You’re welcomed with a rather basic interface. You can choose to do a quick race, play through the championship circuit, do a few rounds in the arcade mode, or even go with four player multiplayer. Out of the modes, you’ll spend quite a bit of your time in the championship winning access to new teams and tracks.

If you’re new to the game, you may want to hop into an arcade race and race with any available car on any available track. If that doesn’t suit you, go for the quick race, which randomly selects the car and track for you. Let’s get to the good stuff, though.

Starting a season is pretty simple: just pick a team from the four available (there are some unlockable teams you can get through winning). Each team has its own distinctive quality. While H.O.T. runs everything for top acceleration, R.E.D. is a team based around superior handling. Each team has three cars for the three different types of races you go through—off-road, on-road, and drag racing. The latter is used for qualifying, but the other two are the meat and potatoes of Drome Racers.

The driving should be vaguely familiar to anyone who has played Mario Kart, as the scheme is similar. A accelerates, B brakes, R fires the turbo, and L does weapon shooting. What differentiates this, though, and adds a bit of depth is the attribute system. Depending on how many stat points you have in a certain attribute (grip, speed, acceleration, handling), your car drives with a noticeable difference. Every team has a major stat difference, making for a bit of difficulty. A few races with a new team can easily break you in, though.

By now, you should have noticed two very big things. One, this game has fully polygonal environments. They sort of mimic the molded plastic landscapes larger Lego sets come with. It’s a nice stylistic touch, I’ll give them that much. Two, the game is FAST. By the time you have Exo Force, you’ll be hitting 600 Mph easily.

This leads into the small gripes I have about this title. First of all, there is no set difficulty level. It seems that the team you choose dictates the difficulty. I’ve noticed the rubber band AI comes into play a lot more with Exo Force than H.O.T. Also, the music is rather bland and uninspired. It’s acceptable, but nothing I’d like to listen to much. Finally, and I cannot stress this enough, the ice-based levels are uniquely frustrating. Thankfully they aren’t the majority.

To sum it up, Lego Drome Racers is a very solid title with small flaws that keep it from taking the crown from the current king of portable racing. Nonetheless, if you have a Game Boy Advance and want a new fix, this budget title could be right up your alley.