Forza Horizon 5: The Definitive Review
Neeeeeow. Neeeeeow never changes.
It’s something of a habit that when I turn on my beloved Series S, I will occasionally peep at the new additions to Game Pass. However sometimes I do this with a bit too much gusto and end up on the next page down, which is dedicated solely to Forza Horizon 5 and my complete lack of activity with that game. I think it was something I signed up to when I had the thing installed on my machine, but seemingly can’t easily dismiss. Nonetheless, each time I mistakenly land on its dedicated page, I remember the sinking pit of ennui that game gave me. I remembered the rapidly dissipating enthusiasm I had for it, the shallow engagement, the lack of any personal sense of value in the game’s offerings, and I remember the key fault I always find with Forza Horizon: its inexplicable smallness.
My parameters for the open-world driving game were completely defined by Eden Studios’ Test Drive Unlimited, an early Xbox 360 title that stunned with its surprisingly poor handling model but completely convincing sense of scale. The Oahu map1 was deliciously large, and the temptation to just drive was utterly compulsive and commonly satisfying, like a decent meal, something ordinary but nourishing. To rev off to a destination unknown, to just follow the road and your whims was a glorious freedom, particularly once you got beyond the starter cars. One memory is burned indelibly into my soul - having driven to find the Lotus dealership, I bought an Esprit V8. Rolling out of the showroom, the next step was obvious. I floored it and went on a drive for 45 minutes, just howling along the winding b-roads and highways of Oahu’s interior in a charge for the coast. It was pure leisure. There was no currency to accrue, no list of tricks. It was pure driving and despite that handling model, it felt fucking great. And when you reach the sea, you stop for a photo and drive all the way home. Beautiful.
This was because the scenery changed, the roads remained constantly unfamiliar, the balance of long straights and meandering sweeps offering a tempo of tranquil velocity, where despite the speed relatively gentle adjustments were all that was required - aside the junction changes and traffic negotiation - to keep bombing towards the sea. For the sea was the only border here, because the developers made the entire island the game space. It makes perfect sense. The sequel2 included Ibiza, another island. It seems completely natural, which makes the choices of locale for Forza Horizon all the more bizarre. Oddly, just as I started writing this piece, news came of the beta for the latest (and much delayed) Test Drive Unlimited, which I’d actually forgotten about. But the good part is the game is still on an island. This time, Hong Kong. My response? Fucking yes. I look at previous Forza Horizons and wonder why the fourth one wasn’t set on the Isle of Man. I mean, it’s not as if it doesn’t offer every terrain in the faux-Britannia of Forza Horizon 4, not to mention having an absolutely legendary race track. Likewise for the euro excursion of 2, where surely Sicily and its Targa Florio makes the ideal home? How about the Canary islands, or Puerto Rico? Bermuda? Tasmania? Iceland? Orkney? Corsica? Crete? Cyprus? I know I shouldn’t bang on, but I hope you can see that the island is the ideal home for the open world racer.
Instead of picking islands, Playground went for weirdly artificial wraparound spaces that become incredibly familiar with surprisingly little play. I remember Horizon feeling oddly tiny in comparison to Test Drive Unlimited, and future instalments seemed even smaller somehow, despite their objective enlargement. The seasonal approach of Forza Horizon 4 never made up for the homogeneity in its representation of disparate parts of the UK. How they made it seem so samey is quite an achievement, but given the astonishing blandness of its ‘festival’ culture, it’s apparently something the studio is adept at. That fucking festival, mashing up the dayglo horror of VNWiki’s3 tales of financial largess and bauble fetishism with the facile posh-boy frothing from an infinity of supercar-ordering YouTubers. The big events, Pebble Beach, Lake Como, Goodwood, all dissolve under the artifice of Forza Horizon’s zoomer-baiting gestalt of Doug DeMuro and Dominic Toretto on ritalin and its vague aspirations to the post-90s gnarly-baroque culture of Red Bull’s sponsored events, where it has to be dangerous to score any bucks. Mark my words, Forza Horizon 6 will be sponsored by Prime Soda and the feature race will have you driving while trying to keep a breakdancer headspinning on your bonnet (while paragliders race you through a nuclear explosion on the moon). In a way, the tie-ins with Lego and Hot Wheels seem fitting for this toytown paradise for the permanently pre-pubescent.
As a firm and wholly committed member of Generation X, I do not want this fucking bullshit. I want substance, I want to build something, I want to feel a sense of reality in the environment. I don’t want a Red Bull extreme drifting 2,000hp quad-turbo LS-swapped Koenigsegg Jesko with microtransacted infinity gauntlets. I want Harry’s Garage: The Nice Drive4. I want the entirety of London and the M25. Do you remember the glory of Project Gotham Racing? How its DNA ended up at Playground and in Forza Horizon, but how it’s been squandered? I remember driving the Birdcage et al, wondering if we’d ever get the chance to break free of the immaculately-modelled street circuits and drive off towards the North Circular, screaming towards the M4 for a bolt to Wales. Forza Horizon doesn’t care. I want the Isle of Wight, Fuerteventura. Forza Horizon doesn’t care. I want to meet friends for coffee at dawn, then drive to a beach for photos. Forza Horizon doesn’t care. I want to pay for my petrol, to have to shepherd a hand-made engine component for my vintage restoration project from the specialist in one real village to a marque expert in a real town, along real roads. And I want traffic. I want to dive off the clogged A-road to thrum along country lanes. Real fucking lanes. And I want to do it in a Lotus Europa. JPS-liveried F1 world championship edition. And I want hill climbs. Instead of hyperbolic idiocy across pretend vistas with destructible scenery and indestructible cars, I want the real courses. Instead of the tiresome deference to street racing, I want the free road and massive time-trials. A supermarket carpark and a sweet Honda Civic. I want Shelsley Walsh5. What does Forza Horizon 5 give you? A fucking FERRARI 250 GTO FOR FREE. AS A FUCKING BARN FIND. IN FUCKING MEXICO6.
You see, Test Drive Unlimited has two virtues that Forza Horizon will seemingly never attain. One, it’s French. Two, it’s mature. It’s mature in the sense that there is little fussiness here. You do events, get money, buy houses, get garages, fill garages with cars. You can fast travel anywhere you’ve already driven. It’s so simple, so clear, so pure. In Forza Horizon 5, you buy houses in order to be allowed to fast travel. In Test Drive Unlimited, every car you drive is earned. In Forza Horizon, tradition dictates you get glitter-cannoned in the face with three cars just for turning up. And the kicker is that none of these awarded cars have any value, literally. Instead you get an ever-increasing garage of cars you probably would never buy, which you probably don’t want to drive. It’s the polar opposite of my final Test Drive Unlimited garages, which were replete with vehicles I slaved to own, choices that directly reflected my tastes. Forza Horizon 5 spewed vehicles at me while keeping the ones I actually wanted locked away with extortionate prices7, forcing me to jump through the career’s godawful hoops to earn any decent cash. I really never asked to drive some fucking buggy around some fucking ruins to the delight of some fucking asshole who wants the footage for some fucking social media fucking fuck fuck fuuuuuuck. I just want to drive to the sea in a Lamborghini Muira. Can I do that? Or do I have to fuck about at the top of a fucking volcano first?
I should have known from the intro, which played out as some utterly miserable mish-mash of a Top Gear stunt and a Fast and Furious set piece in stupid land. It tries to tempt you with a finale drive in the game’s cover star, the incredibly cursed Mercedes AMG-One8. In a way, the hubris of Mercedes’ halo project matched the hubris of Forza Horizon’s utter stasis, this idea that the game barely changes9, but the locale does and some new cars get added. It seems so low-effort, so utterly devoid of imagination. And again, so small, so timid. So afraid of letting the player get lost. I remember the hype around the game’s massive challenge - the GOLIATH. A shocking 55km race. 55 kilometres! Imagine that, all the horsepower and storage capacity of cutting-edge console technology deployed to create this incredible test of endurance. Except that Test Drive Unlimited’s Tour of the Island race was 189 kilometres. It takes an hour at full throttle10. It’s magnificently huge. Goliath was done and dusted in what, 20 minutes? It seems that the horizon is disappointingly closer than it may appear, and this exemplar of modern AAA racing is completely outclassed by a game that’s now seventeen years old. Perhaps more galling still is Microsoft Flight Simulator11, which is by far the more exciting proposition. Instead of some curtailed, artificial sliver of Mexico, you get the entire fucking world via Microsoft’s Azure platform. A real integration of gaming with the cloud, offering two petabytes of data to draw from. With this in mind, Playground’s own playgrounds become embarrassingly small. Recalling my Lotus drive from Test Drive Unlimited, I remember plotting out the routes to all the dealerships, seeing which ones I could unlock in series. It was such a fun drive, such a simple and pure pleasure. In Forza Horizon, you drive to the festival and open the menu to buy whatever you can afford. And this underlines the stark difference between the two, the gulf between the soulful and soulless. One is a freeform player-directed journey of discovery, the other a mere transaction in an ocean of transactions.
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I was once told by Marek Španěl, co-creator of the utterly seminal mil-sim Operation Flashpoint, that they got the stupendously large open-world map by nabbing terrain data for Oahu, which had apparently been fully radar-mapped and released for free. One suspect Eden Studio did the same, and wonderfully so.
The sequel, Test Drive Unlimited 2, was unfortunately total garbage thanks to a pitifully shit career system and fucked economy. I did, however, enjoy many a Balearic costal drive in an all-white Ferrari 308 GTS.
While certainly entertaining, the endless tales of fucked Lamborghinis and phantasmic McLaren F1s lull me into a firm and unshakeable belief that rich Americans live up to their stereotype.
Harry Metcalfe, ex-grain merchant, current farmer, ex-Zonda owner, current Countach owner and founder of Evo magazine has the best automotive channel on YouTube, according to F2P expert Mark Sorrell:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIB5XXHNAWWzTOw6guIMYCg
If you’re a proper head who loves the technical side, then check out the channel for Harry’s vintage mechanic of choice, Iain Tyrrell:
https://www.youtube.com/@iain_tyrrell
I mean, Iain has a 45-min video on the Lamborghini Espada’s V12 and a wild visit to the US, where he visits the Citeza workshop. Yes, Citeza. The knowledge is as deep as the kink in Iain’s vertebrae, presumably caused by decades of lifting high-performance Italian engines with his bare hands.
AKA the home of British hill climbing, arguably one of the longest-running motorsport disciplines in the world. The Shelsley classic is a wonder to behold, being far more wholesome and pure than the Goodwoods. There is a rarely-told history of European hills as crucibles for bonkers garagiste amateur racers to fling their home-made contraptions up a hill for the fun of it. Rivalled only by the dark arts of TRIALS for niche motorsport.
Ferrari made 36 250 GTOs and knows the precise location of all of them. You do not suddenly find a $30million Ferrari in a fucking barn. FUCK OFF.
Ferrari: 288GTO, F40, F50, Enzo, LaFerrari. An attentive game would incentivise my ownership of this collection, spur me to earn it. Let me take out loans to purchase, which I offset with race wins in the loan-financed car, perhaps?
To paraphrase Chris Harris, a wonderful car that struggles to work. In a much-hyped demo day on track, the AMG-One broke down so many times Chris thought they really shouldn’t have bothered, and that the Mercedes board must be ruing the day they ever committed to mashing a Formula 1 hybrid powertrain into a road car.
I mean, isn’t each one basically a map pack, a car pack and some cosmetics? If we’re being honest?
I did it on a motorbike. Test Drive Unlimited’s motorbikes handled like GTA Vice City’s, so were perfect for the long haul races. I remember missing a kink at 160mph and flying off into the sky, but I had built such a lead over the AI that it didn’t matter, leading me to think I should have done more stunts.
Developed by Asobo, who previously developed FUEL for Codemasters. Another game that wasn’t afraid to have a map so fucking huge, players could happily get lost. A good friend of mine loved it so much, he would drive for hours in the open world, listening to custom soundtracks, entering a kind of zen state in the process. Demonstrated nicely Jacob here: