In order not to waste your time, here is a brief summary: Forza Horizon 5 is the best arcade racing game of our time, which simply has no analogues among the racing games from an online game developer Friv2Online of recent years, except for Forza Horizon 4. If you want to know more, welcome to the review.
The Forza Horizon series has been entertaining gamers since 2012, and starting from the third part, not only owners of Xbox consoles, but also PC users. With each new release, the franchise grows - not so much in depth as in breadth, replenished with new cars, challenges and network activities, but at heart remains the same arcade race, whose purpose is to give a holiday atmosphere.
USA in Forza Horizon, Europe in the second part, Australia in the triquel, England in Forza Horizon 4, and now sunny Mexico, which seems to combine the features of the entire series: from cramped city streets and endless highways to impenetrable jungles and viscous deserts. Although, of course, there was some local flavor: if you like the country of sombreros and tequila, you will be delighted with its embodiment in Forza Horizon 5.
The game begins with an ultra-epic intro, where supercars jump out of planes and, upon landing, immediately join the race. Our hero is already a superstar, the same racer who ignited the festival in England three years earlier, and the organizers of the race do not get tired of reminding him of this. Yes, and he himself does not climb into his pocket for a word: yes, now we have a fully voiced protagonist, and he, I must say, chats incessantly. You can choose his appearance, voice, gender, self-identification, dress him up, and also set the range of emotions that he will give out before and after the race. Such a piece of The Sims in Forza Horizon.
It became more not only dialogues, but also the plot as a whole. The game no longer looks like a sandbox, into which the player is thrown like a kitten - maybe he will find something to do with himself. On the other hand, this is not a boring story about street racers, which the developers of racing arcades stubbornly continue to feed us, including the relatively recent Need for Speed Heat.
No, in Forza Horizon 5, a scenario is a set of quests available in each of the six major regions. Here you help an archaeologist find ancient temples, there you compete with local luchadors in street racing, but here you become a stunt performer and perform stunts. Moreover, missions can have a multi-level structure and even non-linearity - a short one, but still. Well, the finale of the episode in each area traditionally ends with something grandiose, like an epic race across the entire map.
And it's exciting! Tasks are full of cut scenes and various tests, during the mission, another character can get into your car and chat with the main character at ease, and a trip in search of a lost city will suddenly be interrupted by a plane crash, followed by the rescue of the pilot in the pouring rain. I liked the feeling of being a key participant in the events, and with each stage passed, I wanted to gain recognition points as quickly as possible so that a new story chapter would open.
But Forza Horizon 5 is not only interested in quests - far from quests. It is easy to get lost on the world map: there are so many icons here that your eyes run wide. Most of them are familiar from the previous parts of the series: these are the usual ring and sprint races, and radars, and maximum speed zones, and drift zones, and ramps for extreme jumps, and stands for experience and fast travel, and houses, and areas with hidden rarities - activities can not be counted. How often have I had to deviate from the route, following the start of the next race, because a booth or a drift zone loomed on the mini-map!
In fact, there are few new activities in the open world for the series: apart from the aforementioned story missions, I managed to find only pioneer tracks that require you to overcome a given route in the minimum possible time.
And yet, the amount of everything that can be done in the friv game is amazing. To cover all the content, explore all areas of the largest territory in the series, which unites many biomes, from sandy beaches to snow-capped mountain peaks, you will need several tens of hours.
This is only a single component - and after all, Forza Horizon 5 is also an MMO race in which other players are on the map with you. And entertainment for fans of online competitions is appropriate - if the usual racing races are no longer interested, you can play the "royal battle", race with the flag and other modes. In the pre-release press version, there were not enough players online, but I managed to participate in Horizon Arcade, a collection of over a hundred mini-games where a team of participants must complete various challenges, such as making countless jumps or playing football with a giant ball.
And sometimes in the game you just want to forget about everything and just roll somewhere along the beach, enjoying the beauty of your supercar and the views of Mexico. Playground Games have outdone themselves with a stunningly beautiful picture. It will feel especially juicy if you have a monitor or TV with HDR - it's just a new level of perception!
However, even on medium PCs, Forza Horizon 5 will not lose face, and the authors can be called optimization gods : on my far from top-end configuration, the game shows stable 60 frames per second at 1440p resolution and with maximum graphics settings, and ray tracing works in photo mode even on a video card without RT cores. In the open world, however, Ray Tracing was not activated - the power of the consoles is not enough.
The richness of the biomes allows you to quickly adjust the pace of the gameplay. Races in the city often force you to slow down and maneuver between rival cars in a limited space. Desert roads allow you to accelerate to maximum speed. And mountain serpentines are full of blind turns and springboards, where the height difference is tens of meters.
Accordingly, for the highway you want to choose a fast Lamborghini or Ferrari, off-road Subaru Impreza or F-150 will be useful, and vice versa, a supercar will get stuck in the sands of the desert, and a serial sedan will not be able to climb a steep mountain slope.
Fortunately, traditionally for the series, the player's garage is replenished with cars with enviable constancy. There are more than five hundred car models in Forza Horizon 5, and many of them are given out just like that - in the prize game or, for example, for loyalty if the player's account has other parts of the Forza franchise. Therefore, there is always plenty to choose from, and you don’t need to go somewhere to get the right car: it will be delivered to anywhere on the map for free and in a couple of moments.
Moreover, all cars have a characteristic behavior, and you can easily distinguish from each other, for example, two Viper - 2008 and 1999. By the way, rear-wheel drive cars in Forza Horizon 5 are a separate pain: they easily break into a skid and become almost uncontrollable. Tuning on the spot, flexible difficulty settings - too: you can try to turn the friv game into a simulator that will even take into account parameters such as tire wear.
Collecting a collection of cars is worth it for many reasons. Firstly, simply because each of them is very cool, and often there are unique models that you will not find on the roads of your city. Secondly, the collection itself is now presented in the form of a table, where you fill in the cells with cars from each manufacturer in order to receive a gift at the end - for example, another unique model. Finally, thirdly, it is pleasant to consider cars, tune, paint, photograph. I wanted to spend as much time in the workshop and photo mode as I did in the races.
Forza Horizon 5 loves rewarding players. The Wheel of Fortune gives out a bunch of prizes, including money, emotions, clothes and accessories, and, of course, cars. Each sneeze on the road is accompanied by a reward in the form of points: for passing next to an oncoming car, for a sharp turn, for the demolition of small trees and posts. Completing goals brings recognition points - this is a separate menu, divided into many categories, where the player is given almost a thousand tasks. If you're the type who needs a constant supply of rewards, this game is ready to pile them on for you.
If we compare the fifth part of the series with the previous ones, at first glance it may seem that they have too few differences - even the types of races and modes wander from game to game. However, it is worth taking a closer look, and the difference becomes noticeable: they slightly reworked the physical model and controls, seriously improved the sound, made tuning more convenient, added dialogues, expanded the plot, even filled the cities with people who watch the races from benches and terraces and from tables cafe. The system of seasons has also been changed: in Mexico, winters are milder, so snow will appear only in mountainous areas, while in others, for example, rivers and lakes will become shallow. The weather, in turn, changes dynamically: during the race it can rain, and you can simply drive out of a dust storm, leaving it behind.
At the same time, the friv game gives extraordinary freedom, within which you can do whatever you want. And in places, literally create: there is the opportunity to create your own liveries for cars and publish them online, as well as prepare races and tests that players from all over the world can take.
Like the rest of the Forza Horizon series, from start to finish (more precisely, given the network component, the game has no ending, so - until you get bored) Forza Horizon 5 maintains the atmosphere of the festival, where you are the main character and the brightest participant, entertains and admires. If you played the previous parts, then you already know what to expect from the fifth. If you haven’t played, here’s what you need to know: there are simply no other such arcade races. Bright, beautiful and exciting - this game will definitely not disappoint you.
