Playground Games is back at it again with a new sequel to the open-world racing game series Forza Horizon. Forza Horizon 5 takes the seemingly neverending music and car festival to Mexico this time, and that’s essentially the one big new thing for this instalment.
That said, what it lacks in major revolutionary features, Forza Horizon 5 makes up for it by being one of the best put together entries in the series yet. It’s an exceptionally refined open-world driving game, leaving all of its competition behind.
Presentation
The Horizon Festival has now made its way to Mexico this time around. And contrary to the more subdued locales of the UK countryside in Forza Horizon 4, Horizon 5’s open-world is much more diverse.
From the sand dunes next to a huge volcano that’s traversable to the swampy jungles of the south, Mexico has quite the stunning landscapes you will be zooming through. The sole big city of the open-world, Guanajuato, has its own quirky characteristics too. It’s full of colourful houses, twisting roads and an underground tunnel system that makes navigation through the streets a nightmare. In a good, challenging way perfect for a racing game.
What is a headline feature is the open world itself. I found myself stopping in free roam just to stare at the voluminous clouds and see how the dynamic time affects it. It’s beautiful. It’s not trying to be a perfect recreation of Mexico, but a stylised open-world that captures the spirit of the country’s countryside.
Forza Horizon 5 retains the past entries’ seasons feature, which renders the world in four different seasons (summer, autumn, winter, spring) but this time matched to Mexico’s weather, which translates to hot, wet, storm, and dry season respectively. Weather is localised, so a sand storm or rainstorm can be happening on one side of the map, but not the other, which is a cool addition to the dynamic day-night time system.
Most of the cars are immaculately detailed, with some cars having the insides of the trunk and hood rendered. And you can always inspect these beastly machines in detail through Forzavista, where you can walk around the cars, get in, and inspect them up close. That includes being able to see a car’s pop-up headlights work, or check out what kind of luggage branded with the car’s name you would get in a fancy supercar.
Forzavista now has ray-tracing, though I don’t see any real impact of the graphical effect. It’s there, somewhere.
Since the backdrop of all the racing shenanigans you’d be doing is because there’s a music festival here, there is a choice of licensed music to get your vibes on. It’s quite the selection. You have some proper mainstream radio tunes here and there, a selection of music from Mexican musicians spread across the radio stations, and personalities as DJs commenting on your progress through the game. It’s all well done and definitely fit for the atmosphere they’re going for. There’s also new compositions solely used for expeditions, and some good selection of music that’s available for the copyright-safe streamer mode.
All the music has some form of dynamic music system going for it. The song will loop on until a race finishes (unless it’s a really long race), with a stinger playing as you cross the finish line. The music selection for each of the story missions and other scripted races are also fantastically well-picked for the occasion.
But what about the actual soundtrack when driving, the car sounds? Playground Games made an effort to inform fans that they’ve recorded new audio for the car sounds, and there’s definitely an improvement in that aspect. A screaming V10 sounds so good as you would expect, and the deafening silence of electric vehicles where you only hear slight whines are well depicted. If the car is turbocharged, you can hear it go “stu-stu-stu” when you let go of the throttle. Different exhausts offer different exhaust notes too.
It’s an improvement, but don’t expect all of the 500+ (and growing) cars received the same love, some will still unfortunately sound like vacuum cleaners at worst. Can’t do much about EV’s lack of a soundtrack, however.
Gameplay
In Forza Horizon 5, you will be dropping it hot into Mexico as soon as you start. Like literally being dropped, of a cargo plane. The swooping intro sequence (the initial drive as they call it) should give you a gist of what the game’s all about. Fast cars. Slow cars. Offroad trekking. High-octane racing. And good vibes all around.
You’re just one of the many (more than 10 million) Horizon superstar drivers that arrived, and it’s your job to show it, by any way you like, by earning accolades. These mini-achievements will give you points for whatever kind of interaction you do in the game. Completing and winning races is obviously there. But if you like to create liveries, make tuning setups to share with the world, play around in photo mode, explore and get all the collectibles, or just do the story missions, all are rewarded with progress in one way or form.
There’s no specific bottleneck of events you need to do, you are given utmost freedom in this aspect.
Once you get enough accolades, you get to expand the Horizon Festival. This is new to Forza Horizon 5, and acts as a progression check.
You will be unlocking new events which include story missions, expeditions to open new outposts and the finale races that can last over 10 minutes long. Gain it all, and you will reach the Hall Of Fame, essentially “completing” the game.
Unlike Forza Horizon 4 where you need to do the main campaign as it walks you through all four seasons before you set off into the online open-world, Forza Horizon 5 sets you off right after you finished your first expedition. After the first five hours, you can start racing with friends and even do the seasonal playlist of events, though at least one event is locked off until you reach the Hall Of Fame.
Come On Vamanos, Everybody Let’s Go!
The best thing about Forza Horizon 5 is its sheer freedom of play. You are never forced to do any specific event, as mentioned. But you’re also not forced to any kind of restrictions in how to complete them (except the seasonal playlists).
Want to race but you’re still cannot handle the speed in the top S2 class? Race in D class with a BMW Isetta, no worries. Want to bring that Isetta to the top S2 class? Get the right upgrades and good luck racing with a pocket rocket, because you can. No meme race is not worth any progression. And you don’t necessarily need to win them either. Just do whatever. Explore. Have fun. You can try and win that race next time.
Don’t be surprised if there are folks who play Forza Horizon 5 less for the racing and more to just drive around sight-seeing. That’s a totally okay thing to do. And it helps with the usual monotony of racing games, where the only thing you could do is just race.
This laissez-faire approach is so much in line with the tone of the game. The Need For Speed series has the edgy hardcore street racer vibe. But Forza Horizon? It’s all good vibes and positive mental attitude that’s prevalent right now in this age. No need to think about the dangerously excessive amount of partying and car hooning that you are partaking. Having street races that are probably illegal continues to be cheekily referenced but no more than that.
It’s all celebrating cars, celebrating the locale, and celebrating the cultures of both in a fun, positive manner. Take your worries away. Come on, my friend, let’s go!
Sim-Cade Open World Racer
For the uninitiated, Forza Horizon is a spin-off series to the sim racing Forza Motorsport series. And one thing Horizon shares a DNA with Motorsport is its vehicle physics.
On the arcade-sim spectrum of handling physics, Horizon leans more toward the simulation end, more than any other open-world racers out there.
But don’t expect simulation the levels of more hardcore PC racing sims, mind. It’s still arcadey compared to your iRacings and Asetto Corsas.
This is a game where you must gently and gradually press the brakes down as hitting it dead on will cause the tyres to lock up. You can also lose grip around corners and ‘catch’ it again by putting the right amount of counter-steer. Blasting through the highway at full speed can be scary, especially if the car lacks enough downforce to keep it down. One wrong move of the steering can send you flying and spinning out of control.
But fret not, Forza Horizon 5 offers a bunch of assist by default for newcomers. If you’re a seasoned racing game player you might want to fiddle with the driving assists settings and see what suits your level of play.
Also, Forza Horizon 5 is the kind of game where you can easily make lopsided builds that maxes out the performance points for a class, but is absolutely bog slow. But if you know what to upgrade and understand how to tune them, you can turn almost any stock car into rally beasts, off-road monsters, drift machines, drag mobiles on top of the usual sleeper tunes. If it’s too daunting, the community has your back, there’s plenty of user-created tunes you can search in-game and install to your car.
When it comes to driving physics, Forza Horizon 5 on the controller feels familiar from past entries, and that’s fine. Because there’s no other game in the open-world racing genre that goes this level of simulation.
So, What’s New In Forza Horizon 5?
If you’ve played Forza Horizon 4 before, don’t expect entry numero cinco here is a radical shift to the established formula. It’s a game you’ve played before but much, much refined. But it’s worth noting that some of the new game modes are were born out of Horizon 4 post-launch.
The battle royale mode, The Eliminator, is now available from the get-go and is part of the Festival Playlist. The community-driven challenge mode of Super7 is also back, and the ability to create your own scenarios and races have been vastly improved via Eventlabs.
Eventlabs lets you make silly game modes like driving a dump truck around town and smashing the trash bins, or getting through a maze while traversing tight platforms. Fun stuff, but the real question is how long until someone recreate a Fall Guys map with it?
MMO Car-PG
Forza Link is the new name for what is essentially the chat wheel. Now you are limited to two pre-defined chat wheel prompts (rewarded as unlockable) with two more reserved for contextual chats. You can invite random players on the server to a party or a co-op event much more seamlessly.
Forza Horizon 5 really is making an effort to nudge you into interacting with your fellow racers in a safe and wholesome environment. Alongside the mentioned features, you can also help out players who are looking for hidden barn finds (or ask for help if you’re looking for one) and give and receive gift cars to random players. You gain kudos for doing such tasks which lets people know you’re a good sport.
In practice, it’s still a bit of a miss. The new server system in Forza Horizon 5 will load players in and out of your vicinity rather than having them maintained on one specific server. And as such, there were instances where I was chatting with random players and hoping to get a reply only to see the despawn or loaded out because I was doing so while driving. Sending texts while driving is always a bad idea, but I don’t expect this to happen in a game.
That’s not to say it’s a bad idea- it was likely the usual game launch online issues that can be fixed. I’ve seen more players than ever before hanging out in one spot than in past games due to this trick. Instead of having players spread around the open world, the game will load in players close to you seamlessly. It’s a trick that makes the world feel more alive. It’s not just you smashing all the cacti and bashing all the fences down.
Competitive online races are still available, but there’s now a more casual, relaxed, PvE mode in the form of Horizon Tour. It’s a set of events of three races, with two interludes in-between where you drive to the next destination. Very similar to the standard multiplayer races. But with having only to fight the AI, it’s a much laid-back online experience, perfect for those who want to race with friends or some random players, but don’t want to go all sweaty about it.
Showcase Events and Expeditions
Showcases, the big race events where you take on other vehicles that are not necessarily cars are back but after five games, it’s fair to say the gimmick runs dry already.
Racing against not one but two monster trucks isn’t as cool when the buggy you are in is just half their size. It’s going to be a chore to repeat the same race that’s for the most part scripted that wears out its fun after the first attempt. Showcase events are a series staple, but it’s also time for a good revamp of this gimmick. The fact that on Steam, the achievement for finishing all the Showcase events is still low should tell how other players are feeling about it.
What’s a nice change of pace is the addition of expeditions. New to Forza Horizon 5, these are a new type of events that blends the scripted gimmicks of showcase events and the narrative exposition from story missions.
You’ll be visiting various places, seeing what the Mexican weather has to offer, and sidetracking into doing optional objectives.
These are fun diversions, the great use of music in these segments helps a lot, and the reward is an extra Horizon Festival stage. This means if you’re not buying houses, there are now more places on the map where you can set your home as, and stop by for a quick tune or livery change. Nice.
Other Minor Additions
Cars have an extra interaction. Convertibles like the Ferarri Portofino can put up or put down the rooftop with a click of a left thumbstick. And the cover car, the Mercedes-AMG One, can turn on track mode. However, these two features are extremely limited to specific cars only. Some convertibles that have automatic roofs in real-life don’t have it in the game yet.
You have an expanded character customisation options including the options for prosthetics and pronoun picking, but there’s a limited amount to make your character stand out from others (there’s limited facial customisation, not even facial hair or make-up options). Plus you don’t see many close-ups of your characters anyway.
Interestingly, your character does talk this time, but they don’t have their own character so it’s mostly underutilized. Though there is one good use of a character shouting out your name, which is a huge list of various given names and nicknames.
Finally, a good reason to call yourself El Pollo Diablo this time around.
The livery editor is now more approachable with a whole UI revamp, which feels more in line with what the Gran Turismo and Need For Speed series have offered (but not necessarily feature- parity with them yet).
The Festival Playlist has more events on offer and a better, more transparent way to track your progress. No more looking up the percentage weightage of each event, you can now see how many points each task is worth.
There’s also a neat gimmick in the form of skill songs. Occasionally, the radio station DJs will put on a song where during the limited time, all your skills (drifts, airs, smashing into destructible stuff, etc.) gets double points. And your character will be vibing – like literally bobbing their head and shaking their shoulders- during this time period. It’s a gimmick, but a fun one.
The game feels much better put together this time around, but not necessarily on the technical side. The PC version has an awful memory leak issue that degrades performance over time. I saw wild shifts of the dynamic weather from heavy rain to bright and sunny in too quick of a timespan. And some Festival Playlist tasks are bugged.
You can find the known issues here, and I suspect most of these kinks mentioned here will be gone from the list in the following weeks and months after launch.
Content
Forza Horizon 5 has the biggest open world of the series yet. While bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better, but the sheer diversity of biomes, roads and landmarks really makes it a much more fun experience.
You get mountain climb routes (on tarmac and dirt), a highway stretch longer than past games, large empty sand dunes, swamps with densely packed trees, multiple drag strips, multiple tracks, a town full of twisty routes and tunnels, scenic drives with canyons and seaside on your side. This open-world rendition of Mexico is so much fun to drive around in.
As for cars, you have over 500 of them to choose from. You’d be really happy if you love Ford, Chevrolet and Porsche as they make up a majority of the list, but there are returning oddballs (the three-wheeled Reliant Robin made its way to Mexico) and local favourites (the OG Volkswagen Bettle is such an icon in Mexico there’s a whole story mission devoted to it). And some cars have customisable body kits, though don’t expect Need For Speed levels of customisation in this aspect.
Getting to the Hall Of Fame and opening up all the content Forza Horizon 5 has to offer took me around 20 hours. But reaching there just means you’ve reached the endgame. There’s still more to fully complete all the activities.
And then you have the Festival Playlist. It’s a set of daily, weekly and monthly rewards, coinciding with the change of in-game seasons. If Forza Horizon 4 has anything to go by, you can expect 2-3 years worth of post-launch support.
Not to mention the buttloads of potential from community creations. The custom livery painters are already making masterpieces. The potent Eventlabs feature might produce some cool game modes. If you love the variety of what Forza Horizon 5 is offering right now, there’s a lot of content to snack on in the coming months and years.
However, the main problem with Forza, as a series, content-wise is that it has an expiration date. And I’m not talking about the limited-time events. You see, all past Forza games will one day be delisted due to licenses expiring. The entirety of the Forza Motorsport series can’t be bought digitally anymore, and last year Forza Horizon 3 just got delisted.
Forza Horizon 5 will eventually be sunsetted and will be gone forever from digital purchases. It’s understandable that getting the licenses for cars, tracks and music is tricky, but I don’t like the idea that a game has a limited shelf-time.
Racing games with real cars will continue to suffer this fate, and it’s frustrating that even with the backing of a huge company like Microsoft, that are pushing the games industry for backwards compatibility and game preservation, can’t do much about it.
Personal Enjoyment
It’s no surprise that I immensely enjoy my time with Forza Horizon 5. It’s a familiar game, but the change of setting and (for the most part) ridiculous amount of polishing this entry really does it for me.
The opening sequence I went through saw a Koniegsegg Jesko breezes through me at possibly more than 200mph, timed perfectly to the beat drop of Metrik’s Route 134 song. That, that got me good. And there’s plenty of those scripted cinematic drives that will get you pumped (for the first time of play).
There’s a lot of care to ensure the portrayal of Mexico, and its people, to be done with proper respect. Enough to convince me that Mexico can be a good tourist destination. And I actually pay attention to the characters this time around.
The racing is solid as always. Forza’s brand of sim-cade handling physics is uniquely only in Forza Horizon when it comes to open-world racing, and it’s the right amount of challenge and realism I wanted out of it. The rubber-bandy AI at high difficulties is an acquired taste, however.
The vast selection of cars, all an open canvas to put on nice or cursed liveries keeps me coming back. Seeing what my friends are driving and what liveries they have donned their rides in is also fun for me.
Forza Horizon 5 is a game so similar in its feature set compared to its past entries, and if it’s an annual release I would have probably liked it less. But the many minor changes, fixes and additions do add up into a better experience this time around.
Also, you can put silly horns. For whatever reason, the Microsoft Teams calling sound and Windows 10 notification sound joins the rank of the Windows XP shutdown sound and many other novelty horns you can unlock and spam to other players. It’s stupid fun, more of this, please.
And props to the writing team who have sneaked in various little nods and references to other Microsoft games, other racing games, and pop culture references on top of their excellent puns, all done in a fun, respectful way.
Verdict
Forza Horizon 5 continues to uphold the high bar for a great open-world racing game, and a great open-world game at that too. While it doesn’t bolt on big new headline-grabbing features other than a change in setting, it’s the many, many, tweaks under the hood that continues to make this old engine sing.
In a future where we are pushing for greener mobility, the days of owning and driving cars we know and love today are numbered. Thankfully, these beautiful arts of engineering is preserved (for now) in a car paradise where you are free to let them loose however you want.
Come, my friend. Let’s go to Forza Horizon 5. Car paradise awaits.
Review based on PC (Steam) version. Review copy purchased by the reviewer
Forza Horizon 5
- Presentation 9.5
- Gameplay 9
- Content 9
- Personal Enjoyment 10