izigame.me

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.