How do you improve a great racing game? Just add Lego bricks

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  I don’t know where the pedals are, and I can’t see a way of changing gear. My hands don’t even reach the wheel. And yet this Ferrari F40 Competitzione is fast. [credit: 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.