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It didn’t take much to get me interested in Forza Horizon 5. Although I prefer Forza Horizon 4’s British setting over this game’s Mexican locale, I still find it to be very fun and enjoyable. Enough changes and updates were made to FH5 to distinguish it from its predecessor, but it’s also similar enough that fans of the franchise will feel right at home upon the game starting.
FH5 is a very good game in and of itself. It features plenty of road, dirt, cross country, and street racing, plus a good handful of speed traps, speed zones, drift zones, and jump challenges. At the same time, it leans into the vehicular adventure and story offerings, giving this open-world arcade driving game a bit more structure for (new) players who need some guidance on where to begin.
In Horizon Adventure, you are tasked with establishing outposts for the main event, road racing, dirt racing, cross country racing, PR stunts, and street racing. You then earn Accolades to unlock and take on the outposts’ lineups of expeditions and stories, as well as win the finale races. Of these, I especially enjoyed the few stories that flesh out the supporting characters, specifically Alejandra and Ramiro.
“Vocho” tells the importance of the VW Beetle to Alejandra’s family, and to Mexico by extension. It plays like FH4’s “British Racing Green”, but with a touch of personal history. Ramiro’s fun nature shines in “Lucha de Carreteras”, which features street racing infused with lucha libre styling. “V10”, the sequel to FH4’s “The Stunt Driver” that marks the return of stunt coordinator Mike Steele and actor Frankie Beaumont, is also a standout.
FH5’s map is the largest one in the series to date, with varied geographical and topographical features: desert, volcano, mountain range, wetland, jungles, beaches, and plains. This map is also meteorologically diverse, with adjacent areas possibly having different weather conditions. To see a dust storm brew up during spring season is breathtaking, and to race into it is thrilling.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3412788084
What I enjoy about FH5’s Accolades system is its clarity. The game openly states what Accolades can be earned, how to earn it, and how far along you are in doing so. Browsing the lists of over 2000 Accolades inspired me to try things I previously didn’t care much for, including making an earnest effort in drifting and tuning cars. Essentially, FH5 fine-tunes the tried-and-true gameplay that FH4 offered, and provides a more well-rounded and approachable gaming experience as a result.
That being said, Accolades being one of the measures of success makes Horizon Adventure a bit too easy. Despite my benefitting from it, I feel like I didn’t earn the privilege to participate in the finale races. Does it make sense that I get to race in The Marathon, the Horizon Street Scene finale race, without having competed in a street race event? Frankly, once you’ve completed the finale race, going back to the individual race events is rather anticlimactic.
The game’s large map, while a selling point, is also a weakness. With points of interest far apart and the scenery in between being generally unremarkable, long drives get tiresome quickly. In fact, it’s more fun, efficient and productive to drive from point A to B as crow flies, so you can earn some Skill Points while you blaze across the terrain. While I’m partial to road races in Forza Horizon games, I found this Mexico game map to be remarkably conducive to cross country racing and trailblazer challenges. They’re easily the best racing parts of FH5.
On the other hand, I found dirt racing to be spectacular, and road racing exhilarating in the Rally Adventure and Hot Wheels expansion packs respectively. The Badlands map in Rally Adventure is more compact, but topographically interesting and fun to explore. Rally racing, a new addition to the Forza Horizon franchise, introduces a layer of complexity to dirt racing that I welcome wholeheartedly. I’ve started playing rally racing in first-person mode for the extra sense of realism and excitement.
Hot Wheels feels wholly unique with the setting being three aerial islands connected by the toys’ signature orange tracks, as well as ice tracks, water flumes, and magnet tracks. Although you’re confined to the tracks most of the time, thus losing some open-world exploration, speeding through loop-the-loops, diving straight into a volcano, and winding through giant trees and mountains mid-air, exploring this fantastical racing wonderland at top speed make up for the constraints.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3412788046
And once you’ve played these expansion packs, the flaws of the main game’s map become more apparent. With it being so big, it regularly feels empty during the past two months of playing. I rarely run into other online players on the road since they’d often be hanging out at the Horizon Festival outpost or seasonal challenge locations. Other outposts are usually empty. With few traffic vehicles on the roads as well, the game world feels very dull.
Only Guanajuato, one of two featured cities, makes for interesting setting for races. Its winding narrow roads make street racing exciting, and its underground tunnels make the Hide and Seek game mode rather challenging. And of the four featured archeological sites, only Ek’Balam and Teotihuacan get the most exposure and use. It’s a shame not all landmarks get the same love and attention.
At the time of writing, FH5 is on its 43rd and final monthly Festival Playlist series that features daily and weekly challenges. After this, the game will re-release previous series as voted by the community. This is great news for me because being late to FH5 and having already spent over 200 hours playing, it’s the daily and weekly challenges that keep me coming back, even if it’s just for several minutes. If it weren’t for the live service content, I would have stopped playing tens of hours ago.
Regardless of FH5’s longevity at the time of this review, I think this game is absolutely worth playing even without the live service content. While I admit the game is less fun without them, there is plenty of offline content in FH5 to satisfy fans of arcade driving and open-world adventure games. Because the gameplay is fine-tuned and accessible, and made even more fun with the two expansion packs, I recommend not just the Standard Edition game, but also the Premium Edition.
The 43rd series being the last one hints at news of Forza Horizon 6 being on the…uh, horizon. If the content of FH4 and this game were any indication, the next game will continue to feature stories about the host country or region’s automotive and racing history, and showcase its geography and monuments. Given that, I’m guessing FH6 will be set in either Germany or Japan. Whether I’m right or not, I’m looking forward to a sequel. Here’s hoping FH6 will smooth out the few rough edges of this game and give us an even more polished racing adventure experience.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3410009103

Amount of vitriol and resentment I have towards this game is immeasurable. I didn’t play this game – this game played me: luring me in with pretty graphics and cars, while toxic FOMO mechanics and brain-dead game design stole my precious time.
If you are a casual gamer that just wants to chill and play this game for a bit without a care in the world - you might still extract some fun from this title. It is a nice floor carpet of pretty patterns and quality fabric, alright. However, if you wish to see under it – to play the game in more dedicated way – you are bound to see one of the most disgusting pile of issues that lampshade towards developer’s total lack of care for good game design with zero for respect for players’ time and intelligence.
Describing every problem in detail would make this review longer than a intelligence agency report on country-wide incident, so I will only list them briefly to show how messed up everything is.
Starting from game design: Finishing events give you barely any cash, making them feel unrewarding. Progression is tied to a casino themed WheelSpins, which provide you with random rewards every pull - praying on people’s gambling instincts and throwing a tempo of player’s wealth generation off the rails. You can get supercars extremely early, turning more rare and exciting cars IRL into forgettable afterthoughts.
You could try to finish normal races (of which types are not-numerous and boring), but you are constantly bombarded by Forzathon challenges. Those are week-only task, you need to do repeatedly if you want to get rare cars, which are unavailable anywhere else. That means, you need to log into the game every week to do the same repetitive task over and over and over again without stop. Map might be filled with stuff to do, but you will be forced to do those other time-sensitive tasks every time you boot the game - unless you want to try fight that prevalent fear of missing out. This whole procedure is soul-renting and I was stuck in it for a very long while, while my time in the game was an absolute misery of boring races on boring tracks. I ultimately managed to stop caring about getting all those one-of-the-kind cars, but it was too late for game’s hour count, which ended up considerably high. Even after ignoring Forzathons, this game’s campaign is nothing more than filling in check-boxes on endless to-do lists without rhyme or reason.
Whenever game doesn’t steal your precious time on slop content, it cannot stop itself providing some of the most intelligence insulting voice-over and story. You are constantly being glazed by the the cast as if you were a person that contained the Black Mesa Incident. Writing is infantile and cringeworthy, making every character an unlikeable prick. Horizon Stories mode provide even more idiocy with baffling storylines about characters I simply couldn’t care less about.
For a company that prides itself on respecting different world cultures, Microsoft made an absolute disservice to Mexicans. They took only few token gestures towards their culture - making it otherwise as unappealing as possible. It breaks my heart to see such rich and colorful Mexico culture turned into such dreadful world map (that doesn’t do country any justice), annoying stories that are told irresponsibly bad and terrible music choices. Latter are piled on top of the setlist that, even not considering Mexican contributions, is full of absolute pop trash that drives me to apathy. I always turn the radio off at first possible opportunity.
On top of all that, I feel I’ve got scammed with the Ultimate Edition. Not only DLCs are subpar at best and absolutely dreadful at worst, but there is nothing “ultimate” about additional car packs that were added later and require additional purchase on top of owning the best edition of the game. It was the first time I decided to go with more expensive edition of the game and it will be the last time. I’ve learned this lesson.
There are even more baffling problems that I could really dig into really deep, like tons of useless or mismanaged modes, systems, auction house, customization, terrible color selections and more. I think you got the point already. If you are somebody who cares about game’s design integrity and wants to be taken with respect, DO NOT BUY THIS GAME. It will only incentivize this company to produce the same slop again, with all the wrong lessons learned from it. If you are reading this review, played Forza Horizon 5 and agree with my outlook – I suggest to you to also write a negative review. I know it’s just a drop in the ocean, but that’s the only influence we do afford.
We deserve far better racing title than this sorry excuse of game design.

Even though I do not have many hours on this game as it stands, I should first preface this review by saying I have played Forza motorsport since it first made an appearance on the original xbox. Prior to that I played Project Gotham Racing 2. I also played later editions of Forza (and Test Drive Unlimited 2) on the 360 and several of the PC titles that came along before FH5 arrived.
Forza Horizon 5 -in common with the other Horizon games- brings the precise engine/simulation aspect of Forza motorsport to the open-world/convoy racer theme that Test Drive Unlimited 2 made us love. Obviously the graphics (if you have the right rig) are first-rate and the sound and gameplay experience is just excellent. I haven't played multiplayer extensively yet but there is a great deal of things to do for even a player playing solo and parts of the map to explore and a wide variety of environments. In some ways it is somewhat bewildering to the new player even if it does seem to offer near endless game longevity.
In common with Forza motorsport, the car simulation, upgrading/modding and tuning aspect are a feature along with the detailed car painting/vinyl system to customise your collection. Speaking of the collection, it feels like we have a greater range of makes and models than I would have expected based on the earlier games.
The main downside I have noticed so far is that Turn10 have elected, once again, to lock certain car models away by only making these available to the player if they 'win' them by taking part in various challenges which are themselves only available to play for a limited period of time. This detracts from the 'car collector' aspect of the game which so many of us enjoy and serves no useful purpose whatsoever other than making some possibly very popular models extremely rare to ever appear on the auction house and so near impossible for anyone else to obtain. I would point out that not everyone has the time to play the game daily looking for random challenges to pop up so they have the chance to win the models they really want to try to get.
Another aspect I have noticed has returned, yet again, is that in races against the AI, you start every race right at the back of the pack of 12 AI morons whose purpose in life is to slow you down and so ensure that the first 2-4 AI drivers can make a clean getaway and so elude you on the higher difficulties. There is no option to qualify or do anything to affect your place on the grid- you're starting in 12th place every time. This just increases the level of grind for me.
I'm hoping the online community and casual convoy driving will make up for this and really bring back the memories of TDU2 for me. Those who know will recall near endless hours of fun driving around the map with no particular aim in particular just chatting and driving rapidly around the traffic. All the ingredients for this are there in Forza Horizon 5, I guess the real factor in this is in the people you choose to play with.
The other question remains however: is this game worth of the full asking price for the super-deluxe-premium version with every DLC available until the Sun goes supernova? In all honesty I would say probably not unless you really are a die-hard fan of the series. For the regular/casual gamer just get the standard edition when it's on sale and just buy the DLC packs you like the look of.