I love Forza Horizon 5 but I also have a big problem with Forza Horizon 5: It’s impossible to get anything done.
I’m making progress, no question. My garage is stacked with more than 100 cars. I’ve got millions of dollars at the ready to fund my hunger for even pricier rides, and millions more invested in the Mexican properties that have been my virtual self’s bases of operations. I’ve even eked out enough racing wins to have opened up all the key locations tied to the eponymous Horizon Festival. And yet.
The problem is the driving. The varied Mexican terrain of Forza Horizon 5 is filled with all the straightaways, jumps, drift-friendly curves, and winding city streets a speed-loving motorhead could ask for. It’s wide open and free to explore from moment one, and the mere act of cruising across the landscape gives you the opportunity to build up massive skill chains, with the experience points (XP) you earn feeding a gameplay loop that leads to even more sweet, new rides.
Those skill chains are key. A capable driver has the ability to choose when one ends, because any point gain, even a measly 100 points picked up from the tiniest memory of a drift maneuver, is enough to keep a chain going. The longer you go, the more your pile of points — which rack up right in the middle of the screen as you drive — grows.
It’s a feel thing. Forza Horizon 5‘s controls aren’t tough to get a handle on at its default difficulty and driver assist settings. The options are there for things like manual transmission, but from the first moment you touch the controller this Forza handles like a responsive and perfectly tuned arcade racing game. It’s great at conveying a sense of speed while making you feel like you’re in total control of your ride at all times.
This combo of enticing, intuitive feel and a rapidly rising score that’s constantly sitting right there in your field of view is intoxicating. I fall into a sort of trance when I get into the skill chain zone. Even just watching someone pull one off is hypnotic. Look at this mad driving genius who kept a chain going as they drifted around the entire, massive map.
That’s been my Forza Horizon 5 experience so far. That next map marker might be only a mile away, and something I could technically fast travel to in seconds, but given the chance I’ll spend more than an hour getting there, wandering across the entirety of virtual Mexico in the process. Every. Single. Time.
It helps that your score equates to your XP earned, and new experience levels mean more Wheelspins. This relatively new entrant to the Forza Horizon series is one of developer Playground Games’ more insidiously ingenious additions.
A Wheelspin is, simply, a slot machine where you can win cars and money, as well as wild car horns (Halo theme, anyone?) and attire for your driver avatar. Whenever you have a Wheelspin, you’re going to win something for sure. You just never know what. (There’s also a Super Wheelspin with three wheels in one, which means three prizes per spin every time).
I can’t get enough of the Wheelspins. They’re not the whole reason I play — the driving is still king in that regard — but it’s like this passive bonus to all my lack-of-progress where I can count on seeing it pop up multiple times in a session. And it generally just takes a few spins of the wheel to get myself a new car for the garage, and by extension a new toy I can play with while not getting anything else done.
‘Forza Horizon 5’ is great at conveying a sense of speed while making you feel like you’re in total control of your ride at all times.
It’s really a shame that Playground made the basic elements of its game so deeply enjoyable, because there’s a lot of good stuff here and I may never get to it. The Horizon games have always done cool blockbuster moments where you race against planes and trains, and it’s no different here.
At one point, I hopped behind the wheel of a surprisingly speedy parade float, which I steered carefully around high elevation curves before the route took me, on purpose, over the edge of a cliff. At another point, a race that pit my car against a blimp transformed halfway through as the airship deposited a pair of growling motorbikes onto the road.
There are races, too. So many races. Once you get the main event destinations unlocked — each one themed to a specific racing style, like Street or Cross-Country — the map is quickly overwhelmed by a flood of icons denoting events of interest. These more structured affairs are just that: More of what Forza Horizon 5 does so well already, but with some extra rules around each one.
I’m much more into the passive events that come up as you wander around outside of races. Speed Traps record your speed in one spot or along a stretch of road, with different speed levels nabbing you one, two, or three stars (and a commensurate amount of XP). Danger Signs are jumps, giving you a chance to see just how much your preferred ride can double as an airplane.
Credit: Playground Games
Events like these are great because they never really interfere with me not getting anything done. If anything, they get me to slack off even more. I’ll beeline over to a Speed Trap anytime I see an icon for one pop up on my minimap. It injects the tiniest bit of focus into my incessant cruising, but without having to worry about load screens or other drivers or anything else.
Not every event is a winner. Occasionally you’ll catch sight of a pink bubble on the map, which indicates a Horizon Arcade event is about to start, or has started. These public event gathering spaces see participating cars working toward a group goal, such as billboards broken or total jump distance. But that goal doesn’t scale to suit the number of cars in the event, and failure gets you no rewards. So Horizon Arcade is often a waste of time unless pretty much everyone in the lobby participates.
There are plenty of other reasons to like Forza Horizon 5. The series trademark “Rewind” feature, which lets you wind back the clock in small increments of time — and reverse driving mistakes in the process — is always a winner, and of course you have it here. Rewind is no help when you’re in an online event of course, but for people who just want to win against AI drivers, or learn from their mistakes, it’s always there.
Forza Horizon 5 also offers an impressively full-featured accessibility menu that makes the game’s heady brand of driving available to all players. This includes an assortment of visual options for colorblind players, with sliders for adjusting the intensity of each option. The size and opacity of subtitles can be similarly tweaked. You can even slow down the “offline game speed” and play in slower-than-standard motion.
I haven’t stopped playing because of all the chill vibes I get from just cruising around.
This is just a beautiful game, too. Forza Horizon 5 renders Mexico as an environmentally diverse landscape of rocky deserts, rolling and grassy plains, dense forests, winding mountain roads, and muck-filled swamps. Stunning visual and lighting effects infuse every time of day with its own mood and make rainfall feel like the actual real thing.
None of it works without the driving, though. I haven’t stopped playing because of all the chill vibes I get from just cruising around and watching my point totals soar. Keeping a skill chain going while avoiding collisions — which reset the chain — is its own kind of game. And sure, it’s painful to break a six-figure chain with a 5x multiplier attached to it. But that pain is fleeting. There’s no penalty beyond the lost points. You just pick yourself up, mash down on the accelerator, and get started on chasing your next skill chain.
So I love Forza Horizon 5. Not in spite of it not letting me get anything done, but because of that basic fact. It’s so relaxing and satisfying to waste time in this game. Maybe one day I’ll finish all the main “story” races and see what else I’m missing. But for now, I’m completely content to never get to my next race because of the million wonderful distractions that tug at me along the way.
