Our review of Forza Horizon 5, developed by Playground Games. Available now for PS5 (reviewed), Xbox X/S, Xbox One, and Windows.
WHAT IS IT?
The best Mexican road trip you’ve never taken.
IS IT GOOD?
Es fantástico.
WHO SHOULD PLAY IT?
Those ancient aliens that built the Mayan pyramids.
VE RÁPIDO
Twenty years ago, when the original Forza debuted on Xbox, it was one of the few (very few) games which made me jealous of my Xbox-owning friends, and ever-so-slightly regretful of owning a PlayStation 2.
Twenty years ago, nineteen years ago – ten years ago, five years ago, hell, even last year – if you’d told me Forza would be making its way to a Sony console, I would have thought you’d been huffing exhaust fumes.
And yet, here we are. Thanks to a, shall we say, evolved approach to game distribution on the part of Microsoft, we now live in an era in which former X-clusives like Forza, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and – wait for it – Gears of War(!) have all landed on or are heading to non-Microsoft consoles.
All the better for Sony gamers, then, since the first wave of these – with Forza Horizon 5 at the vanguard – are among the very best titles to land on Xbox hardware in recent years. Yes, sure, Gran Turismo 7 exists, but it’s operating in a different enough space that Forza is absolutely worth adding to your PS5 collection alongside it.
ESO QUE NI QUE!
Several years ago, the Forza series took an interesting turn, away from the more typical selection of discrete race tracks, towards great big interconnected worlds, where you’re free to drive through city, forest, and field to get from race to race, challenge to challenge. It’s a nifty take on the open-world genre popularised by Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto series – and brilliantly implemented in the long-forgotten Midnight Club racing games, also from Rockstar – creating a more or less seamless racing experience, unshackled from menus or, really, any interruptions.
Forza Horizon (2012) was set in a fictionalized take on Colorado, with Horizon 2 (2014) relocating to Italy and France, Horizon 3 (2016) in Australia, and Horizon 4 (2018) in the U.K. None of these were 1:1 recreations, but rather reimagined versions of real locations, digital playgrounds designed for maximum racing fun – and with plenty of secrets to track down.
The Mexico-set Forza Horizon 5 debuted to much fanfare on Xbox and Windows in 2021, widely heralded as the best-realized open-world racing game to date. On PS5, it’s just as good, with incredible track design, even better world design – there are ancient pyramids to zoom through, flamingoes to avoid, active volcanoes to skid alongside of – and a mega-garage’s worth of licensed vehicles to rival Gran Turismo.
NO MANCHES
Forza Horizon 5 is the fastest racing game I’ve ever played.
I’m not quite sure I understand how they’ve done it, but there’s definitely some graphical trickery going on, the world around you zooming along at an incredible pace, even as your car itself never becomes unwieldy or risks spinning out of control. It’s a joy to behold (Forza is a very spectator-friendly game), and even better to control, DualSense in hand.
The world of FH5 is great. I love Mexico, and I also love Forza Horizon 5’s version of Mexico. This is a country of wildly varying environments – peaks and valleys, oceans and mountaintops – and wildly varying weather, from thunderstorms to dust storms… all of which FH5 is more than happy to recreate. If you’ve ever visited Mexico, you’ll find a lot that is familiar here, including sites like the Mayan archaeological site at Ek’ Balam, the beachside city of Tulum, and the impressive Gran Puente bridge.
I also love me some sweet, sweet, designer cars. There are hundreds if not thousands of unlockable cars in FH5, ranging from the 1964 Aston Martin DB (yes, the James Bond car), to the Gran Turismo-famous Nissan Skyline, all the way to more gimmicky fare like a Cadillac Limo, the Peel Trident “microcar”, and various licenced tie-ins, including a whole Hot Wheels-themed mode with Hot Wheels-styled cars. Like any good racing game, FH5 thrives on the chase to collect any and every vehicle, even if just to show them off in your in-game showroom, or, better yet, take them online in its robust multiplayer modes, including a brand-new 72-car battle royale mode called “The Eliminator”.
Day to day, moment to moment, FH5 gives you a lot – almost too much – to do. Thanks to its open-world format, it’s very easy to pick up and play, with an endlessly expanding selection of activities – races to join in single-player or multiplayer, special challenges to conquer – allowing for play sessions of as little as five minutes or as long as several hours, as you go out and tackle each new GPS indicator that pops up on the map. It’s also just as rewarding to simply seek out obscure corners of the map to see what secrets lie in store.
BIENVENIDO AL PARAÍSO
One nice thing about Forza’s open world structure is that a lot of its challenges are triggered (or accomplished) automatically, real-time, seamlessly integrated into your open world travels. Drive through a “trailblazer gate”, for example, and a GPS indicator immediately pops up along with a countdown, the game challening you to race to your target as fast as possible. Other challenges – like reaching maximum speed on a certain road, or getting excessive airtime – are triggered automatically when you drive through a specific spot on the map. It’s only for structured races or certain story missions that you’ll actually have to pull up to a designated location and tap the Square button to launch the mission.
Happily, Forza has a wonderful sense of its own absurdity, deliberately putting you into ridiculous situations like speeding under ancient pyramids or swerving through a field of donkeys. Unlike Gran Turismo, FH5 resolutely does not take itself seriously – which is not to say that it doesn’t treat its vehicles, and fidelity to their real-world design, with utmost respect. But, all in all, this is an arcadier offering than a true racing sim, with an emphasis on wild stunts, supremely destructible environments, and over-the-top set pieces. (One of the recurring gimmicks is a dangerously low-flying transport plane that follows you around.)
Most of the challenges in FH5 are great, helpfully pointing you in the right direction to learn new skills and unlock new stuff. Some of the challenges are tough, although these are, for the most part, optional, in the sense you can set them aside and go do other things for a long time before there’s any reason to come back to them. Incidentally, some of the challenges are long… as in, lengthy, map-spanning challenges which require you to drive across a significant chunk of the world, in order to “clear” one of the eleven biomes which make up this fictionalised version of Mexico.
FH5 is also deeply customizable. That starts with difficulty – it gives you plenty of tools to tweak it, whether tougher or easier – and extends to game design, since you can customise your own races, your car, and your driver (to the extent you care what your avatar looks like). It’s a small touch, but it’s also nice that Playground went ahead and recorded voicework for something like five hundred different first names, giving you plenty of options to personalise your character and then have other characters actually refer to them by name.
Gran Turismo 7 may be the great VR game of its era, but that’s no knock against its Microsoft-produced direct competitor, now making its (extremely unanticipated) debut on PS5. Forza Horizon 5 is gloriously fun, difficult to put down, and a great Mexican travel simulator to boot. Gearheads absolutely owe it to themselves to check out Forza Horizon 5, as do any would-be turistas.
***
Final score: 9/10 carros.
Visit the official website for Forza Horizon 5 here.
