Forza Horizon 5

Most racing games are tuned to impress you for a weekend. Forza Horizon 5 aims to occupy you for years, and its design mostly succeeds.

Developed by Playground Games, the UK studio that spun the Horizon sub-series out of Turn 10’s more buttoned-up Forza Motorsport, Forza Horizon 5 launched on November 8, 2021, published by Xbox Game Studios. The premise hasn’t changed since the first Horizon in 2012: a fictional music-and-motoring festival takes over a real-world region, and you treat that region as a stunt course, rally stage, and showroom all at once. This time the region is Mexico, compressed and remixed into a map that runs from Baja-style desert and Copper Canyon gorges to Caribbean jungle, colonial streets modelled on Guanajuato, and the smouldering Gran Caldera volcano at its center.

The market positioning is shrewd. Forza Horizon 5 sits squarely between the pure arcade spectacle of the old Need for Speed games and the clinical simulation of Gran Turismo or Assetto Corsa. It borrows the licensed-car fetishism of the sims and the anything-goes freedom of the arcade racers, then wraps both in a live-service shell of weekly seasons, rotating playlists, and paid expansions. That shell is where the game’s longevity comes from, and also where most of its problems live.

Timing matters for a review written now. Forza Horizon 5 is a mature product: it has absorbed two major expansions and years of free updates, and it’s a late-life release rather than a new one. So the question isn’t whether Forza Horizon 5 is good. It plainly is. The question is whether, on Steam, at its $59.99 price, at this stage of its life, it still earns your time. For most players, the answer is yes, with caveats this review takes seriously.

• A Five-Biome Mexico: Desert, jungle, canyon, coastline, and city, plus a volcano, packed into a map designed for constant terrain variety rather than geographic accuracy.
• Dynamic Seasons: A weekly, server-wide season rotation (dry season, storm season, and more) changes the look, traction, and event lineup for every player simultaneously.
• A Massive Licensed Roster: Hundreds of real cars, each with deep mechanical tuning, part upgrades, and livery editing.
• EventLab: A rules-and-logic creation suite that lets players build custom races, minigames, and entire game modes, then share them as blueprints.
• Expansions: Hot Wheels drops orange track over a fantasy park in the sky. Rally Adventure adds a gravel-focused region with proper pacenotes.
• Industry-Leading Accessibility: Colorblind modes, a screen narrator, extensive subtitle controls, and American and British Sign Language interpreters in cutscenes.

The Drive Itself

Everything else in Forza Horizon 5 depends on how the cars feel, and the handling model is built to make them feel excellent. Playground’s physics do something few racers manage: they make a hypercar controllable for a newcomer on a gamepad while still rewarding the player who switches off traction control and starts adjusting tire pressures.

The trick is layered assists plus a rewind button that removes nearly all failure friction. Turn everything on and the game is a cinematic joyride. Turn everything off and weight transfer, differential tuning, and tire compounds become decisive, especially off-road, where a badly geared rally car feels genuinely wrong rather than merely slower. The Drivatar AI scales from “New Racer” to “Unbeatable,” and at the top end it’s designed to give you a real fight. It isn’t a sim, and it doesn’t pretend to be. But the gap between “arcade” and “authentic” is narrower here than anywhere else in the genre.

The Gameplay Loop

The structure is the familiar Horizon funnel. A story-led opening, still one of the best tutorials in games, airdrops you into four different cars across four biomes in four minutes. From there, races, Expeditions, and Horizon Stories unlock new festival outposts, and an Accolades system pays out progress for almost everything you do.

And that means everything. This is the game’s central flaw. Forza Horizon 5 is so terrified of boring you that it never stops rewarding you. Wheelspins and Super Wheelspins, slot-machine-style prize rolls, rain down so often that the game hands you dozens of cars you never chose and may never drive. Credits pile up faster than the catalog gives you reasons to spend them. A vintage Ferrari should feel like a trophy. Here it arrives with the same confetti as a novelty hat.

The consequence is a flattened sense of progression. Early Horizon games made you earn a garage. This one hands you a car park. The dopamine curve is front-loaded, and once the novelty fades, the repetition sets in: race, spin, collect, repeat. The game is most rewarding when you ignore its prompts and set your own goals, such as building a perfect A-class rally car or chasing one particular leaderboard.

The story campaign deserves a blunter verdict: it’s harmless and forgettable. Festival characters speak in a register of relentless, frictionless positivity that wears thin fast. You’ll skip it, and you won’t miss anything.

Seasons and the Shared World

The weekly season rotation is the smartest live-service decision Playground made. Because the change hits every player at once, the world feels shared even when you’re driving alone. Storm season turns jungle dirt into slick mud and drops sheets of tropical rain. Dry season dusts everything in haze. The Festival Playlist attaches weekly objectives and exclusive cars to each season, which gives lapsed players a concrete reason to come back on a Thursday.

It works. It’s also a retention mechanic dressed up as weather, and the exclusive-car incentives carry a faint whiff of FOMO. That’s a mild complaint, but it’s a real one.

Multiplayer and the Online Problem

On paper, Forza Horizon 5 is nominally playable offline. In practice, it’s built around a connection. The Festival Playlist, the Auction House, EventLab sharing, Horizon Arcade, and ranked play all require it, and the game has a long, documented history of server disconnects, matchmaking that stalls, and sessions that quietly drop you back into a solo world. When it fails, it fails without much explanation.

Competitive modes like The Eliminator, a battle-royale-style knockout, are inspired in concept but undermined by uneven matchmaking and recurring complaints about cheaters and exploited leaderboards. If your main reason to buy a racing game is clean, fair, ranked competition, this is not your best option.

EventLab: The Real Endgame

EventLab is the feature that makes Forza Horizon 5 effectively infinite. Track editing is only part of EventLab. It’s a rules engine, with triggers, conditions, and scoring logic that the community has used to build parkour courses, soccer matches, cops-and-robbers modes, and things Playground clearly never anticipated. The tools have a learning curve, and discovering good blueprints inside the in-game browser is harder than it should be. But the ceiling is extraordinary, and it’s the main reason this game remains active years after its campaign stopped mattering.

Expansions

Hot Wheels is the better of the two: an unapologetically absurd ribbon of orange track looping through the sky, with loops, boost pads, and corkscrews. It turns the game’s physics into a toy box. Rally Adventure is more niche but more substantive, adding a gravel-heavy region and pacenote-driven rally stages that hardcore players will appreciate. Both are good. Neither is essential, and the Premium Edition pricing that bundles them is aggressive.

Interface

The menus are the weakest link in the moment-to-moment experience. The pause screen is a dense grid of tiles, nested several layers deep, and tasks that should take one click, such as finding a specific tune or checking a seasonal objective, often take four. Notifications stack on top of each other. After years of updates, the UI feels like a building with too many extensions and no renovation.

Forza Horizon 5 still looks spectacular. Playground’s ForzaTech engine handles lighting and atmosphere better than almost any open world in the genre: low sun bleeding through jungle canopy, dust kicked off a desert track at golden hour, storm clouds rolling over the volcano. Car models are photographic, and the Forzavista showroom mode remains a fetishist’s dream.

The art direction is deliberate and color-saturated, a postcard version of Mexico rather than a documentary one. Some critics have reasonably noted that the cultural representation leans touristic. The landscape is beautiful. The texture of actual Mexican life is thin.

On PC, the game is built to scale: it supports DLSS and FSR upscaling and includes a well-designed benchmark tool that makes settings decisions easy. High texture settings demand VRAM headroom, and a map this dense asks a lot of storage and streaming bandwidth when you’re tearing across it at full speed.

Audio is a quiet triumph. Engine recordings are rich and specific, and the radio stations, from electronic to classical to Mexican pop, are curated better than they need to be.

The Steam version works, but it doesn’t feel native to Steam. Buying it there still requires signing into a Microsoft/Xbox account, which adds onboarding friction and a second layer of potential login failure. Crossplay with Xbox players works, which helps matchmaking queues.

Input matters enormously. A gamepad is the intended experience: analog triggers and sticks are what the handling model was built for. Keyboard and mouse is serviceable for menus and poor for driving, because digital steering turns a nuanced physics model into a series of twitches. If you own a wheel, PC is the best place to play: support for major Logitech, Thrustmaster, and Fanatec hardware is solid, and the force feedback design is credible, if not sim-grade.

On Steam Deck, the scalable settings make it a reasonable fit for short sessions, though the Microsoft login layer is clumsier on a handheld.

Value is the biggest platform question. The same game is available through PC Game Pass, and for anyone already subscribed, a full-price Steam purchase is hard to justify. The counterargument is ownership. But in licensed racing games, ownership has an expiry date: car licenses run out, and games in this genre can be pulled from storefronts. This is a genre where storefronts and roster licenses have shelf lives.

Forza Horizon 5 earns its reputation the specific way: a handling model that serves both newcomers and tinkerers, a Mexico rendered with rare care, and EventLab, which turns a racing game into a platform. Years of updates have deepened all three.

Its flaws are almost all self-inflicted. A reward system that gives away everything ends up making nothing feel valuable. An online layer that defines much of the experience can’t always be trusted to stay up. A menu system has grown with every update and never been cleaned up. None of these break the game, but each one blunts it.

If you’re on Game Pass, there’s little reason to hesitate. On Steam at full price, we still recommend it for anyone who loves cars — with the caveat that the best version of Forza Horizon 5 is the one where you ignore the confetti and choose your own road.