Forza Horizon 4 - LEGO Speed Champions (DLC) (PC/Xbox One)

LEGO Speed Champions is the second major expansion for Forza Horizon 4, and it does something genuinely unexpected: it takes Playground Games' polished open-world racer and dunks it headfirst into a tub of colourful plastic bricks. The result is LEGO Valley, a self-contained island with its own distinct biomes, all rendered in that unmistakable blocky aesthetic. You get the LEGO city of Brickchester built from real modular sets (the Bank, the Pet Shop, Assembly Square, the Corner Cafe are all in there), a stunt park cheekily named the Super Mega Awesome Adventure Stunt Park, Falcon Speedway (an actual dedicated race circuit, something the main game was missing), sand dunes for off-road runs, spooky woods, a pirate lagoon, and a UFO crash site with alien artefacts to find at night. The attention to audio-visual detail is real: drive through a field of LEGO flowers and you hear each one clack off your bonnet. Smash through a brick wall and that classic LEGO crumble sound fires off. It is silly, it is charming, and it absolutely works. The progression loop swaps the main game's credit grind for a Brick Challenge system. Everything you do, win a race, nail a speed trap, hit a PR stunt, earns bricks. Accumulate enough and you unlock the next phase of your Master Builder's House, a LEGO mansion that grows in stages across your time with the expansion. There are over 270 challenges on the board, ranging from simple point-to-point runs to timed cone-destruction tests, which gives the whole thing a satisfying checklist energy. You can pin individual challenges to your HUD as a tracker, a quality-of-life feature so useful it is baffling it did not ship in the base game. The nine-event story campaign runs alongside all of this and keeps things moving. The three LEGO cars on offer are the 1967 Mini Cooper S Rally (your starter), the Ferrari F40 Competizione, and the McLaren Senna, each modelled brick-for-brick after their real Speed Champions sets, minifig driver and all. They handle in line with their real-world counterparts, and once you tune the F40 or the Senna up to four-wheel drive they are genuinely competitive across the map. You can also bring any car from your main garage into LEGO Valley, and you can take the LEGO cars out into the main Britain map, which is a great cross-pollination trick for showing off at a friend's place. The honest caveat though: three LEGO cars is thin. Hardcore LEGO fans will feel the absence of muscle cars, tuners, and the wider Speed Champions range the moment they clock how short the roster is. The Master Builder's House also just teleports fully-built sections into existence rather than animating the construction, which is a baffling missed opportunity given the whole LEGO premise. From a casual and family accessibility standpoint, this expansion is a strong pick. The difficulty assists from the base game are all present, so you can dial handling from full simulation down to fully arcade at any point. Kids can hop in and charge around LEGO Valley without needing to understand tuning or drivatar difficulty scaling, while more experienced players can chase three-star ratings on every challenge. It is not a split-screen experience, but as a shared-controller pass-and-play or a game to watch alongside someone, the visual spectacle carries a lot of weight. The one performance note worth flagging: on the original Xbox One, brick-smashing physics can cause noticeable frame dips when chaos peaks onscreen, though this is not a problem on PC or newer hardware. Bottom line, this DLC lands somewhere between a great excuse to revisit FH4 and a slightly undercooked LEGO fantasy. The bones are brilliant, the world is joyful, and the Brick Challenge structure is smarter than anything in the base game's progression. It just leaves you wishing Playground had gone further with the LEGO roster and given the house-building some actual animation. If you have kids, a soft spot for plastic bricks, or just want Forza to stop taking itself seriously for twenty-plus hours, LEGO Valley is a genuinely fun place to be.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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