A game that loses more hours than a bottle of vodka
Oh, I’m sorry, is it morning already? We lost track of time. Luckily we don’t have much to do on Sunday. What do you say, Monday!? The Forza Horizonseries has always been a sort of time machine. You start playing and you regain consciousness hours or days later disoriented. Good news: that doesn’t change with Forza Horizon 5. With this release, the festival moves to Mexico so that you can enjoy a vast and very varied map there.
Find it nice
The vast map of Forza Horizon 5 offers not only the opportunity to tour extensively and to explore, you can decide for yourself what you want to do at all. The main storyline is unlocking all individual car festivals in Mexico. There is one for street racing, one for PR stunts and another for Baja racing. When you have collected enough points, you can expand the festival or unlock the next one. If you don’t feel like racing on the dirt, you can also put the points you earn from street racing in another festival.
This way you could basically unlock the entire game and all activities without doing a single off-road race. Or just exclusively off-road races. Or just sideways at drift events. So you have 100 percent freedom to do what you want. In addition to the storyline, the map is filled with all kinds of challenges, such as speed cameras where you have to get the high score or jumps where the goal is to land as many meters away as possible. Not in the mood at all? Then drive through the vast and beautiful map of Mexico on your own. Preferably with sizes.
This mix of activities and freedom makes Forza Horizon 5 very relaxed to play. If you don’t feel like a race for a while, you look for a nice drift zone to get some points there. Or you do one of the story missions where you have to take a photo in the eye of the storm (because you have that regularly in Mexico). Still nothing for you? Then you take a car from the collection and you modify it by placing new rims, fresh paint and even a different engine.
Tuning in Forza Horizon 5
Modifying cars is where the forzaseries has distinguished itself from other games for years. Especially motor. This way you can let almost all cars go irresponsibly fast. For example, put a V12 in your Audi RS 6. Or a four-disc Wankel engine in an MX-5. Or make the Koenigsegg Jesko four-wheel drive. The only pity is that the game is not very developed on this. Where it was groundbreaking before, it is now more of the same. For example, more bumper kits, other exhausts or, for example, bull bars and spotlights for normal cars.
If you don’t feel like doing it yourself, you can use autotune just like T-Pain. Here you indicate a performance goal and then the computer itself searches for the right parts to get exactly a number of performance points. Please note this. For example, we had a road car that put the autotune on off-road tires because they gave exactly the necessary points. It pays to keep your head up.
The nice thing about all races is that the opponents adapt to the performance category of your car. If you feel like doing a certain race in your Peugeot 205, your opponents will take similar cars. You therefore have complete freedom. It is important to look at the characteristics of a car. In a race with a lot of highway, you want to get a car within the category with a high top speed, otherwise you have to block a lot. By the way, the AI is very polite – they won’t nudge you anytime soon.
Is Forza Horizon 5 also for sim racers?
In general, there are two extremes in racing games. On the one hand you have arcade games like burnout, NFS and Mario Kart and on the other hand you have sim games like iRacing and Assetto Corsa. With all the spectacle, jumps and popular stuff it is Forza Horizon without a doubt an arcade game. We have to say that the handling and handling feel very natural. Often the handling in arcade racers seems invented by people who have never actually driven a car.
The cars drive smoothly and predictably. You can easily absorb or encourage upset. You quickly feel like a hero behind the wheel, especially if you are already overtaking others on the outside. Incidentally, it is so realistic that you are not faster than your drift. Sim racers who want something different will Forza Horizon can still appreciate, we think.
The conclusion
As a car enthusiast you must Forza Horizon 5 actually have in your collection. The game is very similar to the previous parts, but with some adjustments to the game dynamics that give you more freedom to choose what you want to do yourself. A little more innovation would have been welcome, but that does not alter the fact that it is a beautifully designed game with almost endless fun. Forza Horizon 5 is varied enough to play for hours at a time, but also extensive enough to keep in the collection and grab a bite every now and then for a long time.
