The implicit promise of Forza Horizon is in the name. You see something on the horizon, you can drive to it. Skyrim with cars. Far Cry with…
The implicit promise of Forza Horizon is in the name. You see something on the horizon, you can drive to it. Skyrim with cars. Far Cry with more cars and no guns. Forza Horizon 5, the latest game in the venerable Xbox racing series, is no more and no less than that promise—just bigger, brighter, and so, so much more beautiful than its predecessors. Forza Horizon 5, which is developed by Playground Games and officially comes out on November 9 for Xbox and PC, is in some aspects The Monte Carlo Casino Parking Lot: The Game – 5th Edition. When you’re not driving fast cars on long roads through eye-popping vistas, you’re amassing a collection of obscenely expensive wealthmobiles for no other purpose, I suppose, than staring at them. And having others stare at them, too. There’s a peppy verve, an almost contagious enthusiasm rooted in some complete absurdity, that gives Forza Horizon 5 its own express lane on the congested highway of racing games. This is a game where you can drive a Warthog (the very same military vehicle from Halo) through vine-covered Aztec ruins. It’s a game where you can source a Porsche 918 Spyder covered in Mario -themed livery and then summarily crash it into a smoldering caldera. You can push a Lamborghini Aventador made out of burnished mahogany to speeds north of 200 mph, as if such a patently ridiculous vehicle wouldn’t fall apart at the seams in seconds going half that speed. Yes, Forza Horizon 5 is more than happy to embrace its silly side, an ethos that’s apparent from the jump. The opening sequences rank (no exaggeration here) among the most preposterously thrilling moments I’ve ever played in a game. You start in a four-wheeler, parked in the hold of a cargo plane that drops you on the side of a volcano. A few minutes later, you’re in a more sensible car, sure, except you’re driving through a dust storm so colossal it obscures the entire horizon. Another smash cut, then you’re crashing through the jungle in a custom coupe. A fourth, and you’re barrelling down beachside highways, culminating in a drag-strip sprint against a neon-speckled airplane while hot air balloons soar overhead and heart-pumping electronica plays in the background. I spent the whole time laughing in glee. The rest of the game doesn’t quite capture that magic—after 25-odd hours, I’ve yet to see another sandstorm, for instance—but it admirably stays the course. That said, perhaps the lack of ceaseless thrill is because, really, I’ve been down this road before. We all have. Forza Horizon games are always set in deliciously digitized approximations of some real-world location. Previous entries have visited locales like the English Cotswolds ( FH4) and the French Riviera’s Côte d’Azur ( FH2), though the latter loses serious marks for somehow neglecting to include Monaco, the global capital of fancy-pants car culture. These maps always center around a traveling car festival, the titular Horizon Festival, whose central grounds function as a home base of sorts for your escapades throughout the region. Forza Horizon 5 largely fits into that framework, with some welcome tweaks. The setting this time—a coast-to-coast recreation of Mexico centered around the city of Guanajuato—is divided into 11 wanderlust-inducing biomes. The Horizon Festival itself, meanwhile, is no longer fully centralized. Your initial goal is to accrue enough accolade points, earned by completing events, to establish five new “outposts,” shown as Coachella-like concert stages on the map. Those outposts correlate to a specific event category in the game; earn, say, the Apex stage on the east coast and you’ll get access to road racing events; put up the Rush stage in the northern canyons to get a bunch of high-wire stunts, and so on. Once you’ve established a stage, you can continue to unlock bespoke missions, called showcases, related to that stage’s discipline. Going through the motions here is how you come across some of Forza Horizon 5 ’s more creative events, like a headlong sprint against a freight train. (I won.) It’s also how you find some of the more infuriating ones, including a stressful string of missions wherein you need to maintain speed above a certain threshold. (I lost. A lot.) So Forza Horizon 5 quickly settles into a rhythm: Do minor events, get points, unlock major events, rinse, wash, repeat. It helps that the map is positively littered with icons—so many icons—to the point where the finish line of one race is likely quite close to the starting gate of another, so you’re never not progressing. Or at least, that’s the way I approached things. You could also just drive around aimlessly for the heck of it.
