Tensions are high as you await the first stage of the Drome Championship.You've trained for the intensity of Multi-Challenge Racing; each race a seamless set of stages, mixing tracks from realistically stunning City, Mountain, and Canyon environments. Now you must prove you're up to that grueling challenge. With high-tech racing machines based on new cars from the 2002 LEGO Racers construction toy range, Drome Racers is a racing experience like no other.
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A big part of my interest in these really obscure older games is seeing how they go about their design. More than enough genre-defining games existed by this point, but a lot of these titles feel like they loved to throw whatever ideas and mechanics they wanted at the wall when they could have just been copying the homework of the greats - for better or worse. Drome Racers effortlessly sticks out on the ‘worse’ side of the spectrum, and I could easily tear it to shreds if I wanted to; I could go on about the atrocious physics and collision that can kill you on a whim, or the multitude of powerful undodgeable powerups with no counterplay, and yeah that’s all bad but it isn’t interesting, and I don’t like senselessly ripping into games for no reason. Thankfully, it did have the courtesy to be bad in such a bizarre and funny way that now I have to make it everybody else’s problem.
The career mode is split into ‘cups’, and you race a certain amount of tracks each cup while getting knocked out if you place badly enough in a race - nothing too unusual so far. But while the first race in each cup starts everybody on the grid, each race after that has everybody pulling in from the pits one by one. And the spacing between everyone depends on the difference in the last race - if I finish 3 seconds, or 20 seconds, or 2 minutes ahead of someone in one race, they’ll be about that far behind at the start of the next. I’m SURE I don’t need to explain how absurd that is, so I put together a little collection of some of the funniest starting grids I saw throughout the game instead. And it sounds like this should be great for you, right? Well, kind of! It’s obviously great to get a completely undeserved free lead, but lapping the back few drivers is pretty much an expectation, and it gives them ample opportunity to hit you with the last thing you could possibly want - eighteen tons of raw undodgeable homing missile in the back, sending your paperweight car into a triple backspin and ending up facing the complete wrong way, giving you a perfect view of everybody who’s about to overtake you.
It’s a bad game, it’s real bad, but it’s a hard one to truly hate. I got interested in it as a sort of ‘Lego Racers 2.5’ after playing the joyless void that was LR2, and while it might be even worse than that game to actually play, it absolutely delivers in soul. It’s got this great, charming ‘c-tier’ energy where it’s trying to come off as cool as possible, but it’s still very clearly aimed at children - similar sort of vibe to one of the Hot Wheels games I played earlier this year. It’s backed by a surprisingly great soundtrack that carry the ‘mindless driving while in first’ parts to an insane degree. And though most of them don’t end up translating well into gameplay, there’s some decent and unique ideas in here! Probably the most affectionate bad score I can see myself giving a game, if that’s worth anything?
The career mode is split into ‘cups’, and you race a certain amount of tracks each cup while getting knocked out if you place badly enough in a race - nothing too unusual so far. But while the first race in each cup starts everybody on the grid, each race after that has everybody pulling in from the pits one by one. And the spacing between everyone depends on the difference in the last race - if I finish 3 seconds, or 20 seconds, or 2 minutes ahead of someone in one race, they’ll be about that far behind at the start of the next. I’m SURE I don’t need to explain how absurd that is, so I put together a little collection of some of the funniest starting grids I saw throughout the game instead. And it sounds like this should be great for you, right? Well, kind of! It’s obviously great to get a completely undeserved free lead, but lapping the back few drivers is pretty much an expectation, and it gives them ample opportunity to hit you with the last thing you could possibly want - eighteen tons of raw undodgeable homing missile in the back, sending your paperweight car into a triple backspin and ending up facing the complete wrong way, giving you a perfect view of everybody who’s about to overtake you.
It’s a bad game, it’s real bad, but it’s a hard one to truly hate. I got interested in it as a sort of ‘Lego Racers 2.5’ after playing the joyless void that was LR2, and while it might be even worse than that game to actually play, it absolutely delivers in soul. It’s got this great, charming ‘c-tier’ energy where it’s trying to come off as cool as possible, but it’s still very clearly aimed at children - similar sort of vibe to one of the Hot Wheels games I played earlier this year. It’s backed by a surprisingly great soundtrack that carry the ‘mindless driving while in first’ parts to an insane degree. And though most of them don’t end up translating well into gameplay, there’s some decent and unique ideas in here! Probably the most affectionate bad score I can see myself giving a game, if that’s worth anything?