There’s no need to reinvent the wheel, and that’s even more true when you’re making a game about driving cars. If you look at the 1950s version of the Mercedes-Benz E-Class, you can see the model evolve through decades of tiny innovations and improvements, but you can still see the resemblance and the brand affinity in every iteration. It’s the same for Forza Horizon 5.
This time, developer Playground Games takes us to a fictional representation of Mexico – a series of varied biomes to race, drift and stunt jump across in a massive selection of cars. You’re introduced to this gorgeous, expansive environment – the best yet in the series – by being parachuted into it from the back of a cargo plane. The camera cuts to a close-up of your car as it drifts down before panning out to reveal an active volcano filled with smoke and lava flows. You hit the ground driving and gun it down the steep decline.
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Next, you’re in a Chevrolet Corvette racing through a sandstorm with particle effects and dust clouds filling your screen. The way light illuminates the flecks makes it feel as though you’re speeding through the orange haze of Blade Runner 2042. Soon after, you’re in the seat of a Porsche 911 and dodging trees in the jungle – squint and you could almost be zooming on a speeder in a Return of the Jedi video game adaptation.
It’s a thrilling introduction to the world, but it’s only a taster – there’s much more waiting for you when you start to tick off the hundreds of racing activities dotted around the map. You can take part in white-knuckle rallies, neon-lit street races, airstrip drag races, gymkhana-esque stunt trails and plenty more besides. One minute you’ll be bouncing over sand dunes in a buggy and the next you’re drifting around street corners in a Nissan Skyline. From craggy cliffside dirt roads to wide-open expanses, it’s a perfect playground for petrol heads, but it manages to be accessible enough that you don’t even need to care about cars to have fun.
That’s where Forza Horizon has always excelled – straddling that middle-ground between racer and sim, where mistakes don’t necessarily cost you a race, but cars still behave as if you’d expect them to. It’s a racing game where road barriers are more like road suggestions. You even get points for smashing through things and leaving a trail of destruction in your wake. “Nice!” the game says whenever you mess up. “Smacktus!” it screams when you sideswipe a row of cacti. It doesn’t matter whether you can follow a racing line or not, you’re rewarded for everything you do in Forza Horizon 5. You’re always progressing towards something else. Just like those metal fences lining the roads, there’s no barrier you can’t smash through.
That accessibility is coupled with dozens and dozens of personalization options, which even extend to prosthetics, pronouns, and voice type in the character customization menu. You can also tweak almost every aspect of the difficulty to suit your abilities.
Because of all this, Forza Horizon 5 is a racing game that almost transcends genre. If you want to get into the nitty-gritty, you can tune your cars right down to aerodynamics and weight, but there are options to automatically apply upgrades if you don’t want to get lost in the reeds. There’s so much to play with, but it never once feels overwhelming. Hell, you could spend all of your time in the game creating custom liveries for other players to use if you want – it’s as much a Pimp My Ride simulator as it is a racing game. It might be as predictable as a Nascar race, but there’s little need to shift gears when you’re already miles in front of the competition.
I have very few criticisms of Forza Horizon 5, but let’s tick them off anyway. First off, I wish everyone in the game would shut up. The radio presenters are fine, but everyone else needs to go away forever. The festival atmosphere works, but do we really need to listen to people talking about their grandfather who built a classic car? Do we even need cutscenes where people talk, in a racing game? I’m going with a solid “no”.
Outside of that, my only gripe is that nighttime doesn’t last long enough. For a while, I wasn’t even sure if there was even a day and night cycle, because I’d only seen nighttime come while in specific events. Fortunately, there is a day and night cycle, but it feels like it’s daytime for 95% of the time and nighttime for the rest. It’s only annoying because the game looks absolutely glorious in the dark. It looks incredible no matter what time of the day it is, but there’s something special about watching headlights glisten off rain-slick roads.
There’s also that time I had a rain droplet effect applied to my screen perpetually. The droplets didn’t move, they just clung to my screen, following me between events, across the open world, forever taunting me until I reset the game. They even followed me to the beach, which is just rude. Fortunately, it’s the only bug I encountered in my entire playtime. There are plenty of buggies, however.
It doesn’t matter which car you’re driving, every single one of them feels incredible in their own way. Some might have back ends that are angrier than the morning after a vindaloo, but it feels good when you tame them and understand all their quirks. You soon build a roster of favorites for each race type, but you just as quickly abandon those favorites for a shiny new ride. New cars are deposited in your garage at such a pace that you don’t even mind giving them away to other players with the new barn find gifting mechanic. And the world – my god, the world! It’s just gorgeous, and exactly what the series needed after the endless rolling hills of the UK. It’s always going to be more exciting to race down the side of a volcano than it is to drive past a countryside pub. Forza Horizon 5 is a joy, then. Actually, scratch that – Forza Horizon 5 is perhaps the best racing game ever made, and you should try it even if you don’t usually play racing games.
Written by Kirk McKeand on behalf of GLHF.
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