Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft

Jonathan Gitlin

Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft

It's no secret that I like cars. I left a career in science policy to come to Ars to write about them, after all. But long before I fell in love with the automobile, there was Lego. I got sucked back into the world of the plastic brick on the eve of the millennium thanks to the first Lego Star Wars sets, but these days I've mostly been building little minifig-scale sports cars, particularly when writer's block strikes. So imagine how excited I was to find out that those Lego Speed Champions cars were coming to the rather excellent Forza Horizon 4.

Expansion packs are no new thing to the Horizon series. Nor are cameos or guest appearances from other franchises—The Fast and the Furious has shown up previously, and the most recent game includes a brief Halo crossover. But this is certainly the most left-field of them, transporting you from Britain to the Lego Valley, a magical place where most everything is built from bricks, and the humans are all now minifigs.

There are some Lego-specific tweaks—in addition to in-game currency and reputation points, you also need to earn bricks to build yourself a Lego house. But by and large, the gameplay remains identical: drive around wherever you want, entering races and challenges as you go and listening to the radio while you do it. (Sadly, or perhaps happily, that catchy number so beloved by Emmett in The Lego Movie is absent from the soundtrack.) There's still dynamic weather, day turns into night, and each week the in-game season changes.

Everything looks awesomely surreal

Forza Horizon 4 was already the best open-world driving game I've played, but I'm here to tell you it's even better with Lego. The designers at Playground Games made a conscious decision to respect the scale of the bricks, so everything you see is theoretically buildable. And it looks gorgeous. ABS plastic lends itself well to 3D animation; dozens of Lego video games (and more recently, some movies) have proved that all too well.

But the rendering goes beyond blocky bricks. Thanks to the scale, you can see the occasional indentation or flash line from a mould, and bricks here and there are scuffed the way yours might be if they've been in circulation a while. The designers even went as far as putting cameras in the cockpits of actual minifig-scale Speed Champions cars to see how the cockpit view should look. And just like the real thing, the driver's hands won't actually reach the steering wheel.

A real-world Lego Ferrari F40 might have wheels and tires, but minifig-scale Speed Champions cars lack suspension or even axles that can steer. That means they can't really drive over bumps or steer for themselves, which is not a problem when you're whooshing a Lego car around on the floor with your hand. But it was a problem for the game's physics engine, which expects to model vehicles that do have suspension travel and which can turn and steer. So the team at Playground actually had to create a few new (digital) bricks to make the Lego cars work in the game. These specialty virtual bricks are hidden inside the in-game models, so you'll never see them on the screen, but I love that the developers went for this level of logical consistency.

Is everything awesome?

This is just an expansion pack ($19.99, or free if you already own the Forza Horizon 4 Ultimate Edition, the game's expansion bundle, or its add-on bundle), so there is less to explore and do than in a full Forza Horizon game. The selection of Lego cars you can unlock is also pretty limited. In fact, there are just three that I know of: a 1967 Mini Cooper S Rally, A Ferrari F40 Competizione, and a McLaren Senna. However, all the existing Forza Horizon 4 cars will work in Brick Valley, so you're unlikely to run out of stuff to drive.

And it's still just a Forza Horizon game; you can't walk around as a minifig to explore, although there is a drone mode which lets you have a closer look at your surroundings. You also don't get to design or put together your Lego house yourself, and there's nothing to build in-game so you don't get to hear that click-click-click noise from previous Lego video games we've played and loved.

But trying to make a game be everything to everyone is what led to jPod's downfall at Neotronic Arts. Forza Horizon 4 Lego Speed Champions isn't trying to be everything to everyone—it's just taking an already great game and adding Lego. And it turns out that's more than enough.

Listing image by Microsoft