In the first moments, I fall from a plane through a parachute like in a game of Battle Royale, I soon find myself driving a Ford Bronco up a huge mountain, lava and ice make up most of what’s in front of me on the screen, I can’t see below as the high altitude covers the thick clouds, Bienvenido a México or Welcome to Mexico, I was pretty sure I was about to start the new adventure.
Welcome to Mexico, this time without the usual yellow filter from American movies and series, but with thriving bright colors, vast yellow deserts, sand and thunderstorms and player-friendly season system, here is a review of Forza Horizon 5, the new part of the famous Forza Horizon series by Microsoft.
Three years after the release of the iconic Forza Horizon 4, which was and still is a landmark in the car games industry, and games in general, developer Playground Games and publisher Xbox Game Studios brings us the fifth part, and this time the journey takes us from the countryside of London to Mexico.
From the kangaroo country Australia to the old continent and the four-season London countryside to southern North America, the Forza Horizon series has emerged as one of the best car racing games, which offers an open world with stunning graphics, a huge number of cars, as well as an arcade style of play mixed with some realism, and in this part The excitement rose, the graphics developed insanely, the world became bigger and more diverse, along with the content and gameplay that remained as fun as we always used to.
In the beginning, the game gives you the ability to customize your character, between a huge range of costumes and accessories, even wearing a face mask, glasses, and even customizing dances and victory celebrations, some of which come free at first, and others require spending the money you get from the game to unlock those privileges.
We initially liked the way to customize your character, although in the end it will only appear in some cinematic clips and inside the car of course, but the interest from the developer even in those details shows that he is not joking when it comes to polishing his game in all aspects, and no wonder because of those the details are amazing in every respect.
You can still own houses across the vast gameplay map, use them to buy cars and enter the garage to modify and upgrade your car, customize your character at any time in the game, change your car’s license plate, use houses for quick navigation and other exciting things.
The story Campaign, a new mechanism for exploring Mexico in Forza Horizon 5
Although it is a car game in the first place, and all you actually do with it is driving, but the game contains a story mode that is the longest in the history of the series, the story mode that you can access individually or with your friends, to be honest there is nothing interesting in The story itself and what it tells, which is normal for a car game, but it is an invitation to players to explore the entire map of Mexico and meticulously explore all of its activities and races with a number of voice dialogues and representation that serve the structure of the story.
The Campaign is a slightly longer introductory and training part, taking you on a complete tour of vibrant and diverse Mexico that includes 11 distinct biomes from deserts to lush jungles, swamps, historical cities, beaches and active volcanoes.
Although there are plenty of familiar races within the game, from street races, dirt races, road races, etc., that permeate the story, the structure of the Campaign itself is fundamentally different in terms of how it works.
This time, each genre has its own center event in the Horizon Festival, there are six points around the map with the Apex Road and Wilds Dirt festivals we’ve already seen in the last part joined by Baja Cross Country, Street Scene Street and Rush Stunts, as well as the main Horizon Main.
Each festival is made up of a selection of different ‘chapters’, with a final event in each chapter ending its story (mostly a quarter or 20-minute-long race) and then unlocking loads of races in the game map that you’ll enjoy playing after you finish story, or even during the story itself before it is finished.
This is also where the Expeditions come in within the world of Forza Horizon as initially you won’t have access to the different festival categories and you’ll have to explore the Mexican terrain in special events to find them, these Expeditions are part of the showdown and a sub-story.
The problem that we think was clear during the story is that it requires a number of points to unlock each adventure, which is a new mechanism for progressing in the game story and this means that you cannot start to finish the story first and focus on it, while you will need to participate in other activities and the game world to get points Accolade In order to continue the story and unlock the rest of the festivals, Grinding sounds a bit like? Well, not really. The game in general rewards you for almost everything, and therefore it is easy to collect those points.
Forza Horizon 5 is truly a festival. The fireworks, the airships in the sky, even the art design and menus, it’s a state of euphoria mixed with a sexy Mexican Spanish accent.
Online, Free Roam, and Customization modes in Forza Horizon 5
If you consider the story as a short number of hours that will inevitably end soon, the essence of Forza Horizon 5 revolves around the endless number of hours that the game provides in the multiplayer mode and the open world full of different activities, you can still roam free in the vast game world and meet players The real ones are on the road and invite them to challenge in countless diverse races.
You can also organize the Convey or convoys to enjoy the world and races of the game with your companions and show the cars in front of each other. However, you can also go through that experience completely individually through the Horizon Solo mode if you want to, and with this the game provides 4 main races to play over the network:
- Open Racing: It includes a huge group of races that you unlock through the events of the story as explained at the beginning of the review, such as street races, rally, Cross Country and others.
- Open Draft competitions: or drifting, which are competitions whose goal is to achieve the largest possible number of drifts with the car in order to win.
- PlayGround competitions: named after the developer, and featuring a set of slightly different challenges
- The Eliminator mode: The length of the Battle Royale! But it’s miniature where you land with a bunch of games to compete in a number of different activities and challenges, and only one will win at the end of the game.
Besides the main gameplay phases, this part also introduces the seasons system, the game will change dynamically over time and introduce new effects of weather and lighting based on each particular season, which in turn includes a set of exclusive activities for each season separately which gives a kind of variety to the game and expels boredom The result of repeating the same races, as the season lasts for a number of days and then changes with a host of new activities besides the weather system of course.
In the rainy seasons, you can enter into thunderstorms and watch the lightning strikes on the ground in front of you to the point that it uproots a tree in a majestic view, and in desert places in the summer you can encounter a sandstorm, where the vision becomes completely foggy and increases the difficulty and danger of the race.
Not only that, the game provides across the map a set of various Live Events that are renewed daily, but are renewed more than once a day, and therefore every inch of the map can be a way to collect experience points and money, and the Horizon Arcade mode has also been added, which gives you access to a number of Activities also while you are wandering in the free world and randomly on the map.
This mode is one of the most fun activities in Forza Horizon 5, as it consists of several mini-games that you can participate in throughout the open world, Arcade mode offers an unrestricted form of gameplay allowing players to join or leave the games without consequences.
The nice thing is that the phase can take place in different locations at the same time while also including various different games at the same time. Players can invite other drivers online to join a caravan and explore the world to find new activities. These mini-games are shorter than traditional missions and include objectives Different cooperative and competitive like smashing goals or whatever.
One of the new phases as well, which we liked greatly is the Events Lab phase, which is a game mode that depends on the game community who is passionate about creating special arenas and crazy races and spreading them with players through the game and then starting to compete in them. The developer has given in this phase a lot of tools that allow for anyone to build what they want in the racetrack, what we liked the most is that it is also possible to play with the relative weights of the cars and gravity within the game world, creating a different experience from the normal racing spread in the game world.
Gameplay, a mixture of arcade driving and realism on the road
Speaking of the gameplay, it is the most characteristic of the game besides the graphics, which we will talk about later. It needs poems and not just an expression. Car control is amazing, easy, and has some realism as well. The developer has excelled in combining the arcade style of play in the previous and what the feeling of the car on the road through the endless range of adjustments you make to the cars, and depending on the type of road you’re driving on, are all factors that affect the way the car is controlled.
There are nearly 500 cars in the game, the largest number in the history of the series and the largest number for any racing game as well. The cars in the game range from classic and modern cars to high-performance cars, including the famous Mercedes AMG ONE, and each car has a unique way in the way Driving it, we still have here the possibility of making a special car tune.
Modifications to the car itself through the Tune give one car more than one way to drive it as well, and according to each player’s building and playing style, which creates more variety in driving cars.
However, modifying the options of the cars themselves, which includes modifying the engine, tires and everything related to the chassis of the car seems a little “complicated” and takes time to understand, which is not a flaw at all, but gave the game a unique blend of customization for your car, so no car is like the other, Fortunately there are a bunch of suggestions that the game offers and the community of players provides some ready-made builds that you can use depending on your playing style.
The game also gives you the ability to fully control the difficulty through a huge set of options related to customizing the difficulty of the AI, driving and speed, as well as the brakes and the cornering assistance system, and the extent of the real damage to the car such as the engine and tires, and all of this is also affected by the surface on which the Arabic walks The weather is as mentioned above.
Besides, the Rewind feature is still available and can be opened or closed as needed just like all the difficulty adjustments and others, this gives casual players or new to the series an opportunity to breathe a sigh of relief and enjoy the game, and with time adjusting in those settings makes the game more difficult and therefore more challenging After many hours waiting for you.
Increasing the difficulty will increase your rates of getting experience points and Accolade points as well as the game currency CR that is used to buy cars and outfits, and therefore once again we assure that the game rewards you as you deserve, whatever your abilities and whatever you are doing in the game world.
Car review in Forza Vista is still present, this time it supports ray tracing technology, and unusually in games, the technology is only supported inside that mod, this means that you can enjoy ray tracing in the game for owners of RTX cards and RNDA 2 cards from AMD, as well as the X version Box is in quality mode, but don’t expect more as ray tracing is not supported outside of this mode.
In fact, there is absolutely no harm in that. Light reflections, light permeation, and even the reflection of the player character and steering wheel in the car mirror in Cockpit mode can be easily observed, also all mirrors in the game reflect what is present in real time, both for cars and the nature around them.
In this part we also have a new camera, which is the dashboard camera, and it appears through the meter from inside the Arabic, and it is different from the usual Cockpit camera, which shows the steering wheel, and we liked the new camera very personally, the best thing is that every camera in the game has a Slider the FOV can be controlled through it to ensure the best experience for you as per your personal preference.
ANNA’s voice assistant continues as one of the nice options that the game provides while driving and talking to her as if you were a real personal assistant, with the press of a button you can ask her to select the nearest race to get Accolade points, temporarily disable the online competition feature, or even ask her about the current season in the game and new in it.
Besides, of course, it guides you on the way, whether by screen or by voice, supported by the Link feature, which you use to interact with the environment and players online by saying hello and offering to join convoys or challenge the game directly.
The biggest flaw in the Forza Horizon series, continues!
We have a problem with the density of cars in the open world in this part, despite the magnificence and diversity of the world, whether graphic or quality, but we feel a little lifeless, the reason is that the cars scattered in the streets even inside some of the cities in the game are few, exaggeratedly few compared to the last part, sometimes you will need time to come across a car even on the highways.
Also, people disappear completely on the sides of the road, in most car games like The Crew 2, for example, you find some people wandering on the side of the roads as a kind of giving life to the streets, there is very little and in very specific places in Forza Horizon 5 which makes you feel a little bit like you are in A ghost world where there are no humans.
With this, one of the biggest flaws in the Forza Horizon series, and not only in this part is the physics of crashing and smashing cars, it continues with the fifth part as well, the collision physics in the game does not work as we expect, when we see all this huge potential of the game it is frustrating A collision between cars or when you are driving at a speed of 400 km and then crashing at all that speed into a wall, for example, as if nothing had happened.
Yes, there are some cracks that you can see on the car windshield, or some traces of that debris and scratches appear on the car body itself, but it is not enough and in fact including this in the game can greatly harm its performance, as well as may bring some other problems in the end, it was disappointing that there was no development on this exact point.
Designs and performance
When Forza Horizon 4 was released three years ago, some did not imagine that the level of paintings in a game would reach this degree, which made some think that this was the maximum that the industry could reach, at least for the next five or six years, but again Forza Horizon 5 demonstrates the most advanced and vibrant graphics.
Compared to the previous part, the landscape now looks very flat and lifeless in Horizon 4, the water also looks less realistic and the sky is less dynamic, and speaking of the sky and its details, there is no description for this except for pictures, this part is one of the best games in general Which depicts the appearance of the sky and clouds, whether at night or in the morning.
Sunlight and more dynamic lighting in general provide a great view. A lot of the time we were spending just looking at the sky without doing anything else. Driving at night is another state of high adrenaline. There’s nothing quite like taking your favorite car and taking a night ride in Mexico. Screw the metaverse shit, we’re living it right now with Forza Horizon 5.
The Playground Games team took a large number of sky photography in Mexico, and in Mexico specifically, these shots were taken in 12K resolution and they used this data to make the sky more realistic and dynamic during the game, which is why it looks so beautiful.
The developer also used “photogrammetry data”, which are snapshots that are taken directly from the real world via 360-degree photography and then brought directly to the game. The last time we heard this term was mentioned in a Microsoft game as well, Microsoft Flight Simulator, which uses data Bing Maps photogrammetry to map the entire globe in-game, our review over a year ago has more details on the matter.
Despite all this, not everything is perfect, we have a problem with the edges even with Anti-Aliasing on the maximum settings, the edges of trees and plants along the way look strangely sharp, it’s not supposed to work like that, it’s not a big deal to be honest but if you check you will undoubtedly notice, it shows more on 1080p display resolution.
There is also a clear problem with the graphical setting Environment Texare Quality, which caused some problems with Hitching (some elements suddenly appearing on the screen) within sight, and the biggest problem is that the game does not include a graphical option for distance drawing or Drew Distante, when setting the setting to Ultra The problem appears even though it is advanced numbers, converting numbers to Extreme solves the problem by a large percentage, but also the developer should look to the Ultra setup because it shouldn’t appear like this.
Hitching problems are generally related to drives, but in our case, we made sure to use NVME storage and tried the game on a number of slower SATA SSDs as well, but the problem still existed.
Speaking of performance, we mainly tested and reviewed the game on the PC version, but we saw many technical reviews before the game was launched for XBOX Series X versions, and in fact we are a little disappointed that the game works in Quality mode at only 30 frames per second, but for good Note that the developer uses an advanced type of Motion Blur which makes the game look a lot smoother than it should be on this number of frames.
Looking at the PC version, it is open frames and also open up to 8K graphic resolution, and it works well even on medium devices, a card like the GTX 1070 TI of the PASCAL generation, any card that is about 4 years old now, can provide an average frame rate of up to 90 frames on Full HD display resolution using the highest possible graphical settings.
However, the game uses a large amount of the video memory of the graphics card, especially with the settings raised to Ultra, so make sure that your graphics card provides at least 6 GB of memory.
Acoustics
Interesting, to see this amazing development in the level of acoustics, we are not talking about music and soundtracks which are also great in the game, although it is not at all friendly to fans of live broadcasts, fortunately the game provides an option Streamer Mode in the settings which prevents music Which holds the Copyright of the work.
But we are talking about the sounds of the engines, which have become more realistic than before, by a large difference. The sounds of the engines for each car are different, and perhaps there is a disparity. Yes, there are some cars that do not provide the same real experience, but we are talking about more than 500 cars, and in total the game implements this professionally. Extremely.
Natural sounds, such as thunder and lightning, and when entering a sandy capital seem highly polished as well, in addition to the sounds of birds that you can hear in a specific number of places you visit on the game map, it can be said that the audio aspect of the game is perfectly designed to complement the gaming experience and amazing graphics.
Staying on top again
Congratulations to the developer and players, Forza Horizon 5 is the best racing game without any competition!
Every time we think that Forza Horizon has reached the top and cannot offer anything new, Xbox surprises us with a new part that is stronger than the previous one, and the fact that maintaining the top is always more difficult than reaching it, which is what the developer Playground Games succeeded in strongly, although Forza Horizon 5 is somewhat closer to the fourth part in the experience in general in terms of modes, gameplay and driving style, but it has its own luster in terms of “fabulous” graphics and gameplay content in general, which makes it one of the few games that deserves to be called a next-generation game!
However, the game has its drawbacks related to the absence of cars in the streets, not adding the some languages, although you will not find that defect in foreign reviews, as well as maintaining the same physics of collision and smashing without trying to change, which we see as the least polished elements of the game compared to the rest of the elements , but in the end we’re standing in front of an arcade driving game, we won’t covet and ask for more than what’s given, but we won’t forgive that point in particular with the upcoming Forza Motorsport sequel.
If it is true, the Forza Horizon series cannot be compared with any car game at the moment, not only for the gameplay and amazing graphics that are unmatched by any other car game, but because of the huge content and the number of cars that are not even a quarter in other games, in addition to To the diverse world as well as the introduction of three parts with the same strength while keeping the upward curve of the series always upwards.
The Need For Speed series, The Crew, Dirt and others stand on the sidelines, helpless, and in order to try only to compete, you need miracles of development and ideas, and with this situation and with the release of the fifth part, the gap is widening more and more and we do not think that there will be anyone who will topple With the legend of Forza Horizon from the throne of racing games.
Forza Horizon 5 rating
- Story: 8
- Playstyle: 9.5
- Play content9.5
- Graphics: 9.5
- Technical aspect: 9
- Acoustics: 9
Positives
- The world’s largest in the history of the Fosra Horizon series!
- True next-generation fantasy graphics.
- Develop the story A wonderful journey to explore the entire map of Mexico and learn all the phases of the gameplay.
- The content of the game is huge, hundreds of different activities that you can participate in either in single or team mode.
- Added Horizon Arcade and Events Lab modes.
- The gameplay is characterized by the combination of arcade driving and a mixture of realism on the road.
- The ability to customize almost everything, from your character to the car, adjusting weights and adding skills.
- The game rewards you with experience points and money for almost every move you make in the open world.
- The dynamic weather system was an amazing addition.
- Sand and thunderstorms gave the game world a special character.
- One of the best games depicting the appearance of clouds and sky.
- The use of photogrammetry data in some parameters in the game.
- Continuation of the seasons system from the previous part.
- A complete list of more than 500 cars between modern and classic.
- The game performs very well on PC.
- The engine sounds got a huge update and are even better than the fourth installment.
Negatives
- The physics of crashing and smashing cars is the same and is the least element of the game.
- To advance in the story, you need to compulsorily collect Accolade points.
- The density of cars on the streets is a bit low.
- Quality mode only offers 30 frames on Xbox.
- Ray tracing support is limited only to Forza Vista.
- There is no support for some languages.