Before I dive into my review I’ll share a bit about my experience with Forza to give some background to help understand my review. I started with Forza with FH1 and still consider that to be one of the best open world racers of all time, and played FH2 on both XB360 and XBONE and FM6. I really got into Forza with FH3, FM7 and FH4, and got all the cars in those games. Online has never been my thing, and I avoided multiplayer except for when it was required for the festival playlist. I’m currently playing FH5 on gamepass after getting burned with preordering FH4.
Anyways, onto FH5. The star of the show is the world map. I really like the terrain variety, the intense weather, interesting locations, and having multiple race tracks on the map. No real complaints here, just a few minor nitpicks like the general lack of snow to use the new dedicated snow tires on, but it’s in line with the Mexico setting.
I also really appreciate the new vehicle handling model, and the larger variety of tire options for cars. There’s a really nice balance here between realism and accessibility that has made Forza so great compared to the competition.
The car roster is neutral, objectively it’s great but it’s largely the same roster from FH4. Car customization is mildly improved with being able to select transmissions with different gear counts, more rim styles and being able to pain brake calipers, but doesn’t address other issues like the major dearth of aero options and bodykits. What really isn’t great is how many of the cars that were in the autoshow in earlier Horizon games are now suddenly exclusive like the Ferrari 458 S.
This leads into the not so good things about the game. While Horizon is a great open world car sandbox, it’s a poor game. I’m not excited about unlocking the same cars for the 3rd or 4th time and having to deal with another couple years of festival playlists and having to mess with the awful auction house with all the scalpers or be at the mercy of the devs for a desired car to come around again if I miss a week. Although FH5 is better than FH4 for “story” content, it’s still extremely shallow and there’s just not much of it overall. Game progression, like FH4 feels like it’s centered around wheelspins. These are so blatantly obviously ripping off tried and true gambling hooks with the sounds and animations that it’s not even funny, and come across to me as insulting honestly. I know we get cars and credits thrown at us at a much faster rate than games before FH4, but it feels cheap and shallow, like it was the luck of the spin and not something I actually earned. Overall progression is pretty disappointing all around.
I’m not sure what happened with the drivatars, but they feel like a big step backwards. In the open world they spawn in aggressively around the player and constantly ram into you like the AI is blind and can’t see the player and break skill chains and mess up PR stunt attempts and are generally a major nuisance that detracts from the game and hinder just cruising. One silver lining with the server issues is that I can go online and have the drivatars disappear and get a mostly empty world to cruise in peace. In races the AI cheats much more blatantly than earlier games, and appear to bend the laws of physics to follow their programmed route. The overall difficulty is higher than previous games, but it doesn’t feel like a fair increase, more like their power bonus numbers got boosted behind the scenes to give players more of a challenge. Despite being unfairly fast on some tracks, the AI is still dumb as a rock on others and will get stuck, making for an extremely inconsistent and often unenjoyable racing experience, especially on the dirt and cross country tracks where the AI grip assists are more blatantly obvious.
Multiplayer is flat out broken and doesn’t appear to have addressed any of the problems from FH4 even when it did work. I know the connectivity issues will be fixed in time, but that doesn’t address the more fundamental issues with the multiplayer game modes. For racing, there’s no way I know of to pick a specific track and weather condition, and race people with those settings. I’m limited to a matchmaking pool with no control over what tracks get chosen, with lots of built-in delays that slow the whole experience down. Moving playground games to be teams only after FH3 was a mistake, which has not been rectified here. Winning or losing feels like it’s more up to the luck of the matchmaking algorithm than any individual skill. Arcade likewise feels unfair with your success dependent on who shows up to help, not on individual skill and no scaling to reflect the number of participating players. Trial is in the same boat, it’s up to matchmaking luck more than anything else. Haven’t tried eliminator in FH5 yet, but if it’s unchanged from FH4 (which seems likely) then it might fare a little better in that individual skill does make a difference, but with being one giant freeroam rush (which I personally don’t enjoy) it invalidates the majority of the cars in the game and normal road driving skills are largely meaningless and is still hobbled by the standard multiplayer lag/forced timeouts that slow everything down. The biggest problem with multiplayer though is that it’s still part of the festival playlist. This will encourage a lot of players to come in who don’t really enjoy multiplayer and often don’t know what they’re doing, hoping to get matched with a strong team who can carry them through the event so they can get the reward and get out of the event as quickly as possible. This might produce good engagement metrics with more players in MP than there would be without the coercion, but it also makes for a pretty terrible MP experience for those who do want a good game with a lot of players who really don’t want to be there.
The final issue I’ll point out are all the bugs and exploits. These are nothing new to Forza games at launch and probably will be fixed in time, but the severity of these issues is unusual, especially given this is the 3rd Horizon game the same devs have delivered to both Xbox and PC. I will comment to the devs that if players are exploiting the game as aggressively as they are to get easy credits/wheelspins/etc then you might want to look at why they would choose the grindy/repetitive exploits over playing the game. Maybe there’s some un-fun and grindy aspects of the game progression that are pushing players to seek these things so they can play the part of the game they actually enjoy (like driving the specific arbitrarily hard to get car they want)?
In summary, Horizon feels like an excellent open world sandbox married to a poor game, just like FH4 was (although the map here is much better than the relatively boring FH4 world). The devs seemingly got most of the hard stuff right (world design, graphics, audio, handling/physics, AI and stable netcode is hard too but they dropped the ball on those) and flunked some of the easy stuff with how game progression and the festival playlist is set up with all the wheelspins and locked cars that detract from the experience and are an obstacle to playing the parts of the game I enjoy.
Going forwards with FH5, I’ll probably finish out the SP content with the stories and PR stunts (except drifting, not a fan of that) and win all the races, and take a break from the game until we get a good sale and maybe an expansion pack with some new content. I’m just tired of the weekly festival playlist grind after the last 2 games and don’t want to get on that treadmill again and have to re-unlock all those same cars yet again.