LEGO Racers 2

Before you get to a starting grid, you get a beach. Sandy Bay is a small drivable island with a garage, a few townsfolk to bump into and side tasks scattered around its coast, and it sets the tone for everything that follows: this is a kart racer built inside an adventure game's skeleton. You roll around, talk to characters, find the person who unlocks the next event, then commit to a circuit. For a 2001 licensed kids' title, that was an unusually ambitious structure.

Attention to Detail built five of these worlds, moving from the beach through Dino Island, Mars, an arctic zone and finally Xalax, the home turf of series antagonist Rocket Racer. Each has its own theme, its own set of tracks and its own bricks to hunt down, and the bricks matter because the car you drive is one you assemble yourself. The builder is the part that has held up best. Chassis, wheels, engine parts and cosmetic bricks all come out of a palette you expand by exploring, and the resulting vehicles look authentically like something a child would snap together on a living room floor rather than a designer's idea of a toy car.

The racing itself is lighter than the original LEGO Racers. Power-ups are colour-coded bricks lying on the road, handling is forgiving to the point of vagueness, and the AI rarely puts up a real fight once you have upgraded your engine. What the game asks of you is patience with its hub structure more than skill behind the wheel. Some of those errands are thin — fetch this, find that person, drive here — and the load between areas breaks the rhythm.

It does hold a specific place in the era, though. Open-ended traversal was the new fashion after the first wave of 3D platformers, and plenty of studios bolted a hub onto a genre that did not need one. Here it half works, because driving around a LEGO island genuinely feels like play rather than a menu with scenery. The PS2 version is competent rather than pretty; the flat colours and simple geometry read as stylistic now more than they did then.

Played today it makes most sense as a curiosity for people who grew up with it, or for anyone interested in how licensed children's games briefly got ambitious about structure. The racing will not keep an adult busy for long. The garage might.