Forza Horizon 5 Review

Playground Studios’ Forza Horizon 5 is their biggest launch to date. With over one million players even before the official release (premium edition owners had early access), its success is undeniable. Is it hype or actual greatness?

The Forza Horizon franchise is no stranger to the average gamer, with its big environments, thrilling races, and hundreds of vehicles to choose from, along with multiple customization options and collectibles. It has always been an Xbox Game Studios flagship along with the track-focused brother, Forza Motorsport. While Horizon competed with the likes of Driveclub and Test Drive Unlimited 2, Motorsport tried to dethrone Gran Turismo, Sony’s flagship racing simulator franchise.

Earlier on, Forza Motorsport seemed to draw most of the attention, with Motorsport 5 and 6 being huge cash cows that brought hundreds of thousands of gamers to the green side, including me. Forza Motorsport 6 was my first Forza, back in late 2015. Coming from a PlayStation 2 console and years of Gran Turismo 4 (although I wasn’t playing it in 2015), FM6 was a blast. Full HD graphics, solid 60 fps, considerably sized garage, plenty of good tracks. Guaranteed fun. Although, I did miss the Gran Turismo struggle from the first ten or so hours, with slow vehicles and a lot of license grinding. It didn’t take long until I had a fantastic garage with everything one could ever need.

Motorsport had something that Horizon didn’t: a long, interesting, and somewhat challenging career mode. Earlier Horizons were nice, don’t get me wrong, mainly Forza Horizon 2 with that fantastic European landscape, good engine sounds, sharp 1080p@30 on Xbox One, which was impressive back then all things considered. It looked really good even if you were to compare it with demanding PC titles. For 2014 standards, FH2 was the créme de la créme. But as much as it was very beautiful, it felt rather short and once you ran out of things to do, there was no motivation to keep on playing and grinding levels. The fact that the garage was substantially smaller than Motorsport didn’t help much either. It didn’t take long until I couldn’t stand playing it.

Forza Horizon 3 was a game-changer. Not because of the game itself, which some claim is objectively worse than Horizon 2 as far as location and sounds are concerned, but it was the first title that was also available on PC. The fact that it was no longer an exclusive meant more people could play it and generate content on YouTube, Twitch, etc., which was hugely beneficial to the franchise as a whole. It suddenly became so much more than just that one cool Xbox game where you can race a lot of different cars.

Horizon 4 maintained the successful formula, with cross-platform support, new setting (United Kingdom), more cars, more stuff to do and made it available on Xbox Game Pass since day one, a brilliant move, which boosted the player count even more and made it reasonably cheap to try the game out. But even so, it still didn’t feel quite right to me when it comes to single-player gameplay time: nothing but short.

Needless to say, the hype for Forza Horizon 5 was huge. Not only people were already bored of Horizon 4, which was a respectable game, but the content can only go so far. The initial rumors suggested Japan would be the setting, for the first time. Horizon was in Colorado (US), 2 in Europe (France and Italy), 3 in Australia, and 4 in the United Kingdom, so an Asian setting would be a welcome change of pace. People truly believed that would be the case.

It wasn’t until some Xbox developers and community managers hinted at Mexico that the whole belief that FH5 would be in Japan got destroyed once and for all. People welcomed the new setting, because Mexico offers varying landscapes, challenging roads, and overall an interesting environment for an open world racing game. It would all boil down to how decently the developers would be able to encapsulate the Mexican atmosphere into a tiny videogame map.

Not only did they come up with their biggest map to date, but also the most varied one as far as biomes are concerned. 1.5x larger than Forza Horizon 4, about 105 square kilometers, which isn’t much by today’s standards but very impressive Forza-wise. It’s still relatively small if you compare it to 12-year-old Arma 2 with their impressive 225 square kilometers and even Gran Theft Auto V, but, then again, different games, different purposes. The size is fine for what it is. It’s a good playground!

As far as content is concerned, it’s pretty much in line with Horizon 4, but with more races. A lot more! There is plenty more to do in Mexico, with stuff ranging from casual night races a la Need for Speed to insane Cross Country rallies with your favorite off-road vehicles. There’s stuff for everyone! And that’s where Horizon 5 shines. It offers a broader single-player experience that will keep you playing for far longer than usual.

It would be a solid 10 out of 10 if not for one thing: despite being big, the map is empty. There are huge sections of just roads, vegetation, hills, and farmland. Nothing else. No villages, big cities, which isn’t the purpose of the game, I know, but it makes it far more believable if there’s an increased populational density, which isn’t the case. The cities that happen to be there are very small, except for Guanajuato, which is the biggest one, yet very small compared to the rest of the map. They wanted to bring the entirety of Mexico into one reasonably sized map but forgot that a country isn’t just made of different biomes, but also different cities with their characteristic architecture and layout, which is exactly where it fails to impress. It’s all very beautiful, but small, not bringing that density that one would expect from Mexico. This also means that cities like Mexico City aren’t there either, despite being the most important city in the country. An urban environment that would spice up the night racing aspect of the game, making it feel even more like Need for Speed, but Mexican.

One can hope that the decision to make it less dense was purely for performance purposes, given it’s slightly more demanding than Forza Horizon 4, and it must run on the base Xbox One. Yes, it does support the previous generation as well! I played it on both platforms: the OG VHS-style Xbox and my Desktop, and both were visually stunning. Clearly, the PC experience was better, given it was quad HD, ultra settings, 60 fps, but the Xbox One version did fine. 1080p, 4xMSAA, 30 fps, not bad. Very stable 30 fps, by the way, which wasn’t the case with my PC experience. While I could easily run the previous iteration at well above 60 fps (80-ish), my RTX 2070 struggles to maintain 60 at times, mainly during the night. Lighting was heavily improved, with realistic flares and even night shadows! Which makes it so you can see the shadow of the Drivatars against the wall when you are directly behind or beside them. It’s an impressive visual effect but it does impact the average framerate.

Then again, it’s only natural that titles get more demanding over time, a direct consequence of improved graphics and the technology under the hood. Horizon 5 is truly a next-gen title, with visuals that scale up from potato levels (APUs, etc) to “extreme”, a graphics settings only recommended to the RTX 3xxx cards, mostly from the 3070 and beyond. It’s so extreme that my VRAM was not being able to cope with it at all in 4K. It did run, though, nearing mid 30s, with a bunch of graphical glitches caused by the lack of video memory. Truly extreme.

The optimization work is brilliant, and it can run on just about anything, as long as one understands that it only goes so far on that aspect, but it’s helped out by features like the dynamic resolution, allowing cards like the GTX 1050TI to run the game in 4K at 30fps on High. Even though it’s not exactly native 4K, it looks good enough! Who would think that one day, entry-level hardware would be able to run a Triple-A title in 4K, even if not fully native. What a time to be alive!

With that being said, Forza Horizon 5 is their best title so far, and the numbers are there to back up that claim, even though it doesn’t do everything right, mainly on the map aspect which I mentioned. It deserved more density and variety, even if that meant an additional performance cost. But it doesn’t take away from the fact that it is the best arcade racing game out there and one of the best releases of 2021. A solid 9/10 from me.