Forza Horizon 5 – PS5 Review

Somewhat bewilderingly, we have the pleasure to review Forza Horizon 5, originally released in 2021 on Xbox and PC Gamepass. Developed by Leamington Spa-based dev Playground Games with porting to PS5 done by Panic Button, this is still published by Xbox Game Studios. Until Phil Spencer navigated Microsoft towards a more platform-agnostic approach, we’d have laughed had you suggested we’d be playing a Forza title on any console other than Xbox.

For a while, the Forza Horizon games and to a slightly lesser extent the mainline series, was the only reason we kept our Xbox One plugged in before it got bumped for the Switch. Well, that and the promise of Halo Infinite anyway, before it became evident that diminishing returns applied there. That said, we’re all over the Masterchef Collection if it ever makes it to PS5.

Panic Button have outdone themselves with this port, with an amazing translation to PS5. Admittedly Playground did the lion’s share of the work here, but still the fact remains.

The first Forza Horizon on 360 was based in Colorado, with the second being based on the French Riviera, the third in Australia and the fourth in Great Britain. There was also the freebie Fast and Furious standalone that we happily played for the Gamerscore boost it yielded.

We have to confess we rather struggled with Forza Horizon 4 purely due to the compressed world having Ambleside close to the Cotswolds and Stonehenge, in reality hundreds of miles away. It might’ve also been due to our focus having shifted to PS4 rather more. We don’t know how people manage to keep multiple consoles going if we’re honest.

Forza Horizon 5 heads back to the New World with this foray to Mexico. We’d not be at all surprised if Forza Horizon 6 was waiting in the wings for ‘holiday season’, perhaps somewhere in Asia is in the offing. We suspect that it’ll release a bit sooner than four years after the event, if not the same day as the Gamepass release.

As is common with its predecessors, while you can take part in conventional races like in the mainline Forza Motorsport series, Horizon 5 is more freeform and focussed on fun and exploration. The Horizon Festival you’ll have grown familiar with if you’ve played any of the prior games is writ much larger. You start with a daft setpiece where you jump from one vehicle to another as your character converses with the pilot of a C-130 Hercules, all the while hurtling down various roads and terrain in a variety of vehicles.

As introductions go, it’s an impressive, if slightly implausible one. Think the freefall sequence of Saints Row: The Third in terms of pure silliness and escapism, especially with regard to your vehicles being dropped from the back of an aeroplane. It’s all heavily scripted of course, though ridiculously impressive with it. Then once the sequence has ended and you get a chance to catch your breath, the first of many trophies unlocks, in this case Welcome to Mexico. Then the first outpost of the festival is then opened that acts as a hub of sorts.

It’s here that you then have the opportunity to explore as you see fit, though due to the way the game unlocks progression, you’ll probably find yourself feeling a little overwhelmed by the sheer scope of the game. As you drive with flair and complete any of the activities in the game, be they races, speed cameras, super jumps, speed or drift zones etc etc, you’ll unlock more Horizon outposts. In the first instance you’ll feel compelled to unlock all there is to unlock, but beware that choice paralysis is very much a thing here. Not to mention the addition of the four seasons that change every seven actual real-time days.

It’s as much a problem of not knowing what to do next as any of the open world Ubisoft games, but we suggest that you don’t feel too much urgency as to unlocking your next outpost as each of them will add a whole new slew of map markers. The beauty is you can ignore them entirely if you wish, as half the fun of Forza Horizon 5 is the freeform aspect of it. Just as in the previous games, there’s the joy of covering every single road in the game. Almost six hundred of them in fact.

Then there’s the cars. They’re all meticulously modelled, warts and all. Over nine hundred in all. This being a Forza game though, there’s tricksy DLC riddled throughout, though even without the paid DLC there’s an absurdly healthy roster as listed on the Forza website. Additionally, if you log in with your Xbox gamertag, having played any of the prior Forza games, you’ll be gifted with several bonus cars.

Though somewhat bafflingly, while there’s Ferraris, Fords, Lamborghinis and any number of exotica available, there’s a weird shortage of contemporary Euro shitboxes.  This writer would love nothing better than climbing into our Citroën C4 and changing the numberplate to the slightly more prosaic day-to-day Isle of Wight registered 2016 plate, as opposed to what we went with for the purposes of this review. Heck, any weirdo could look up our tax status or MOT advisories if we had it on our screenshots.

But because Citroën, Peugeot, Alfa Romeo and Fiat amongst others are owned by the acquisition-hungry conglomerate Stellantis, there’s only a handful of their cars in the game. One Citroën for goodness sake and not even a well known one like the 2CV. Instead, you get the BX4TC rally car from the mid-1980s. Technically you get another, but due to Stellantis having spun off the DS Automobiles brand in 2014, you get the anachronism of the mid-70s late model Citroën DS 23, released in 1973, forty-one years prior.

There’s a few historical Fiats too, but again another Stellantis sub-brand also takes precedent in Abarth. We can only surmise that they asked too much to licence their vehicles or simply didn’t see the value in getting their brands out there in digital form. Heck, we’d have been happy with our girlfriend’s nippy little DS3 but that’s not in there either.

Enough of our grumbling anyway, the cars that are available are stunningly rendered. Climb into a mid-80s hatchback and the internal view will be terrible just as it is in real life along with crappy steering wheel and plastic trim. Though we can only go with prior game depictions for whether a modern supercar is as accurate. Given Playground Games attention to detail we’d be surprised if they weren’t.

As well as the loyalty bonus, connecting with your prior Gamertag if you’ve ever played on Xbox will pull through Drivatars populated by your Xbox Live friend list. In our case, including ex-colleagues and notably one guy we only knew from our shared achievement whoring obsession. He sadly died last year, so there’s a certain poignancy in him living on via his virtual depiction in a game.

The drivatars themselves range from benign to outright aggressive, though if you’re on to a losing streak the game does ask you if you want to drop to an easier difficulty. That’s no bad thing as on occasion, they can be dominant and you’ll stand no chance of winning a race, much less not being overtaken by the entire field in the opening moments of a race.

For example, one Volkswagen Beetle only race has you face off against a field of practically identical cars and despite you being in the same vehicle, they speed off into the distance even if you drive a perfect race. It’s a little demoralising when that happens, but thankfully due to the sheer scope of Horizon 5, unless you obsess over winning a certain race, you’ll move on to pastures new.

Besides the half dozen or so outposts that add all manner of extra showcases, there’s also little story missions to carry out. They’re fun enough, though in some cases the time limits are really stringent. Or in the case of one where you drive a 1930s Bentley racing car, the margin of error is miniscule with no slack given to get the best rating.

As well as the base game, the Premium edition Microsoft kindly furnished us with also has the Rally Adventure and the Hot Wheels expansions. They add two brand new areas to the already massive game map, meaning that you’ll be playing Forza Horizon 5 for ages if you opt for that version. Yes, the £84.99 for that edition might seem a little steep, especially when it’s a digital only proposition, so you may want to bear that in mind. Or consider adding the premium addons to your Wishlist in the event they go on sale.

The music and sound effects are integral as always, with the radio stations and accurately sampled growls of each vehicle being present and correct. Though we did have a moment of ‘is this really happening’ when barrelling down the side of the mountain and music from Halo 4 was playing on the classical radio station we prefer. Coupled with a flash BMW in Xbox livery, it made us doubletake a little.

Forza Horizon 5 is quite the package then, even in its base guise before you add all the DLC. It does have a few annoyances though. The variable Drivatar difficulty for example. Or the fact that despite your last activity having taken place in Mexico itself, you’ll find yourself back in the hub of the last addon you played. In our case the Hot Wheels expansion. It adds a layer of friction we could well do without. Also, in season play, we found that multistage objectives were reset if we dared to turn our PS5 off altogether.

When you come to stop your play session, there’s no option to quit to menu. We suspect this is why we keep finding ourselves back in the Hot Wheels hub. Is it really too much to ask for a Save and Quit option? We guess that the idea is you keep going back to your playthrough for a minute here and a  minute there, but we’d like to switch off our console from time to time, not mention cutting our electricity usage down to a trickle as opposed to nudging north of 10KwH a day. We’re not wanting to be in thrall to Ovo’s billing department more than we have to be thanks, their standing charges are already extortionate enough as it is.

In conclusion, Forza Horizon 5 is a wonderful port to PS5 of an expansive game. If you’ve deep pockets, we can well recommend going for the Premium Edition as it’ll stop you getting quite so frustrated by the message telling you a car is only available as part of a car pack. As it stands, even the base edition is a remarkable proposition given how many vehicles are available to you, notwithstanding the excellent landscapes ranging from verdant rainforest to arid deserts. The caldera that dominates the north of the map is also gloriously realised. Move over Gran Turismo 7, Forza Horizon 5 is here and it’s wonderful.