Forza Horizon 5 Review

Some categories of gaming just seem to always be stuck on an island by themselves. You know, there’s not a lot of Venn Diagram overlap between Train Simulators and the rest of the market for example. They might have relatively large audiences but ultimately struggle to get some semblance of mainstream attention just by virtue of the genre being what it is. Racing games, at least if we’re not talking about something like Mario Kart (or the far superior Diddy Kong Racing) often fall into this category. Obviously, the more simulation-heavy titles fit this bill, but even many arcade racers have had a harder time getting the attention of those outside of their core audience.

Forza as a franchise has certainly garnered a large fanbase and while the main series has done particularly well over the years it’s Playground Games’ Forza Horizon spinoff that has really made headway. In fact, it’s done so well that an argument could be made it has dethroned Forza Motorsport as the main series of the franchise. Forza Horizon 4 in particular really showed that Playground Games meant business, and it went further than any other game in the franchise before it in earning new fans that hadn’t ever been interested in racing games before taking on the Horizon festival. The open nature of the world was capitalized on in as many ways as you could hope, and it was even enough to get people talking about game of the year nominations – something racing games have rarely achieved. While those nomination talks didn’t precipitate into the big award, it certainly told Playground Games and Microsoft’s Xbox team that Forza Horizon was a pillar franchise and now they had a big task in front of them – figuring out how to top Forza Horizon 4. If it wasn’t already apparent given the reception it’s gotten essentially everywhere, Forza Horizon 5 has certainly accomplished its task.

If there’s something that Forza Horizon games have gotten really good at it’s the opening 30 minutes. There’s as much beauty, excitement, and adrenaline crammed into the opening scenes that you’ll likely be left gobsmacked, if not a bit stunned by it all. In the era of reaction videos on YouTube and live streaming, I’ve greatly enjoyed watching how people take in the opening minutes of FH5 – especially when they’ve not played a game in the series previously. The joy on the faces of the players as they’re air-dropped out of a cargo plane onto the slopes of a volcano is visceral and contagious. It’s one of those shared experiences in games that makes you appreciate the game itself even more, and what’s almost as impressive is just how well Playground Games has managed to carry that experience across the rest of the game.

Forza Horizon 5 is at its core an open-world arcade racing game like those that came before it. Horizon is a celebration of cars, racing, and the culture of the location in which the event is taking place and you’re the superstar at the center of it all. This time around the Horizon Festival has set up shop in Mexico and you’ll get to explore and experience the various beautiful biomes and locales the country has to offer. From gorgeous beaches to dense jungles, mountainous volcanic regions, colourful cityscapes, and more, Forza Horizon 5 gives you a serious variety of locations to explore and race across. The types of races, too, have great variety that you’d expect in an open-world racer and will have you on circuits, cross-country sprints, off-road mud diving, drag racing, street racing, and sometimes a combination of a few. What Forza Horizon 5 does particularly well, however, is stringing together all of these elements in an ever closer to a seamless gameplay experience that, like you, has its foot firmly on the gas as often as possible.

The Horizon series has always felt like one of the best examples of taking a thought or feeling and having it truly permeate the entire game and experience. Forza as a franchise has always maintained that it's all about the love of cars, the emotional experience in driving, and the fun culture surrounding cars and racing. Forza Horizon 5’s success is a result of employing these tenets better than any of the games in the franchise previous, and arguably better than most games in the industry comparatively speaking. The energy from the introduction flows seamlessly into your first car selection which flows seamlessly into your first race selection and so on and so on until you’ve been playing for hours with no concept of time. Races and events are unlocked over time as you accumulate points for the Horizon Festival which results in the expansion of the event in more or less the order in which you deem appropriate. Perhaps the only thing that could slow you down would be that you can make any race entirely your own, or that you can get lost in arguably the best livery editor ever made, or that you can tune your 70s muscle car to be off-road viable for the fun of it.

Truly, if Forza Horizon 5 was a fast food chain it would be Burger King if only because you really can have it your way. Want to change a race in a series you are currently taking part in? You can do that, and I don’t mean that lightly. You can literally remap and create your own race with your own rule sets and complete that instead while uploading it for others to perhaps use on their end instead of the stock race as well. Whether you want the track to change, the car type to be different, the win conditions to be altered, or a little bit of everything, you can do just that. Just as easily you could see the most community-recommended races for the event and complete that if you’re not feeling creative but want a change of pace all the same. This freedom is scarcely available in racing games, especially to this degree, and it more or less means you can nearly recreate the entire campaign on your own terms should you wish.

This granularity of freedom extends to your difficulty and accessibility options as well and what makes Forza Horizon 5 such a tour de force of playability for nearly everyone that chooses to play it. This goes far beyond the now-famed driving line that shows you where to point your car and when to put on the brakes. Want to turn a few knobs to make it a bit more sim-cade? Go ahead. Want to back all those knobs off to make it purely arcade with fewer driving challenges? You can do that, too. Want to slow down the entire game speed so you have more time to react? That’s possible. The team is even working on an option to have a sign language interpreter overlayed on the screen during cutscenes for the hearing impaired who prefer it versus text alone to get a better feel for emotion and inflection in the dialogue. Whether you’re new to racing in its entirety and need some training wheels, or you have other special circumstances that require a helping hand now and then, the team at Playground Games are doing more than most to make Forza Horizon 5 a game you can enjoy in your own way, and at your own pace.

The gears behind all of this are part of an equally well-oiled machine. There’s a great hybrid feeling of arcade and simulation Horizon hits that allows for some truly off-the-wall stupid fun moments at every turn. It’s hard not to have fun full sending a multi-million dollar hypercar off a ramp for nearly a kilometre of flight time, or giving a Dodge Dart a V12 racing engine and all-wheel drive to attain a 0.7 second 0-60 time. Depending on your difficulty settings you’re not exactly going to be able to completely ignore the laws of physics, but you’re not going to get as severely punished as you would in some racers should you attempt to anyway. When you do make these mistakes, the rewind feature has your back just like in other Forza titles so you can salvage hitting that tree at 200mph by going back several seconds prior, or pretend you're Adam Sandler or something – I’m not judging you.

Drivatars also make a return to Horizon 5, unsurprisingly. If you’re unacquainted with the Drivatar system it's Forza’s attempt at making its AI a bit more human by incorporating driver skill and tendencies with the difficulty level you set in game. This means that though you may not choose to race real folks online, the AI you’re up against in your races will be loosely based on their real-life counterparts. This system is super cool but also super talked up for what it often results in. While it’s at the very least more likely your more skilled friends’ drivatars will be at the front of the pack, the story of each race plays out much the same regardless. While they say rubber banding doesn’t exist in Forza titles and that may be the case, there are still obvious mechanisms in play that give each race a similar feel versus the dream of all AI making more unique and independent decisions. You’ll notice your opponents have ungodly acceleration at the beginning of a race – even more than their cars would allow – and that they simply don’t need to worry much about the speed at which they take many corners. This is often quite hidden from the player but many clips have turned up online showing the realities of the system.

The result of this is that you could have one race in which you win by nearly ten seconds, but in the following race in the same car it is all but impossible to overtake the leader in the time you have, forcing you to drop your difficulty or swap cars in such a way that the game changes the cars on the field and gives you an actual hope of victory. This was present in Horizon 4 but I don’t personally remember it being so prominent as it is in Forza Horizon 5 which is a shame and perhaps is in response to people claiming 4 was too easy even at the higher difficulties. It’s not exactly experience crushing given you can simply solve it with a quick difficulty change before changing it back after the race is won, but it is one of the few points of weakness the game has and should be pointed out.

Other weaknesses in Forza Horizon 5 are similar in that they don’t necessarily ruin your experience so much as take a faint amount of the shine out of the whole package. For example, because the game is so very open and customizable, it ends up killing the feeling of progression. Credits are easily earned whether by wins or by wheel spins which means you’re getting into whatever car you want pretty early on, buying houses is trivial for similar reasons aside from one or two truly expensive properties, and you aren’t required to finish much if any of the story missions to move things forward. I understand that they’re doing their very best to get out of the way and simply provide a loosely controlled sandbox for you to go to town in, but I’d still like there to be some semblance of progression that makes you feel like a part of the Horizon Festival. As it stands, it just feels like the Festival is happening where you just so happen to be racing at the time. You get great and entertaining quips and updates from the various radio hosts as well as in cutscenes when you eventually choose to take part in the story missions but nothing particularly structured in a way that makes you feel as connected to the Festival as the other characters would make you out to be.

Forza Horizon 5 isn’t without its bugs, either. While I only played on the PC via the Microsoft Store and can’t comment on the console side of things, there are certainly some kinks that have been worked out and some that continue to be worked on. Thankfully nothing in my many hours of play time in which I all but 100% completed the content available from launch proved more than a mild inconvenience. The most frequent crashes to desktop I got always revolved around doing something within Forzavista or modifying a car. If I switched rims too quickly back and forth when deciding on what I wanted, for example, that seemed to anger the gods and crash the game. Most of my other issues were within Forzavista as well which is the mode in which you simply drool at your car in all its glory and maybe take some pictures. I can’t recall ever locking up or hard crashing during a race so if it happened it couldn’t have been more than once. Early days also saw connectivity issues be the norm, frequently dropping you out of online sessions. It never stopped me from taking part in online events, however, and I believe most of those issues are ironed out at this point.

Speaking of online stuff, all of the usual suite of things are back for Forza Horizon 5 such as running around in a convoy with your friends or other folks, coming across other players on your map and challenging them to races on the fly, the returning and shockingly competent battle royale Eliminator event, and an enormous complement of community features to round it all out. For example, one step beyond the track editor, the Event Labs mode allows you to custom-create tracks, arcade events, and PR stunts in a way that’s well past the scope of just the Blueprint editor letting players get what I’d describe as more or less a Halo 3 Forge utility within the Horizon landscape. There are also daily and weekly challenges that populate the Festival Playlist in which you can earn Forzathon points to spend in a unique shop and add to your collection of clearly sensible and stylish choices for your avatar. The real gem here is that just about anything you can do offline you can do online and vice versa – all with the same relative ease regardless of which you choose.

What you unlikely need to be told at this point is just how incredible Forza Horizon 5 looks. It has been labelled as one of if not the best-looking games made this year – or ever. Like many others, I would love to know what kind of magic Playground Games has behind the curtain because the competency required to have a game like this scale so well from the Xbox One era through to ultra high-end PCs is mind-blowing. The best part is that the game looks incredible regardless of what platform you play it on though obviously having the ability to play it on a PC with everything set to plaid is a bonus. Forza Horizon 5 is almost assuredly going to be one of those games people bring out to show off their newly acquired TV fresh off the black Friday presses in an attempt to prove to their significant other that it was definitely worth it. There’s nothing more to say about it, really. It’s just incredibly beautiful and insanely optimized to a level I don’t think any other game has ever been. The audio is also great with fun radio hosts making a return to deliver an equally fun soundtrack that continues to be time-synced to races in a way that always blows my mind. My only nitpick would be that the voice overs sometimes get lost in the mix despite their best efforts to duck the rest of the audio to let them come through more clearly.

Playground Games is very seriously approaching perfection within Horizon. It was almost inconceivable that they’d be able to surpass 4 in any truly meaningful way, but they did it anyway. Forza Horizon 5 isn’t without flaws, but the flaws are so minor that they’re vastly overshadowed by it being arguably the most complete and well-executed arcade racing game of all time. It’s converting millions of players into fans of racing, has smashed player count records for the Xbox, and has done so all while sticking to its lane and polishing that lane to a crystalline shine. It’s the most accessible racing game ever made, the most visually impressive especially given its open-world scale, and has an enormous amount of day-one content with an evolving series of content packages in the pipeline both free and paid all while being available on the Xbox Game Pass. If you have the opportunity to give Forza Horizon 5 a test drive, you should without question open the door, take a seat, and slam your foot on the gas.