Handbrake turns are satisfyingly difficult to pull off with precision and while the amount drifting would whittle your tyres down to nothing in real life it’s still not as unrealistic as many other games. With a solid mix of off-road and circuit racing there’s a clear difference in handling and suspension depending not only on what car you’re driving but also what surface. Importantly, the map, which in the last game was criticised for being smaller than Forza Horizon 3, is now twice as big as before – with the addition of the volcano also adding the highest point of any of the games so far.Īlthough it does qualify as an arcade racer, with no pretence of the same level of realism as Forza Motorsport, Horizon is far from complete fantasy. Mexico’s seasons might not be as clearly defined as the UK, and so no longer cycle round every week, but Forza Horizon 5’s weather effects are still excellent, with localised storms that you can drive away from and even Mad Max style dust clouds. This time round it’s the turn of Mexico, with the game’s open world including deserts, forests, volcanoes, beaches, cities, Mayan temples, and everything in-between.įorza Horizon 5 is still a cross-gen game, so it’s not able to leverage the full power of the Xbox Series X/S, but it looks fantastic, with a seemingly infinite draw distance, an impressive new lighting system, and the various biomes all rendered in stunning detail. The basic premise of Forza Horizon 5 has been the same since the beginning and while the concept of attending an almost countrywide driving festival has become more extravagant, and less believable, with each iteration it means each game also functions as a kind of virtual tourism, with previous entries taking place in fictionalised versions of the US, France/Italy, Australia, and the UK.
So if you can put up with that there’s no reason why anyone wouldn’t enjoy Forza Horizon 5, unless they had a pathological hatred of driving games. And while the cringeworthy xtreme racing dialogue, between the game’s gaggle of obnoxiously hip racers, is painful to listen to the recent release of Riders Republic makes it seem like poetry in comparison.
There’s certainly increasingly little similarity between Forza Horizon and the purposefully po-faced Motorsport. Sony has published plenty of arcade racers in their time, but the likes of MotorStorm and Driveclub have gone the way of the dodo and, as an open world arcade racer with fantastic graphics and a robust multiplayer, there’s now nothing quite like Forza Horizon on any format.
Forza Motorsport was created specifically to be a rival to Gran Tursimo on the PlayStation, its regular release schedule standing in pointed mockery of Polyphony Digital’s troubled relationship with release dates.
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