Forza Horizon 5 – Review
Playground Games’ Forza Horizon series has traditionally served as the slack-jawed younger sibling of the more serious, Top Gear-reading Forza Motorsport games developed by Turn 10 Studios. For the most part, they’ve coexisted peacefully, trading off release dates, allowing players to switch back and forth between drivery-pokery and drivery-pokery with ease.
It was only after the release of Forza Motorsport 7 that Turn 10 began working on a reboot of the series, which it plans to make its debut on the Xbox Series X at some point in the future. As a result, the last Forza Horizon game was Forza Horizon 4, which is a lot like the upcoming Forza Horizon 5, which is both good and bad for Forza Horizon 5.
Pros:
Looks great
Stellar set pieces
Excellent driving
Good music selection
Very similar to Forza Horizon 4
Cons:
Very similar to Forza Horizon 4
Score – 10/10
Because it’s Forza Horizon, the game begins with you jumping a car out of a plane. Anything less would be out of character. You arrive in Mexico, a country with a wide variety of landscapes, from muddy jungle roads to vast deserts and small town streets. The Great Britain map of Forza Horizon 4 has a very different atmosphere, but unfortunately, you’re playing one of the game’s showcase events right away.
Even though they’re visually impressive, these are just a cheap trick after doing the same thing over and over again in the previous game. At the last minute, the plane will slow down enough to allow you to just squeak out in front of them while you spin your wheels in a ditch just 40 metres from the finish line.
For the Horizon Festival, which is a celebration of automobiles, you must perform daring feats and win enough races to unlock the various speed traps around the map, where you must compete against your pals for the best time. As soon as the shackles were removed and I was free to roam the beautiful Mexican countryside, I remembered why I enjoy these games so much.
It’s an exhilarating experience to be behind the wheel. With the generous rewind and driving line, it doesn’t feel like a battle to stay on the track, and the sense of speed is massive without feeling like you’re about to fly off into a ditch. It’s just fun to enjoy the ride. It’s also a lot of fun. Drifting, burnouts, jumps, and other illegal activities are rewarded with points in a basic combo system. Your car’s performance will improve as you rack up combos, making it more difficult for opponents to break them.
Forza Horizon 5 on Xbox Series X is a visual masterpiece. You’ll wish you could slow down to take in the scenery more at 60fps, even if you can choose between graphics and performance mode. The view from the top of a volcano, like the one seen while gliding down the crater, is truly stunning.
Anyone who’s played Forza Horizon 4 will recognise the open-world activities in the game (such as Stunt Jumps, Speed Traps, and Drift Challenges). Forza Horizon 5 does a fantastic job of ensuring that every action you take in the game contributes to your progress. All it takes is one good deed to get you to the next big event, and it doesn’t matter what it is. If you prefer stunts, street racing, or anything else the game has to offer, you’ll still progress.
There are some fantastic missions in Forza Horizon 5’s main storey, such as the long expedition journeys that will show you around the map and change things like the time of day, or the weather, to give the world a bit more personality. In terms of other races and open-world challenges, I prefer Forza Horizon 4 because they feel so much like each other. The cars are mostly unchanged, save for a handful of newer models, so why not just go back to the map I’m most familiar with?
In the end, Forza Horizon 5 feels like a natural conclusion or at the very least a natural break for the series. Forza Horizon 5 is a fantastic driving experience, but if you’ve already played Forza Horizon 4 to death, there isn’t a lot of reason to pick up Forza Horizon 5, unless you’re just desperate for more content. There are few driving games that offer the breadth of content, visual flair, and incredibly satisfying handling of Forza Horizon 5, even if the formula is starting to run out of road for new players (especially those with Xbox Game Pass).
