Forza Horizon 5! As gorgeous as it is disappointing!

Welcome everyone to Mexico! The much anticipated fifth installment in PlayGround Games’ Horizon series has been out for nearly three months now and after so much anxiety, anticipation, and eagerness to finally sit in the drivers seat of this petrol filled racer and rip it full throttle through the Mexican shoreline I finally get my go at it! So how is it? Well….it’s a bit of a letdown, and yes, I’ll explain.

The Good – Get those tires warmed up!

At the core of every Forza Horizon is an adventure intended to guide your exploration through its environment with racing events and challenges. Horizon’s latest story mode is now called “expedition”, which is essentially like every other story mode in past Horizons. Win X event to unlock Y type of race then rinse and repeat. With that said Mexico is Horizon’s largest map in the franchise. In fact, one of Horizon 5’s best elements is exploring Mexico’s beautiful terrain be it asphalt road coastlines, luscious wetlands, scenic mountaintops, and of course it’s ancient history. Horizon 4 had seasons of weather whereas Horizon 5 offers a different take with dynamic weather including two new conditions – tropical storm and sandstorm. All of the familiar race types from previous Horizon titles return with the exception that Dirt is now called “Mixed Surface”, for some reason (probably being PC). All of this is further reinforced by Horizon Festival events & the newly added Horizon Event Lab for some really creative user map designs.

Exhaust noise? Tire smoke? Performance mods?

One of the many cool changes is the addition of sound modification when choosing an upgraded exhaust so now you can really here that Mercedes AMG crackle and pop! being able to actually rev your car AND hear the changes while customizing parts is a very cool option. This way your opponents will know your exhaust clearly isn’t stock as you walk away across the finish line! Grip has been adjusted so RWD/FWD doesn’t feel as if your tires are constantly on ice (AWD is a different topic). Tire smoke is more robust, full, or thicker, however you want to put it. There’s more of it and more is better! New Horizon – New physics who this?

Visually Horizon 5 is beautiful. Fortunately for me I play on PC so I crank everything up to 4K/120 max. I’ll let my clip below of the Mercedes C63 Black Series speak for itself. Go ahead…just soak it in.

Everything about Horizon 5 is just gorgeous. Racing in a tropical storm you feel immersed in the wind blowing, the downpour of rain, trees are swaying. In a dust storm visibility is strained as you struggle to find your racing line on corners up ahead that you can barely see. If anything is to be commended here as being the biggest improvement. It’s the visual immersion. I can only imagine that to top this the next Horizon features some sort of VR with one of those haptic feedback vests and a fan blowing in your face mimicking wind-speed. Here’s a quick picture comparison between FH5 and FH4. On PC running at the highest settings.

The Bad – Seems we’ve hit a few potholes.

Where to begin. With most new games (sequels included), there are bound to be a few issues. Maybe there’s server congestion, perhaps it crashes due to raytracing *coughFH5cough*. Eventually these smaller more manageable things get sorted out. For Forza Horizon 5 though something tells me these other more pressing issues are here to stay. And that’s a concern, a big one.

Horizon Open / Online Multiplayer-

Say you’ve just spent several minutes or hours fine tuning your new A-Class Mustang. You’ve tried it out on the open road and done a few road races to boost your confidence. Now you’re ready to put your money where your chat box is and take it online. Though instead of jumping right into an A-Class Road / Street matchmaking queue you’re faced with this. Not even an option to select the type of event you just spent the past half-hour tuning your car for.

So you hit open racing in the hopes of finding the race and class you’re looking for but instead you’re presented with this.

Now this certainly isn’t A-Class and it definitely isn’t a street or road race. And it only gets worse from there. You can spend several minutes searching and searching for the event you want and when you finally do join don’t forget there are only three races. So, you may be on race 3 of 3. Then guess what, it’s back to the lobby you go to search for more. This matchmaking system in Horizon 5 is hands down one of if not the most frustrating thing. You’ll spend just as much time finding an event as you will tuning any one of your cars and for a game touting it’s multiplayer ability it’s not a good look.

Performance Class Balancing / AWD –

As the fifth installment of the Horizon series this is something that should have been ironed out in Forza Horizon 3 or 4. This is not PlayGround Games’ first go at this especially when you consider all of the feedback from the Horizon community. Certain vehicles in certain classes (looking at you Bone Shaker), are so overpowered that even in the hands of a very incapable person they still do well. Performance Indexing and classes exist so as you upgrade and fine tune your vehicle it is placed in an appropriate performance class with consideration to all it has. PlayGround games has not learned at all in this respect as we see the same cars from previous Horizon’s still with the same bias. Think Goku vs Vegeta. Maybe Playground Games has an inherent bias towards those vehicles.

Now to the real meat of AWD vs everything else. AWD or (All-Wheel-Drive) in Forza Horizon 5 is simply broken. AWD is so unbalanced in Forza Horizon 5 due to it’s small performance index cost that it nearly completely negates the competitive choice for RWD (rear-wheel-drive), or FWD (front-wheel-drive). In every race you can count on roughly 80% or more players running in AWD.

As a point of reference here is an option to add AWD to this Mercedes AMG GTR. At it’s current configuration you can see the PI is 900 – the maximum allowed for S1-Class. Now with the added AWD option it’s in fact gone down 5 points while maxing out launch and acceleration. Now to those who might think “right well speed and handling have gone down”, this is a simple fix by adding a race transmission which still puts us a few points below where we started.

And the result looks a bit like this-

I see only one real option to resolve this. Releasing a patch / timed updated coinciding with upcoming DLC aimed at addressing AWD performance cost.

Online Racing Course Variety-

In Horizon 4 online races were setup the same (if you opted to omit free roam). A total of 3 races in any combination of circuit or sprint placed at different locations around the UK. Horizon 5 touts having the largest map of any Horizon which is true but for some reason there is such a small variety of courses. Often times a series will end offering a different class but same event – only to repeat the same track. Which begs the question with so much space where are the rest? Not to mention so many of the courses resemble one another, all narrow roads with a few hairpin turns, or a very tight circuit. There’s even a circuit with only two laps I mean come on. With all Horizon 5 has to offer we shouldn’t be on life support for more designs already.

Overall

Horizon 5 is much of the same routine expected in Horizon 4 with the only main difference being visual – in a very good way. Mexico is a beautifully crafted location suitable to keep your eyes watering and have you questioning if you’re really in the matrix at its realism. So long as the horrendous multiplayer & lack of intuitive online selections force a blue pill of boredom and frustration down your throat. Horizon 5’s upgrades to vehicle customization are extremely positive and the experience from owning a steering wheel is a vast improvement to it’s predecessor due to improved physics. Though in all while I do enjoy Horizon 5 I think I would enjoy it significantly more had I not played any other racing games in the past to compare it with. Especially Horizon 4. Horizon 5 is best akin to The Crew – but with the benefit of tuning your car.