Forza Horizon 5 could be the best racing game of the year, but so far the gameplay raises a few questions.
Make bets you would never make. That Peter Molyneux’s next game will go off like a rocket (or that the rocket will be finished at all). That the next FIFA will finally substantially expand the career mode. Or that a potential Battlefront 3 is guaranteed to run smoothly at launch. But 9 out of 10 people would probably speculate without a second thought that Forza Horizon 5 will be a damn good game.
Simply based on past history, Forza Horizon 3 was a masterpiece. Forza Horizon 4 even more so. And barring PC porting issues and online connection glitches, Microsoft’s racing open-worlds are similarly well-rounded works of art as David’s Michelangelo or the rest of the Ninja Turtles.
But you know what I, as a journalist, can also bet on? That the preview events before the release of a Forza Horizon are the exact opposite of what the game actually wants to convey. They are extremely limited. As a rule, Playground and Microsoft only show the intro race, i.e. the first five minutes of a new Horizon – the absolutely most unrepresentative part of the entire game.
No open world, no open world activities or game modes, no vehicle list, no real gameplay, no races, no enemy AI. Just orchestrated from-A-to-B jetting with jets in the sky, slow motion and effects fireworks. And then I sit here afterwards and ponder and ponder what to write now.
This was also the case with Forza Horizon 5. I watched a beautiful 2021 Ford Bronco drive down a scorching hot volcano for eight minutes, then thunder through the Mexican Baja desert – and promptly the character darts through a sandstorm in a Corvette, through the jungle in a Porsche, over beaches in a Mercedes AMG 1, through cities and palm tree-flanked holiday resorts. And … well … now I’m sitting here. And pondering. Because you can just watch the gameplay for yourself:
How big does the Open World have to be?
Where are you most likely to look in linear gameplay footage if you want to learn about the Open World? That’s right, to the edge. So I stuck my neck out and spied exactly what I was hoping to see in Forza Horizon 5: The courage to be uniform. Which almost sounds unfair.
Forza Horizon 5’s open world gets bigger. Significantly bigger. From 71 square kilometres in the predecessor to 107 square kilometres in the sequel. And that gives the individual landscapes plenty of room to breathe, even though larger Open Worlds are known to be a challenge for the developers
Forza Horizon 5: All info on release, system requirements and more
When I look at the horizon in the intro drive, I only see more of what I am currently travelling in anyway. So vast desert landscapes, gigantic mountain foothills, endless jungle, lush residential areas. And that’s great! The city of Guanajuato is also supposed to be bigger than previous settlements.
Normally, the size debate in Open Worlds is as trite as the question of whether Nintendo now Sega … sorry, PlayStation now beats Xbox, because good Open Worlds don’t have to be big (and the Super Nintendo is better than any other console anyway). But in an open-world racer that lets me hurtle through the countryside in a Bugatti Chiron at 400 km/h, I want a feeling of expansiveness, of infinity.
Horizon 3 and 4 didn’t offer wineworlds by any means either, but I so hope that Mexico feels less like an attraction park and more like a real world. Of course, compromises have to be made – too much space eventually becomes tough – but I’d like to spend an hour racing through the desert without having to drive past every corner three times. And without wanting to read too much into the first eight minutes: The intro makes me cautiously optimistic that that’s exactly what I’ll get.
How about the seasons?
There was a lot of confusion and speculation about the seasons in Forza Horizon 5 – and while my character in the intro can barely see two cacti in the middle of a sandstorm, I finally get some clarity: spring, summer, autumn and winter are coming back, but in a different way, because seasons don’t work in Mexico like they do in rainy England, because of climate zones and stuff. This is what Playground’s Creative Director Mike Brown emphasises while commenting on the gameplay.
The tropical rainforest is not called tropical sometimes-snow-sometimes-autumn-leaf-forest for good reasons. In winter, the chance of snowfall increases in the mountain regions, but in summer, hurricanes can sweep across the land. Rain and frost, of course, have a physical effect on driving behaviour, while the effect of sandstorms is limited to the visual. But well, that should be enough, because with a visibility of three metres, a hypercar at 300 km/h is certainly more risky to drive.
Seasons change again in a weekly rhythm. So after seven days in the real world, spring becomes summer and so on. Since the effects are less severe in Mexico than in the UK, fan criticism here should drop noticeably. A large part of the community liked the seasons of Forza Horizon 4, but there were many annoyed voices who simply didn’t want to have winter imposed on them for seven days. I can understand that, it happens to me every year with the summer heat.
So, now I’ve talked about the weather and beautiful nature in my musings – time for one last big topic: feelings.
Forza Horizon is changing
Forza Horizon is changing. For me personally, there will probably never be a better intro than Forza Horizon 2’s, because it so perfectly summed up what 2014’s fantasy is all about:
180 seconds of an announcer slowly counting up as I’m inundated with images of gorgeous southern French landscapes, partying people, beautiful cars – Horizon 2 begins like a meditation that pulls me out of my everyday life before fading to black and into the game proper. Eric Prydz is slowly played like an anthem while the camera pans from the waves of the sea to the supercars – and 10 seconds later I’m thundering along the dreamlike Riviera with electro beats in the background and Lamborghini Huracan under my feet.
At the time, the idea of getting behind the hottest iron in the whole game was still brand new. Horizon 2 sold right on time the big millenial dream I always wanted to chase as a 24-year-old (and yet never did because I’m a nerdy couch potato). Seven years later, things look a little different.
At first glance, of course, Horizon 5 still has the cheerful sports car celebration orgy of the past, but by now the series is about other fantasies: I explore a foreign country there first and foremost, I get shown all the special features of Mexico by local people, I live out my own personal desires there.
If I want to race, I race. If I want to have fun with people I know, we just ride through the countryside. If I, as a newcomer, just want to have a nice experience, I don’t necessarily have to compete with others. Creative people simply spend hours in the editor putting together new types of races.
And this no-holds-barred exploration of a foreign land is now much cooler to me as a 31-year-old than the big party bash. Horizon has broken down barriers game by game so that I can now thunder through the countryside with complete freedom, jet over hill and dale and soak up every nook and cranny of this fascinating world. The intro conveys this dream pretty well – and I’m fully on board. At the same time, the big unanswered questions of Forza Horizon 5 hang precisely on this.
What holds Horizon together?
During the gameplay presentation, creative director Mike Brown addresses the big elephant in the room. If an open-world game wants to offer everyone every possible gameplay experience – doesn’t such an “everyone’s darling” risk becoming arbitrary in some way? According to Mike Brown, the game’s actual campaign is meant to hold the big picture together better this time. Where Horizon 4 consisted largely of mini-stories (“Hire yourself out as a stunt driver”), Playground promises a more coherent overall vision this time.
And that sounds vague to the max, because it remains unclear for the time being what that means in concrete terms. Horizon 5 continues the “story” of its predecessor: as a newly crowned superstar of the British Horizon Festival, you now have to pull off the big bash in Mexico, too. Here too: Whatever that means in terms of “campaign missions”.
The gameplay shown so far suggests that exploring Mexican landmarks will play a big part this time. But these are ambiguities that the terse intro doesn’t clear up. But to return to the beginning, I’d still bet that no one has much to worry about with Forza Horizon 5. But at least it will remain exciting until the starting gun goes off.
