The way the cars handle feels way different from any other chaotic-racing-game-with-items I’ve ever played. Drifting doesn’t lock you into turning the direction you started the drift in; you can even drift straight forwards, although that isn’t worth it since it slows you down. You can freely jump quite a significant height into the air to dodge items or enter shortcuts, although your ability to air steer is limited, so be careful with that. The main thing about the racing is managing your boost resource, which you gain mainly by destroying props (fences, traffic cones, ect.) and by drifting. Overall it felt pretty refreshing compared to other racing games I’ve played. It also has a mechanic where you switch between 3 types of vehicles (street car, offroad car, and boat) based on the terrain, which is automatic by default but you can choose to make it so you have to transform manually.
There are 3 speed classes (C, B, and A) and B class extends your boost meter and gives you the ability to get an even faster boost if you manage to boost continuously for long enough of a time, and A class gives you even more boost meter and the ability to spend all your boost rapidly for an extra powerful boost if you can fill the full meter. This makes the higher classes a lot more fun since you can get in the groove and get one big long powerful boost if you can keep continuously destroying objects to keep the meter up.
The item pickups aren’t super interesting but are quite satisfying to hit enemy cars with. Tracks have a mix of fixed item placements and random item boxes.
The singleplayer has rewards exclusive to C class, though, which is kinda annoying. And, ironically, C class feels the hardest to beat the CPUs on since the lack of the more powerful boosts limits the skill ceiling more. C being harder is kinda counter to how it should work in Mario Kart or any other racing game I’ve played…
The rubberbanding is kind of aggressive, although it didn’t bother me personally too much, although I can see other people getting really frustrated by it.
Yes, the game has a lot of MTX available, but the singleplayer gives you quite a lot of Brickbux so you can still get whatever it is you want for free. I only played the singleplayer, but apparently the multiplayer gives you absolutely pitifully tiny amounts of Brickbux, so beware if multiplayer is your main priority.
You can build your own cars with an editor that lets you do just about anything you can do with real LEGO bricks, so I made some pretty silly looking cars for my playthrough. The lack of a minifig editor is kinda frustrating, though, you’re stuck with premade characters only.
There are also 4 battlepasses that are not FOMO but do make you pay to get a lot of the stuff. In the about 15 hours I played the game, I only completed half of one of them. Grinding them doesn’t really seem worth it.
The game has several large open worlds that are pretty fun to drive around in, and have various sidequests and hidden collectibles. At some point they added a 5th, mountain themed area in a free update, although updates for the game seem to be concluded.
Open world exploration runs very well on my computer, but races have bad but inconsistent frame drops. I assume my computer can’t handle all the physics objects created by the CPU cars breaking things.
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