When Forza Horizon 5 crossed the finish line, the bar for open-world racing was raised again in many ways: A Mexican map that’s bigger, taller and far more diverse than any Horizon game to date. Gradual changes to how the Horizon Festival itself is built, with more one-off events purposefully designed to show off Horizon 5 at its best. Improved tools, now allowing you to create fully custom events that are nearly indistinguishable from those created by the developers themselves.

Major visual improvements, particularly improved lighting, tire smoke and dust effects. Hundreds of new custom parts, wheels, performance mods, and more unique cars than ever before. Massively improved sound, better handling, more detailed settings and options, and more online activity. Overall it’s really incredible.

To understand just how big Forza Horizon 5 is, we need to take a quick look back at Forza Horizon 4, which grew into a truly massive racing game in 2018. Playground Games has taken the perfect open-world racing of all previous Horizon games and packed it with simulation seasons, revamped shared-world multiplayer, and changed how teams tell their minicar stories. But that was just day one. Since then, Playground has spent another three years cramming even more into it. The festival playlist offers new activities every week. Eliminator is a very clever and effective way for Horizon to bring the battle royale format to racing games. In Super7, you can not only join other people’s bespoke racing, driving and stunt challenges, but also create and share your own.

What’s impressive is that Forza Horizon 5 doesn’t just transport all of that to another part of the world, it’s much more.

Mexico Pretty

The breadth of Playground’s surprisingly diverse Mexican map is extraordinary, offering a collection of very exotic and interesting environments after three years in Horizon 4’s beautiful but more uniformed UK. Horizon 5’s variety of colorful locations and backgrounds are similar to Horizon 3, but it feels much more expansive than Playground’s notable 2016 Australian version. There’s Baja, where sun-baked asphalt hugs the coast and dry sandy deserts connect to beaches; and deep jungle, where ancient temples, abandoned airstrips and muddy paths wind through the bush. The charming and colorful city of Guanajuato, with its labyrinthine town of cobbled streets and tunnels, contrasts with the quiet coastal towns surrounded by the sea on one side and mangroves on the other. There are also rolling hills, green farmland covered with crops and windswept grass, and beautiful canyons that look like a scene from a Western movie. Within the map you’ll find a semi-arid desert with towering cacti and stubborn shrubs, as well as the tall, rocky volcanic peak of Gran Caldera. There’s even a gigantic stadium for your soccer shenanigans.

Of course, this isn’t a perfect recreation at all. Like all Horizon worlds to date, it pays no attention to reality and just puts together a stylized vision of Mexico at its most interesting. The result is a fantastic map, and the largest in the series so far.

The size can be best observed from the top of Gran Caldera volcano. The Playground Games team stresses that this is the highest point in all of the Horizon games, but you don’t have to take their word for it. Just drive up there and you’ll see how similar it is to Blizzard Mountain from Horizon 3, putting Fortune Island from Horizon 4 in the shade. Not only does the massive elevation gain make it one of the best roads in the series so far, promising a switchback-filled mountain ride that will be a drifting mecca for the Sideways team, but it’s also an amazing demonstration of Horizon 5’s vast visibility. I love games that make you feel small in vast new spaces, and Horizon 5 does that very effectively.

The garage is just as great as the map itself, with well over 500 vehicles, a selection that easily surpasses Forza Horizon’s open-world racing competitors. Admittedly, there aren’t that many completely new cars in the series – and those of us who’ve been playing Forza Horizon 4 every week for the past few years and collecting all the new cars will have seen most of them already – but Playground tones that down a bit by adding a bunch of new wheel options and visual upgrades that can breathe new life into cars we’ve seen so many times before. Changes to the color editor now support higher-resolution designs and graphics as well. You can’t put stickers on glass, though, which is still a shame.

But both the cars and the maps make Forza Horizon 5 look stunning on both fronts. On Xbox Series X, this applies to both 4K/30FPS Quality and 4K/60FPS Performance modes. I mostly played in Quality mode. The frame rate never fluctuates in either mode, and always remains stable. Stable under all circumstances. But I know that the visual concessions in Performance mode are generally very minimal, so you’ll have to study the stills anyway, to see the differences. It’s hard to pick a favorite graphical element of Horizon 5, but I’d say it’s probably the better smoke and dust effects, and especially how light interacts with particles in the air. It looks gorgeous, too.

Open-World Racing Dream

Of course, Forza Horizon 5’s stunning graphics will suck most of the air out of the room, but there are so many other improvements to the Horizon formula that it’s hard to know where to start.

Handling tweaks are deceptively extensive, including more authentic ABS brakes, crisper steering feel, and suspension refinements that give a more convincing off-road feel. The radically redesigned sound is outstanding, with an explosion in the number of cars that sound amazingly different. I especially love hearing the changes that performance parts make to the sound of a car in real time. The ability to rev the engine while working on an upgrade further encourages this geeky behavior.

Even before launch, the new event creation tool will ensure that some great and creative tracks, races, and activities are shared among early players. With far more props and detailed options than Horizon 4’s building tools, I expect some of Horizon 5’s user-generated content to be surprisingly good.

With an overhaul of career mode development, Playground has added a new points system to help you decide which event hubs and special races to prioritize unlocking. These points or “prizes” are awarded for accomplishments big and small, and essentially act as a dramatically expanded version of the Brick Challenges in Forza Horizon 4’s LEGO expansion. This has allowed Playground to add a few select rides to Horizon 5, which they’re calling Expeditions. These Expeditions bring some of the flavor of the Horizon series’ great, but fleeting, opening ride montage back to the main career, using Playground’s staging vehicles, time-of-day lighting, and weather to deliver an unforgettable ride that shows Horizon 5 at its best. In one game you’ll race through trees as lightning strikes the ground in front of you; in another you’ll race up and down a roaring volcano as jets of steam erupt from the ground all around you.

The multiplayer mode has also been vastly improved. This time, Playground has replaced ranked play with something a little less pressured, where you’re not penalized for other people’s poor racing etiquette. Horizon 5’s PvP modes have been combined under one umbrella, designed to accommodate new players as you progress through the championships. This means that, unlike Horizon 4, you’ll no longer have to suffer through a diminishing pack of sour losers who give you a run for your money when a race doesn’t go your way.

Horizon 4’s hourly Forzathon Live events have also been pushed aside in favor of the newly named Horizon Arcade, which works similarly to Forzathon Live – that is, they’re still cooperative events where everyone contributes to a common goal – but there’s a lot more variety to the events. It’s a fun sight, especially when dozens of piñatas rain down from the sky, but it can get pretty boring after 10 minutes.

Then there are the little things that still pile up: a more intuitive car collection view lets you quickly buy multiple new cars for your garage, and skip the menu switching on the dealer screen. A neat activity where you hide your car in your garage for other players to find in a barn you find on the map. Heck, there’s even the ability to finally switch between metric units of measurement and keep horsepower numbers for performance measurements. (Kilowatts are for vacuum cleaners.)

Verdict

Forza Horizon 5 is a deep and nuanced car haven for car enthusiasts and car enthusiasts to endlessly collect, craft, and experiment with. It’s also an accessible buffet of racing spectacle that can be enjoyed by everyone, from die-hard Deluxe Edition fans to Game Pass nomads, regardless of driving ability or mechanical knowledge. It’s a sometimes silly, but always serious Valentine’s Day to Mexico’s world-famous culture, and a romantic ode to the magic of road trips through postcard-perfect vacation landscapes. It’s an MMO-style long-distance racing game with more races, activities and event types than you can fit on any part of the map, but it always feels relaxed and non-intimidating. It never forces you to do anything you don’t want to do, and it always rewards you for any kind of play. It looks great, sounds great and is fun to play. Yes, Forza Horizon 5 has a lot to offer. Above all, it’s the result of a top-tier racing studio and the best open-world racing game I’ve ever played.