Just finished this for the first time and thought it was very disappointing. There are so many good dirt roads on this game, yet the developers apparently thought the Gauntlet should be mostly road racing instead.
Roughly 50% of the distance is on tarmac, and this actually takes even longer in practise because of the slow tarmac ascent up the volcano.
I get that you have to go onto tarmac occasionally, but this takes it to an extreme. Even the last 7% of the race is just a long straight tarmac road instead of the multiple dirt roads that run beside it…
I felt the same way when I did that race, it’s a really disappointing route for a dirt racing finale, especially given all the excellent dirt roads it completely ignores.
A lot of the “dirt” races feature a fair amount of paved roads. They probably should’ve called it “rally” instead, but maybe they didn’t want people griping about the lack of timed runs and navigators. The rally tires are well balanced between road and dirt. And rally suspension and diff usually seem to round out the handling for the dirt races even when they’re not on dirt.
This is more or less an issue with Forza Horizon’s naming conventions, “Dirt Racing” is the Rally archetype and “Off-Road” is the actual dirt focused archetype.
FH4’s Fortune Island finale was pretty fun. IIRC it was multi-surface as well, but definitely not 50/50, it was primarily dirt.
Tbh, if FH5 Dirt Finale really is >50% pavement, I’m not surprised. I play a bit of DiRT 2.0 and prefer mostly dirt/gravel tracks, same goes for the Forza series. I’ll look up some footage to match just to make sure, but in the case it’s true, just another disappointment to add to the list.
I am going to disagree with OP based on my experience to date with the gauntlet. I find it exciting how cars tuned well for dirt vs road both exceed at different parts of this race. This can lead to constant lead changes which I’ve experienced and found fun.
