If you’ve been thinking to yourself, “I need some new Legos to put on my shelf,” the company’s got you covered. Along with its newly revealed set for Batman: The Animated Series, a new array of sets for its Super Mario line are in the works.
Mario Kart Live But With Hot Wheels!
As part of its Mar10 Day celebration (seen below), Nintendo announced it was partnering with Lego again for three new sets. The Bowser Express Train set, inspired by the characterr’s locomotive in the games, comes with two carriages and a car in the back, plus a pair of train stations individually representing Bowser’s Castle and the Mushroom Kingdom. Like in the games, Lego Mario gets onboard the train by being blasted out of a cannon and onto a handcart.
Celebrating MARIO DAY with LEGO Super Mario
King Boo’s Haunted Mansion sees Lego Luigi fight enemies in the estate and unlock a treasure chest (or sit down on a chouch that floats). Last but not least, the Battle with Roy set has Lego Peach defend her castle from the Koopaling and his Chain Chomp Chariot with Lego Mario and Lego Toad at her side.
At the very end of the video, Lego revealed it was working on Mario Kartsets aiming to drop sometime in 2025. There’s no real glimpse of what it looks like, sadly, but it’s nice to hear that one of the character’s biggest spinoff franchises is getting some bricky love in the near future. Next year is also supposed to see the release of the next Nintendo console—Mario Kart games tend to release early into a system’s lifecycle, so it’s easy to imagine the next mainline entry will come sometime not long after that new console drops.
Lego Half Life 2 is a mod that does exactly what the name suggests. Created by Not Dave or Daniel, it takes the classic first-person shooter and turns it into a LEGO game, complete with bricky inhabitants.
Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga’s Air Combos Make Me Feel Skilled AF
It doesn’t overhaul the entire game, so don’t go expecting bricky vehicles and bricky landscapes and bricky buildings; the only things being swapped out here are the characters. But given most LEGO games leave a lot of the landscapes “normal” anyway, the effect is still pretty good!
There are some perspective issues, of course. Swapping out full-size humans for tiny little yellow men and women (and aliens) will do that to your viewpoint. But it looks manageable, and more importantly, it looks very funny.
Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse was brought to the big screen by an incredibly diverse team of artists and animators — maybe even more diverse than you would think.
One of the most interesting members on the team was Preston Mutanga, a 14-year-old boy. The high schooler had actually put together a shot-for-shot remake of the trailer, which the film’s producers caught wind of on Twitter. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, some of the producers of Spider-Verse, were also the directors of the The LEGO Movie and The LEGO Movie 2. It was at this point they realized they wanted to do a scene in a LEGO universe.
“We found out that it was a 14-year-old kid who made it and we were like, ‘This looks incredibly sophisticated for a nonadult, nonprofessional to have made,’ Miller told The New York Times. “It blew us all away, including some of the best animators in the world.”
They reached out to Mutanga, whose father had shown him a 3D software that helped him make his own amateur animated LEGO videos. Mutanga then worked on Across the Spider-Verse’s LEGO sequence, supposedly animating it “after finishing his homework on school nights.”
Mutanga said that what he learned working on the film was “the feedback aspect of [moviemaking], like how much stuff actually gets changed from the beginning to the final product.”
Mutanga says he wants to become an animator and director when he grows up. You’ve got to think he’s off to a great start. Here is the Across the Spider-Verse LEGO trailer he made that got this whole ball rolling in the first place.
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The best Marvel and Spider-Man references in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse you might have missed.
I was on board with Lego 2K Drive the moment I learned we were getting an open-world Lego racing game, complete with the ability to build your own vehicles. And having played nearly 12 hours so far, I’m still having a lot of fun with the game. But it’s impossible to ignore a nagging feeling that it really wants me to spend money in its in-game store.
Announced in March, Lego 2K Drive is the first game to come from a deal struck between 2K and Lego back in 2022. The two companies apparently decided to glue their names together and add “drive” to the end to create what might be the most boring video game title of 2023. Thankfully, the video game itself is much, much more fun than its drab title, which sounds less like a wacky open-world racer filled with cool power-ups and more like a bad sports game featuring a sport I’ve never heard of but which is nonetheless popular.
Bland name, but fun Lego racing
Get past the bland name and Lego 2K Drive comes right out of the gate firing on all cylinders with an exciting CG cutscene and a fairly short but fun tutorial. It makes a good first impression. And the moment the game gave me full control, I was in awe of what I saw. Lego 2K Drive is set in a brick-built world filled with side missions, mini-games, collectibles, and so, so many Lego vehicles. It’s very colorful and gorgeous. And massive! The open world of 2K Drive is split into a few different biomes, each with its own theme, characters, missions, and vehicles. Playing this game is like getting to play in the basement of the rich kid you knew in elementary school who had every Lego set. Lucky bastard. But now I, Zack, have all the bricks and cool sets to play with!
The basic setup behind the main story mode is that an evil racer hates you—for reasons the game jokingly doesn’t elaborate on—and you have to win the big trophy to prove yourself the better driver. To get a chance at that big win you’ll have to earn a bunch of flags by beating rivals, leveling up to unlock new races, rank up, and eventually gain access to the big final tournament. There’s not much to the actual story, but the writing is similar to the recent Lego movies, occasionally making me smile and rarely annoying. And I think kids will enjoy the zanier moments.
Screenshot: 2K Games / Lego / Kotaku
But to win the big trophy and prove yourself to your evil rival, you’ll need to do more than race Lego-built cars around various tracks, as piloting boats and mastering off-road vehicles are on your agenda, too. And like the cars, all of these are brick-built. However, you don’t actively choose between each type of vehicle. Instead, as you race around, the game auto-swaps between either your car, boat, or off-road ride of choice. This streamlines what could have been an annoying part of 2K Drive, and also means that you can explore the entire Lego-filled world of Bricklandia as you please.
Driving real fast and reach a river? Keep driving and you’ll just turn into a boat! Take a sharp turn off a paved road and onto some dunes? Don’t worry, the game will swap your car out for a jeep without missing a beat. It takes the open-world driving of Forza Horizon and makes it even more arcadey and exciting as you can literally go anywhere at any time.
All the bricks and cool stuff in the world can’t save a racing game with bad driving physics or poor controls, and luckily, Lego 2K Drive avoids those pitfalls and is a blast to play. Once I mastered the drifting and jumping controls, I was masterfully swooping, swinging, and gliding around the world like a Lego pro. And on Xbox Series X performance was smooth as butter, making it easy to enjoy all the high-speed action.
Lego 2K Drive’s disappointing microtransactions
The moment bricks start to fall off this creation is when you start to dig around the menus, where you’ll encounter a store complete with a season pass. While the game does feature an amazing, in-depth, and easy-to-use vehicle builder—letting you make nearly anything you can imagine—it also features some disappointing microtransactions.
Technically, you can just drive around, have some fun, unlock some cars, build your own creations, and never really interact with the in-game store. But, if you don’t want to (or can’t) build something like an ambulance or a giant hamburger car, the store offers official Lego builds that you can buy and use in-game. However, all of these cars cost $10,000 Lego Bux. And after playing for 12 hours I’ve only reached around $8,000.
This is the part where 2K Games would, while twirling its mustache, likely say: Don’t worry, you can buy some Bux if you want to. This is true, sure, but it’s so out of place in this otherwise colorful romp of creativity and wackiness.
And the way the economy is balanced, it really feels like you’ll need to fork over some cash if you want to buy more than one of these pre-made cars without grinding for hours. It’s also sad that the in-game store contains Lego part packs for sale. These are cheaper than the cars (thankfully) and the builder in-game does come with a lot of parts available for free (and you earn more by completing missions), but the fact that some bricks and bits are locked behind a paywall—even one that you can bypass via grinding—is frustrating.
Screenshot: 2K Games / Lego / Kotaku
The other big part of Lego 2K Drive is multiplayer, which I’ve only barely poked as there weren’t many other players online while I played the game before release. The online races play similarly to the single-player races, but with the added wrinkle that your opponents might have spent hours figuring out how to build the ideal, perfect race car. Or a giant dick. Or maybe they just spent some real cash and bought a car using Bux. Until the game is out in the wild, it will be hard to say how multiplayer will shake out, but I have some concerns.
It’s really a shame that such a lovely and fun open-world sandbox is tied to stuff like a season pass, premium currencies, and expensive in-game purchases. Perhaps 2K will tweak some levers to make it easier to earn and unlock new cars—which would be nice—but until then the specter of greed will always be there, nagging at me as I build, smash, and race.
This week, all at once, a perfect storm of deals, discounts, and sales has hit the Nintendo Switch eShop. Batten down the hatches, open up your wallets, and check out some of these limited-time deals, including massive savings on numerous Lego titles, Mortal Kombat games, and hits from Capcom, Ubisoft, and Bandai Namco.
Before we go any further, just note that—with the exception of Ubisoft’s Mario + Rabbids—there aren’t any Mario, Zelda, or Kirby games on sale. Instead of first-party discounts, all of these sales are focused on third-party publishers and developers. But there are still plenty of great games to grab up for cheaper than usual, even if Mario and Luigi aren’t part of it.
Here are some of the best deals I spotted cruising through the various sales currently happening on the eShop. While all of these sales are ending at slightly different times, you more or less have until the end of the month (or a few days past that) to take advantage of these discounts.
Now, with that out of the way, here are the best deals I found so far. (The figures in parentheses are the normal prices.)
Another one aimed at older kids, Nuts is the bonkers combination of Firewatch and…squirrel conspiracy theories?
In this one, you set up cameras to observe the behavior of squirrels in Melmoth Forest, and start discovering some very odd stuff. This develops into a story about the effect corporations have on the environment, and doesn’t wrap things up with a neat bow and happy ending. It’s obviously a great conversation starter, as well as a fun, sometimes unsettling game to play.
The reason it’s rated Teen is because of the presence of one curse word, “bullshit,” so there’s a good chance that’ll breeze past the more innocent, or not really bother the less so. But obviously the subject matter won’t quite match the “cute squirrels!” expectations of younger players.
There are more suggestions over at the Family Video Game Database, and you can curate your own lists based on your own kids’ proclivities.
Hopefully there’s something here that’ll help pass some of the yawning stretch of Sundays that makes up Christmas to New Year, and you might even end up not entirely resenting it.
Updated 12/21/22: We’ve removed Boomerang X, and added on Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, Trombone Champ, and Escape Simulator.
