Forza Horizon 5 Review – IGN
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When Forza Horizon 5 crosses the finish line, the bar for open world racing has been raised again in many different ways. A map of Mexico that is bigger, taller, and much more varied than any other Horizon game yet. A new change in the way the Horizon Festival is gradually built, resulting in more unique events deliberately designed to show Horizon 5 at its finest. Improved tools that allow us to build fully custom events that can be more or less indistinguishable from those created by the developers themselves.
A huge visual improvement, especially in lighting, tire smoke and the effects of dust. Hundreds and hundreds of new custom parts, tires and performance mods, and cars with more character than ever. Drastic sound improvements, better handling, more granular preferences and options, more online activities. It really is amazing across the board.
To understand how great Forza Horizon 5 is, we have to briefly look at Forza Horizon 4, which truly became an absolute colossus of a racing game in 2018. Playground Games had taken the flawless open-world racing of all the Horizons. games to date, then stuffed into simulated seasons, a shared-world multiplayer overhaul, and a change in the way the team told their automotive mini-stories. But that was the first day; Then the playground spent another three years plus things to do. The festival’s playlist, where new activities were available each week. The Eliminator, the very smart and efficient version of Horizon to bring the battle royale format to a racing game. The Super7, where we could participate in custom racing, driving, and stunt-based challenges made by others, as well as creating and sharing our own.
What’s impressive is that Forza Horizon 5 doesn’t only all of this transported by plane to a different part of the world; is that it is all this and much more.
Mexico Pretty
The breadth of Playground’s wonderfully diverse map of Mexico is exceptional, presenting itself as a variety of extremely exotic and interesting settings to lose yourself in after three years in the beautiful but vastly more uniform Great Britain from Horizon 4. The Tapestry and Horizon 5’s colorful backgrounds looks more like Horizon 3, but feels noticeably more extensive than even Playground’s remarkable 2016 riff about Australia.
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It’s Baja, where sun-soaked asphalt hugs the shoreline as dry, sandy desert merges with beach and deep jungle, where muddy tracks criss-cross through ancient temples, abandoned airstrips, and bushland. There is the charming and colorful city of Guanajuato and its labyrinthine network of cobbled streets and tunnels, in contrast to a sleepy coastal city flanked by the ocean on one side and mangroves on the other. There is green, rolling farmland covered in crops and windswept grass, and also a picturesque gorge that looks like something out of a western movie. There’s the semi-arid desert inside the map, filled with towering cacti and unruly shrubs, and the tall, rocky volcanic peak of Gran Caldera. There is even a giant stadium for soccer shenanigans.
It’s not exactly a perfect recreation, of course, as with all the Horizon worlds to date, it pays no attention to reality, combining a stylized view of Mexico at its most interesting. The result is a fantastic map, and the largest in the series so far by a surprising margin.
That size is best seen from the top of the Gran Caldera volcano. The Playground Games team has emphasized that it is the highest point in any Horizon game, but you won’t have to take their word for it, just drive there and see how much it dwarfs Blizzard Mountain and Horizon 4 from Horizon 3. Fortune Island Expansions . The massive elevation change not only provides one of the best roads in the series to date, a twisty mountain race that I hope will become a drifting mecca for the side squad, but is a killer display of the Horizon 5’s immense drawing distance. I love games that make me feel small in a vast new space, and Horizon 5 does that very effectively.
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The garage is as large as the map itself, with over 500 vehicles, and it’s a selection that still easily outshines all of Forza Horizon’s open-world racing rivals. Of course, there aren’t a lot of cars that are strictly new to the franchise, and those of us who stick around Forza Horizon 4 every week for the past few years collecting every new car will have seen most of them before. but Playground has mitigated it a bit with the addition of many new tire options and visual enhancements that can help breathe new life into cars that it has seen a lot before. Changes in the livery editor also make it compatible with higher resolution designs and graphics … but you still can’t put decals on the glass, which is still a shame.
However, between the cars and the map, Forza Horizon 5 is incredibly beautiful on both fronts. On Xbox Series X that’s true for both 4K / 30FPS quality mode and 4K / 60FPS performance mode. I’ve been playing mostly in quality mode, as the frame rate never wavers in either mode, remaining rock solid at all times and in all conditions, but I know the visual trade-offs in performance mode are generally so small that I need to study freezing. frames to spot the difference anyway. It’s hard to pick my favorite Horizon 5 visual, but I think it could be the drastically better smoke and dust effects, and especially how light interacts with airborne particles. It looks brilliant.
Open world racing dream
Of course, while Forza Horizon 5’s stunning graphics are sucking up most of the oxygen in the room, there have been so many other improvements to the Horizon formula here that it’s hard to know where to start.
The handling settings are deceptively extensive, with more authentic ABS brakes, a more agile steering feel, and suspension improvements that have resulted in a more convincing off-road feel. The radically revamped audio is excellent, and the number of cars now blatantly sounding different from one another has skyrocketed. I especially love hearing the changes my performance parts are making to my car’s sound in real time, nerdy behavior that is encouraged by the ability to rev the engine during upgrade work.
Even before launch, the new event creation tools are already resulting in some exceptional and creative courses, races, and activities being shared among early players. With considerably more accessories and much more granular options than the Horizon 4 building tools, I expect some of the user-generated content for Horizon 5 to be insanely good.
A rethinking of how career mode plays out has seen Playground add a new point system that lets you take over which special race and event hubs you want to prioritize unlocking. These points, or “Accolades,” are awarded for achieving both major and minor feats, and essentially function as a dramatically expanded version of the Brick challenges in the LEGO expansion for Forza Horizon 4. What this has allowed Playground to do is add a handful. of units healed in addition to Horizon 5, which is called Expeditions. These expeditions inject a bit of the flavor of the fabulous but fleeting opening montages of the Horizon series into the main race, where the Playground stage manages the vehicles, time-of-day lighting and weather for memorable rides showcasing Horizon 5. at its best. One makes you run through the trees as lightning strikes the ground, while another makes you run up and down the rumbling volcano as jets of steam pierce the ground around you.
There have also been some significant multiplayer massages; This time Playground has dropped the rated game for something less pressurized and that won’t penalize you for other people’s bad racing etiquette. The PvP modes of Horizon 5 have been grouped under a single umbrella and are now designed to welcome new players as the championships progress, which means that unlike Horizon 4, it seems that we should no longer be abandoned in groups every shrinking from sore losers who bleed players the way races don’t. go your way.
Horizon 4’s hourly Forzathon Live events have also been shelved in favor of the newly christened Horizon Arcade. It works in a similar way to Forzathon Live – they are still cooperative events where everyone contributes to a common goal, but there is a greater variety of events. They can be a fun sight, particularly when dozens of piñatas are raining down from the sky, but I find that they can go down a bit when the full 10 minutes are up.
Then there are the little things, which still add up. A more intuitive car collection screen that allows you to quickly purchase multiple new cars for your garage and skip the random menu on dealer screens. A cute activity where you hide cars from your own garage for other players to find inside the barns that you have discovered around the map. Heck, there’s finally a chance to toggle between opting for metric measurements and retaining horsepower for power measurements. (Kilowatts are for vacuum cleaners.)
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