this game is busted (good way)

the turbo power-up in this game feels fantastic as it improves your not only your speed with each level-up, but your handling as well. thats the item you'll want to be going for most of the time. this is very much a contest of getting ahead of the pack, which is demonstrated by the rival cpu, who zips past everyone else on the first lap. oftentimes, the start of the race is the most important part, so you'd better aim for those green bricks and not mess things up. its a bummer, because a lot of the items are powerful and fun to use!! its just, with the discrepancy in ai difficulty, a lack of rubber-banding, and no real catch-up mechanics, i feel like the game doesn't reach its full potential. would an option to randomize item placement lessen these issues? maybe! idk!

part of that potential, however, still shines through, and a prime example is the grappling hook item, which when shot at an opponent, slows them down and pulls you towards them with a tremendous amount of speed. if you don't bump into their rear end, you can sling yourself past them to keep that boost of speed awhile longer. its incredibly satisfying to use, and when you're given the opportunity to pull it off, its evident that this item fills a bit of a balance gap.

tangentially, you have to be pretty precise to win some of the time trials, which is odd considering 2/3rds of them feel like crapshoots in comparison. in some cases, i've felt like the item boxes should have been bigger, or collision on parts of the environment smaller.

now i haven't played like, every kart racer, and maybe there are some games out there that have more consistent highs, but the majority of lego racers was a blast for me. this game fucks. and i don't say that about a lot of games.

This was the game of my childhood - I can still hear the menu music! Originally played on PC, I've since bought this on N64, PS1, GBC as well.

Building your own cars and racing them around inventive tracks with a range of zany characters, good graphics for the time and catchy music - what more could you want from a kart game? The handling of the cars is good, and there is a drift mechanic similar to Mario Kart. Unlike Mario Kart however, the powerups are not fixed depending on the position you find yourself in during the race. You can see which type of powerup is on the track, and then collect white bricks to upgrade them.

In my opinion, the game still holds up reasonable well today and would be a lot of fun for children to play. I have very fond memories of playing this with my dad and brother. I still fire it up on the N64 occasionally for a blast.

A bite-sized masterpiece, Lego Racers presents some of the most chaotic, high-energy racing I've seen in any game. Aside from the fact that you're unable to spin out, the driving itself is fairly straightforward - until you hit the powerslide button, which immediately snaps your car hard to the side and lets you aggressively tear down the sharpest of corners without even thinking. It's responsive to an extreme and opens up its own set of crazy, tight maneuvers, and add an element to the driving that isn't that hard to get used to, but affords a lot of room for mastery.

The power-up system is fairly sophisticated and elevates the dynamic of the entire race beyond the simple act of just using them. You have four types of powerups - red (offensive), blue (shield), yellow (defensive) and green (boost), each acquired by grabbing the respective colour brick; on top of this, they all have four 'levels' increased by grabbing white bricks. The highest level green powerup - a wormhole teleportation device, of course! - is clearly leagues above all the others, so your racing line has to accommodate grabbing as many green and white bricks as possible more than just barrelling straight through to the end. But if you get hit by an opponent's powerup you lose some of your white bricks, so it's not always feasible to hold onto all your pieces until you get the wormhole - it might be better to make the snap decision to drop a bomb or chuck a grappling hook to get a bit of space or distance in a pinch. It's not just a cool powerup system, but it creates room for split-second tactical decisions and warps the way you interact with the race in a way that makes it as compelling as it is fresh.

The main problem with this game, really, is just that there isn't enough of it! There's only 6 circuits, each consisting of four tracks, as well as a single 'final boss' track at the end. The latter half of the circuits consist only of reversed tracks from the first three which is like, better than if they didn't exist at all? But then again it's probably even more telling that you can knock this game out in an hour or two despite them reusing all but one of their tracks. It's such a shame, because it's a really fun game - I just wish there was more of it to play!

Jogo divertido e feito para descontrair, se for jogar com este intuito, irá perder boas horas jogando.
Só fiz o básico que era chegar no pódio, eu não senti a necessidade de derrotar todos os rivais para completar e fazer o 100%. Ainda mais que o jogo é bastante punitivo, então por isso que para mim, fazer o mínimo que era chegar em um 3º ou 2º lugar, já estava de bom tamanho.
Mesmo o jogo sendo desbalanceado, o que importa é que tem o grande fator da diversão, de qualquer forma, vale a pena jogar.

Despite having far fewer tracks than I remember, and resorting to mirroring tracks pretty early on, Lego Racers somehow remains exactly as fun as I remember it being.

The brick system for powering up your power ups is great, and it's still a blast to break things by using the full-power green brick warp power up over and over.

Later circuits also remain a challenge, probably because the CPU cheats to higher degree, and there's likely a ton of rubberbanding going on there, but it doesn't feel impossible.

After finally finishing the game and defeating all of its host racers 22 years after first playing it on my family's eMachines PC, I can confirm this game still rules.