road and water – and, cleverly, your experience immediately transforms into the suitable automobile as quickly as you want it: hurtle over a ramp right into a river and your truck is all of a sudden a speedboat. This frictionless enjoyable extends to collisions – most objects you hit, from fences to timber, explode into Lego bricks on affect with out impeding your progress. Certainly, smashing stuff helps restore your personal automobile, so, identical to within the Lego Star Wars video games, breaking issues is actively inspired.

The fluidity and verticality of the sport, the place realism is instantly eschewed in favour of stunts and thrills, stroke a chord in my memory of Halfway’s under-appreciated arcade racers of the 90s – the likes of the Cruis’n sequence and Hydro Thunder. Seems, it’s not a coincidence. “We have now Brian Silva and Steve Ranck at Visible Ideas – they each labored on Hydro Thunder,” Mark explains. “Everyone knows that there’s an actual ability, an actual nuance, to understanding the way you make one thing playful, how to make sure vehicles can drive up partitions easily, the way you make it enjoyable to smash into stuff. It’s buttery – you simply undergo issues … [tuning racing games is] a protracted, iterative course of, it’s a form of craftsmanship.”

All through the world are retailers the place you should buy new clothes and customized gadgets to your automobile and driver. The sport additionally has an in-depth building mode the place you possibly can construct your personal automobiles from scratch utilizing round a thousand totally different Lego bricks, in addition to stickers. Apparently, you’ll have the ability to modify ready-made automobiles, too, and though 2K wouldn’t affirm it, it’s doubtless that creators will have the ability to share their customized designs with different gamers.

As for power-ups, we’re undoubtedly in Mario Kart territory. Throughout races, you possibly can decide up homing missions, pace boosts and a cloaking system, in addition to spider webs that act like Mario Kart’s ink stains, obscuring the display for different drivers. The event construction can also be acquainted, a sequence of cup occasions the place races are tiered by problem. 2K is promising six-player aggressive on-line racing, however there’s additionally split-screen for each cooperative and aggressive native multiplayer.

It’s been 20 years since US developer Excessive Voltage Software program launched Lego Racers, a driving sim that mixed the knockabout gameplay of Mario Kart with the visible fashion and building potentialities of Lego. A sequel adopted a few years later, however one way or the other the compelling thought of a build-it-yourself Lego racing sport fell by the wayside as Traveller’s Tales bombarded the market with its glorious Lego film tie-ins. Now it’s again – and it’s good to see that in such an enormous, extremely branded new household sport, the legacy of some cult Eighties and 90s arcade greats lives on.