Forza Horizon 5 review: A true Forza Horizon 4 replacement?

In my Forza Horizon 5 review, I racked up 23 hours of driving time to talk about the new features, handling, cars and whether it is better than Forza Horizon 4.

Creating something more compelling than Forza Horizon 4? Not a task I would want. For all of its flaws, and there were many, it was a game you sunk years of your life into. Especially as the developers kept throwing new DLC packs, cars and challenges at us.

Forza Horizon 5, based in Mexico, also had to worry about next-gen consoles while not closing the door on those who have yet to upgrade from a console that arrived as far back as late 2013. Plus there was, you know, the lockdown thing.

Has greatness been achieved in spite of all that? Well, I accumulated 124 cars, all houses, 12.5 million credits in winnings, 40 per cent of Xbox Achievements, every barn find and reached level 107 to find out. Over a period of 21 hours of driving time, apparently. All in the name of research obviously.

Please note: My video, complete with Forza Horizon 5 gameplay galore, is coming soon. Check out my other Forza Horizon 5 content here and on the A Tribe Called Cars YouTube.

Forza Horizon 5: The new stuff

Remember that bit about shaping the game as you see fit? Well, the Horizon Adventure gives you unlock points for opening new areas in whatever order you choose. Each ‘Expedition’ category has four storyline tasks where you can become a stunt driver for a movie, a Baja rally driver, street racer or get behind the wheel of the most ridiculous Forza vehicle ever. You will know.

There are also fun exploration bits where you drive around completing five unique challenges such as photographing a hidden Mayan statue. That appears on the map as plain as day when you get close enough.

The rest of the game, however, is very much of a Forza Horizon 4 flavour. Go here, drive this, achieve that time etc. Except with Mexican vibes. That free roaming gameplay goodness remains intact.

As with Forza Horizon 4, ‘Exhibition’ races are when Forza Horizon 5 is at its most ridiculous and fun. Because racing a man in a wingsuit and two monster trucks is never dull.

Accolades are a new addition. Think of these as tasks that give you experience points, customisation items and cars for doing Forza-ry things like performing stunts and breaking speed limits. A total of 1,876 accolades means all but breathing is rewarded.

Not new, meanwhile, are the Forzathon challenges for yet more rewards. Except this time you get Forzathon points that can be spent in the Forzathon shop.

During my review, I unlocked the DeLorean DMC-12 at 26 Forzathon points. But sadly not quite the Mercedes-AMG One, which costs 40. Finding players to do the group stuff a week before launch is not the easiest.

Events Lab & gifting are a thing?

Gifting is also new to Forza Horizon 5. Barns that first hide a cool car you can restore can then be used to gift cars to other players. Not specific players, mind you, but you do have a few options.

Forza Horizon 5 also adds the Events Lab. Custom challenges made by the community, basically. One tasked me with the impossible challenge of driving 10 metres into a row of piñatas and past the finish line. That was intense.

Event Lab is interesting because of the three overall command types you can use: Trigger, condition and action. Choose a trigger event, the condition for it to occur and then an action that happens as a result. Welcome to programming.

Sadly, there were too few players to see how creative the community can get. Also the whole process required way too much brainpower for someone who has written about 10,000 words in three days.

The Car Collection, meanwhile, is a menu that shows every vehicle you can get and how to do so. It even sends you to the Autoshow if necessary and, as you unlock every car from a particular manufacturer, yet more rewards are given.

Convoy also makes a return albeit not as fleshed out as it was in earlier Forza games, as do Clubs and the Super7 mode. Where you get to play seven player-made challenges. Do a barrel roll, don’t break your car jumping off sand dunes, drive ten miles without spilling your tea. Okay, so that last one is a lie.

Then there is Forza Horizon Open, which sounds like a tennis tournament but it is for racing people from around the world. Rivals, meanwhile, lets you try to match certain players. Throughout this review, my rival was DJS of Forza YouTube fame. He’s a bit speedy, that lad.

All of this time-sapping stuff is in addition to the usual drift zones, speed cameras, danger zone jumps, road races, cross-countries, rallies, drag strips etc. Oh and the Creative Hub for liveries, photographs and car tunes. Suffice to say, vanishing into a wheel-based abyss is easily done.

What about the visuals?

Phwoar does it look good on Xbox Series X and a high-end gaming PC. Mexico really does make love to your peep holes. I loved the UK location, but Mexico is more extreme. More alive. More stormy too, which adds to the excitement. Although sandstorms did seem to stop happening beyond a certain point in the game.

Which is better, Performance or Quality? Well, both are 4K if you have a fancypants monitor or TV. Quality is prettier. But the 60 frames per second (FPS) of Performance is just so much better for racing. Mmm smooth.

That similarly fancypants SSD in the Xbox Series consoles means the load times are smaller than a Porsche Taycan’s fuel bill. Less time to enjoy those ridiculous showboat and victory dances, that’s for sure.

What about Forza Horizon 5 on Xbox One? Driving too fast down a volcano resulted in me and my hyper VW Vocho Beetle getting stuck in a digital no man’s land. Where I was taunted by free-roaming wildlife. That was fun.

Also fun is the input delay that made me noticeably slower in races. And the fact that the visuals of a Day One Xbox One are really not ageing well compared with the Series X and my RTX 3080. I actually had to pause the game because of all the blood pouring from my straining eyes.

Just kidding. However the Xbox One rendition does make Mexico much less enticing, less alive and less fun. It is also currently more prone to other bugs such as getting stuck in Mayan walls. I was just Mayan my own business. Okay, too far.

Those used to 30FPS like I had to be when Forza Horizon 4 came out will still have a good time though. Just know that Forza Horizon 5 makes a very good case for upgrading, in part because only PC and Series S|X can go above 30 frames per second.

Do the engines sound better?

Audio is another big plus of Forza Horizon 5. Car engines sound more like, well, car engines. Not just the bassy vrooms, but also the whooshes, whines and other descriptive words beginning with W that I am too tired to think of.

I like that ray-tracing audio, that is the name yes, helps with making sounds come from different angles more convincingly and there is more detail overall. All these audio improvements add to the immersion, especially with a decent surround sound setup or headphones.

Okay, yes, some cars still sound somewhat electronic while some engine noises are simply attached to the wrong car. But most of us will find all of this is music to our ears.

As for the soundtrack, I had it disabled because of copyright. The new streamer mode option and ability to adjust the music volume are very welcome.

However, you do still get some music that is streamer-friendly and the rest of the music is plentiful enough that you should like at least one song. Shame there is less Mexican stuff, but there you go.

What about the Forza Horizon 5 cars?

526 vehicles, that is the magic number according to the aforementioned Car Collection menu. A good amount when you remember that Gran Turismo 3 had 150-odd and Project Gotham Racing, an underrated original Xbox game, had 29. I can’t even count to 526.

The problem is that many of those vehicles were in Forza Horizon 4. Not only that, some stuff has vanished such as Alfa Romeo, Lancia and Fiat. I really wanted to drive one of my favourite cars I have ever tested, the Quadrifoglio, but for now I can’t.

At least the new cars are largely great (especially the DeLorean). Big shout out, too, to the X3M Forza Edition that really is epic at S2 class. But perhaps not 2017 Aston Martin Vulcan AMR Pro levels of epic.

It is also a valid criticism to point out that many models in Forza Horizon 5 are a generation behind. It would be nice to drive the new S3 or RS3 Audis, for example. But then given how much after-launch content we got over three years, presumably this will become less of an issue.

One cool but largely pointless car feature is that convertibles can go topless. There is even a race mode, except it is currently limited to the Mercedes-AMG One. At least when you use it you get a realistic increase in downforce and a decrease in top speed.

Tuning and upgrades any different?

Forza Horizon 5 is largely familiar in terms of upgrades and tuning if you played previous Forza games. Still, you do get new stuff such as rally differentials and semi-slick tyres. You can also now press the accelerator while buying parts and preview the resulting engine noise.

Sadly, a few bodykits have gone for the time being and the tuning menu – tyres, gearing, alignment, antiroll bars, springs, damping, aero, brake and differential, you know the drill – is the same as before.

Will car setups and tunes mirror that of Forza Horizon 4? It appears some tactics do still work and that the default for most cars is a good starting point. But perhaps enough has been done to see new tuning tricks emerge.

Is the AI still rubber-bandy?

As for the artifical intelligence behind the wheel of the non-human racers, Forza Horizon 5 does a better job. Okay, so the AI rarely crashes or pulls into a drive-thru for a coffee. And at unbeatable (the daddy of difficulty levels) it is annoyingly consistent at braking and steering. It also seems to land in water and not lose speed, unlike when you do it. This is not good news for many off-road races.

But at lower difficulty levels Forza Horizon 5 does keep you busy and able to leave the pack without being as fast as DJS, crafty with wall bangs and constantly hitting the rewind button. On tourist, the easiest AI setting, you could be utterly inebriated and still win, which makes it useful for when you want to drift around circuits connecting corners like you watch Tokyo Drift too often. If there is such a thing.

Is the Forza Horizon 5 handling good?

Changes to the suspension, tyres and other areas make Forza Horizon 5 more pleasing. You can still go insanely fast along public roads with little consequence, but generally heavier cars make for added realism and intuitiveness. Cars drive more like real cars.

Whereas in Forza Horizon 4 things were usually just plain floaty and steering was hyper-fast, hello Ridge Racer, Forza Horizon 5 has taken a chill pill. Kind of.

This is really felt when you hook up a steering wheel and barely change the settings. Because instead of fishtailing and needing to press the accelerator with ninja levels of precision, you can just drive and have fun.

Has Forza Horizon 5 become a sim racer? No, it is a still more arcade racer than simulator. Which is fine because we have Forza Motorsport 8 on the, erm, horizon. And yet, some Forza Horizon 5 cars do feel realistic. Enough to please most people, I would say. Especially as most people have never driven the real car anyway.

The main thing is that I found myself wanting to drive more cars than in previous games. They are more than just a number. Honestly, never has a Horizon game driven so well.

With that said, I could only try out the spring and summer seasons. Who knows what handling challenges autumn and winter will bring. Hopefully not too much bloody snow.

Forza Horizon 5 review: The bad stuff

Now we come to the grumpy cynical motoring journalist bit where I will list the bad stuff. Things like the fact that I wanted to learn more about Mexico and its history, countryside, landmarks and so on but these moments are rare.

I also wish the developer had been a bit more inventive in the challenges. Pull away a few environment props such as filmset cameras and lorry jumps and you get A to B driving. And that would be fine if many of the challenges were not over in less than a minute or two.

And your presence, besides erecting lol Horizon stands for the crowds across the map, has zero impact on the world. I want to build my own home or move in somewhere that has a garage where I can store all my crippingly expensive machinery. Or run a business. Oh wait, that is Grand Theft Auto.

Then there are the silly things. Like the fact the driver’s hand movement does not correlate with the amount of steering just like in Forza Horizon 4. And that the speedometer still appears too slowly at the start of a race so it is easy to over-rev perfomance cars unless you revert to automatic. Or instantly switch into second, which is not always fastest.

As for the dialogue, some is amusing and performed with heart. However, generally these largely unavoidable and unskippable interactions are stilted. Bearable once, painful after a few times while trying to get the top three-medal rating. I want less ‘banter’, in inverted commas, and more of the Mexico trivia.

Inconsistencies in the challenge difficulty also ruins the fun sometimes. Given that I race at pro and unbeatable almost entirely, I am not exactly Mr Sausage Fingers. But every once in a while I get absolutely steamrolled. Not just because of the godly AI driving ability, but also because there are some car performance mismatches. A Mazda MX-5, as good as it is, was always going to struggle against a high-powered BMW on a highway.

I should also mention that the user-interface, although pretty, is still a bit busy. It is nice to have loads to do, particularly from value and longevity perspectives. However, option paralysis is a thing and some UI inconsistencies mean you can quite easily forget entire parts of the game exist. Or just end up getting frustrated.

Oh and some PC users are reporting crashes, including myself until I reinstalled the game, and steering wheel accessory issues.

Should I buy, then?

So then, what is my Forza Horizon 5 review verdict? 4.5 Earl Grey teas out of five. Fans of Forza Horizon 4 can expect more of the same, only better and more refined. This is, after all, the crack cocaine of the racing game world and, despite some foibles (love that word), it can and will hook you for days, weeks. Maybe even months and years.

This really is one of the prettiest, most involving and most compelling driving games around and nothing else in the genre does free-roaming so marvellously.

I just can’t help but think that such a beautiful, thriving world, with migrating butterflies and donkeys you can never run over, deserves a more inventive experience and it is here where Forza Horizon 5 suffers. Visually arresting, innovatively arrested you could say.

But then Forza has always been about the driving and the handling, audio, steering wheel and visual improvements all make Forza Horizon 5 superior to Forza Horizon 4. Never has a game made me want to take a Morris Minor up a volcano in the cockpit view more than this game – and that, ladies and gentleman, is exactly how it should be.

My Forza Horizon 5 review stats

Forza Horizon 5 screenshots