I was really anticipating Lego Racers 2...getting to build your own car and then race it is just plain cool. I never played Lego Racers on N64, but supposedly it was saved from mediocre racing by the awesome building aspect.

That's not going to happen with Lego Racers 2. Blame it on the GBA hardware or blame it on the designers, but you can't build your own cars...at least not that I've found. I don't even like the cars you do have; they look less like go-karts and more like jeeps or monster trucks. You can beat an occasional mini-game to upgrade your car's armor, tires, or engine, but the graphic representation doesn't change. The only Lego-style customization comes in building your own character, which is silly since you only see his head during races, and the story mode's conversations are done in first-person.

The game is split up into a story mode, an arcade-style single player mode, and the multiplayer mode. My flashROM copy of the game doesn't save, but I did play the story mode for a couple hours to see how it starts out. Basically, you're a rookie driver hoping to go to a far-off planet and become the best racer in the galaxy (and beat the evil Rocket Racer in the process). You start off in a little town, where seemingly everyone wants to go themselves and challenge Rocket Racer. One by one you'll have to outrace people like the construction worker, the mail man, and the policeman. These initial races are pretty easy, although the policeman puts up quite a fight.

After proving yourself the best racer in town, you'll have to go visit other towns and do the same there before you're named the best racer in the world and get the right to face Rocket Racer. Each level requires a certain number of Golden Bricks to enter, which are earned from winning races. Each area also has one bonus level where you can win an upgrade to your car, as explained above.

The first town is done pretty well, with a good learning curve in the races and some often funny dialogue among you and the various competitors. The second area is another story; all pretense of story is thrown in the trash, as all the conversation degraded into: "This is a farm. There's a race going on nearby, would you like to join?" and "I like soccer. There's a race going on nearby, would you like to join?"

The racing itself is essentially like a typical Mario Kart clone. The Mode 7 engine is a bit more sluggish than some we've seen on GBA, but it gets the job done. Your car is shown rather large on the screen, which would be perfect if you'd built it yourself and wanted to look at it a lot. :-) The hi-res backgrounds look pretty nice, although the ones I've seen are uniform all the way around...you're not going to take a hard right turn and see Lego Castle way off in the distance.

Weapons include rockets, homing missiles, projectiles that bounce off the walls like green turtle shells, boosts, mines, and a couple shield-like things that I can't figure out. There are also green Lego bricks scattered on the tracks which refill your life meter; this might be useful if the AI racers actually used weapons, but at least in my build of the game, they don't.

The tracks are nice and curvy, and have a pretty good off-road feel to them. There's a limit to how far off the track you can drive though. Occasionally I've find a place to cut a corner, which prompts an "X" sign to pop up as if warning me; however, the X doesn't seem to have any effect even when I induce it on every lap, and the "illegal" shortcuts actually help a lot in winning. There are also a lot of obstacles on the track, which add a great deal of challenge when you have to avoid them and try to sneak by the opponents at the same time. So far my only beef with the tracks is that, within a certain area (such as the town), they all look exactly the same. The track layout is usually different, but the graphics are so similar that you may not even notice. The problem with this is that you may have to do ten races in an area before moving on...and ten races in a row on what appears to be the same track gets rather boring. In fact, that's how I'd describe most of the early races: boring. (The police officer being a notable exception.)

Through Lego Racers 2's single-player menu, you can play just a single race or choose from several mini-games. My favorite is the tube slide, which is like a full-pipe version of the Sonic the Hedgehog 2 half-pipe stages. In fact, tube sliding might even be more fun than the actual kart racing. What does that say about the game?

So far I'm not overly impressed with Lego Racers 2, but I've only poured a few hours into it. Look for a preview update for it soon, followed by a full review once we get the final version of the game.