Ok, first impressions: It's basically Horizon with a LEGO skin. No surprise there. It's nice to have a change of scenery, and some new courses. But the complete lack of new cars was striking. Even new LEGO cars would have been something. Could they not get the auto manufacturers to sign off on any other cars in the Speed Champions line or something? One of them's another Ferrari, so they've at least got a foot in the door.
I did a Forzathon Live that started up in the desert with a speed trap and a speed zone. The Desert area seems a bit slick. I had a rally tune on my Renault Turbo FE, which is usually pretty good, and I'm familiar enough with it that I can drive it fairly well. But up in the desert, it slid around a lot. Maybe that's a good thing; new terrain, new coefficient of friction to tune for. There were only 4 or 5 people doing the Live event, and we struggled to hit the targets, and had less than 5 minutes left to finish. Then it took us to a danger sign in the city, where it took me a solid minute just to figure out where the ramp was. There were three or four times when I'd get a run-up to the thing, thinking I was going to get a good launch, only to hit an invisible wall or something and come to an abrupt stop at the bottom of the ramp. Rewind, do it again, and launch like I should have the first time. So clearly there are still some bugs that need to be ironed out.
I unlocked the first level of the house, and the Ferrari F-40. When you get the LEGO Ferrari F-40, you unlock a challenge to race it against the real one, and if you win, you get to keep it. I'd have to check, but I think the original F-40 was already in the game, and I might have already had it. If I did, then now I have two. If the same thing happens when you get the McLarren, then I know for a fact that I already have the original of that.
I've done mostly road races so far, and I swear, there were 4 or 5 of them that went along the same route, because even though I know for a fact I was doing a different race every time, they all seemed to look the same towards the end.
One thing that I will say, though, that the expansion has that the rest of the game is missing, is some kind of marker on which races you've won, and which ones you've merely completed. I played the original Forza Horizon quite a bit last weekend, and one thing that stood out was that I could easily see which races I'd actually won. On the mainland, and Fortune Island, it only seems to mark off races that are completed. Only street races and the big ones seem to have a requirement to actually win them, or any indication that you have.
After a couple of hours of play, I've driven 111/112 roads in the expansion. There's two things wrong with that.
1) Where the heck is that last road?
2) How is it that I'm this close to completing it after only the first couple of hours?
That's an achievement I usually get eventually with new maps, but not usually so soon out of the box. What usually happens is, after a few weeks (maybe a couple months with the main map), I decide that I'm close enough that I can go finish it off. But last night, I'm driving around in a Porsche for the weekly Forzathon, and the third bullet is to drive 20-some miles. So I look at the map, and notice that I'm pretty much almost done driving everywhere. I haven't even started driving the 20 some miles yet, mind you. I'm just looking at the map deciding where to drive. Between the intro and the handful of races I'd done, I had to finish off the race track, the city, and a few of the other sprawling branches, and that's it. When I'm that close to driving all roads on day 1, then maaaaaaybe your new map is a little on the small side
So I go on a sight-seeing tour, and look around the pirate ships and the light house. Which, even though the map says I'd already been there, I didn't at all remember. Every once in a while I see a string of bonus cubes, and sometimes I'm able to react fast enough to veer off and get some. I think Kira said in the voice over that you get a skills and influence bonus or something, but aside from that, and the eventual 500 achievement somewhere down the road, there's not much more of an indication why I'm going out of my way for these things. They're not like bonus boards that you have to go hunting for, and are eventually all collected. I don't know if they appear at random, or are in preset locations, but they just seem to be there, and later respawn when you smash them. But there doesn't seem to be any other point to them.
Also, there doesn't seem to be anything to do there besides look at them, or crash through them.
Obviously, there's been quite a bit of reaction to the expansion, (I mean, we're on page 50 now) ranging from disappointment to outright irrational anger. I think I've discovered the polar opposite of that. I've so far found the new expansion amusing, novel, but ultimately, a bit underwhelming. I'll still play it, and I'll probably get a bit deeper into it, and maybe revisit every once in a while. But I have a feeling I'll be meeting you all back on the mainland after a few days. I gotta go there anyway for the playlist, so...
And why, oh, why, did they decide that it would be a good idea to play "Everything is Awesome" on a loop forever? That song was good exactly once in its entire existence: the first time you hear it in the LEGO movie. Thematically, the lyrics tie into the plot at the beginning, when the protagonist is still bought into the ideology of the corporate oligarchy. "Everything is great when you're part of a team" because you're a meaningless cog in the corporate machine. It's perfect. It's fun, it's catchy, and sure, it's mass produced pop music, but that only fits in even better with it's place in the theme of the movie. The plot of the movie is supposed to be about breaking away from the corporate power structure, and awakening your creativity, which is obstensively the point of LEGO. Yes, there are instructions, and you can follow the instructions and build a house, or a car, or a robot, but you're not limited to that. You can be creative. Be different. Break away from the mould and do something new, and that's exactly why LEGO and Horizon should have theoretically gone so well together, and this expansion, despite the fan outrage could have been more. But LEGO, and by extension Horizon choosing this as a theme song, playing it excessively at E3 events, and somewhat jokingly making it the only song added to the game since launch, and the only song on an entire station only reinforces their heartless corporate mindset behind the creative façade.
I couldn't even make it through the song once. Supposedly, the DJs become unhinged after a while, which I would look forward to, especially Don Thompson, if I didn't have to become unhinged along with them. Hopefully we'll get extractions of the voice over performances some day, so that we can hear them without having to torture ourselves.
So, yeah. That went longer than I'd thought. I apparently have opinions.