Forza Horizon 5

Forza Horizon 5 is a 2021 racing video game developed by Playground Games and published by Xbox Game Studios. The game was released on November 9, 2021, for Microsoft Windows, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S. The game is set in a fictionalized representation of Mexico.

Why You Should Go to Mexico

 * 1) First of all, just look at the game's graphics. Never before has the Xbox Series X/S hardware been put to good use with its drop-dead gorgeous rendition of Mexico, all in beautiful 4K at 60 FPS (performance mode on Series X) or 30 FPS (quality mode on Series X). There's even raytracing for the cars in Forzavista. The Xbox One version doesn't look too shabby, either.
 * 2) The Mexican map itself. It's 50% larger than Forza Horizon 4 ' s rendition of Great Britain yet has more biomes than even Forza Horizon 3's rendition of Australia, meaning that it has a ton of environmental variety. It has deserts, coastal towns, jungles, canyons, the colorful city of Guanajuato, and even a volcano.
 * 3) The driving gameplay remains as polished yet accessible as ever.
 * 4) Lots of accessibility options for players with disabilities, including adjustable colorblindness options, subtitle styles, high contrast menus, text-to-speech and speech-to-text for voice chat, a game speed modifier for offline players, and even on-screen American Sign Language and British Sign Language interpreters for cutscenes.
 * 5) After receiving complaints that previous games' campaigns were getting far too open-ended to the point of being considered unfocused or overwhelming, Playground Games added a more consistent progression system that allows players to have a clear path through the story while still giving them the freedom to choose how they want to progress through earning Accolades, which are based on the Brick Challenges in Forza Horizon 4: Lego Speed Champions.
 * 6) Car sounds have been greatly improved; there is now a greater variety of engine sounds and upgrading or changing your engine will affect what it sounds like.
 * 7) The game's track editor has been greatly expanded in the form of EventLab, which allows players to create not only their own tracks and Super7 events but even their own custom games.
 * 8) Player customization has been improved with the addition of changeable hairstyles and colors, prosthetic limbs, gender pronouns, and even voices for the first time in the series.
 * 9) After being absent from past Forza games for years, car gifting is finally back, albeit in the form of making new barn finds.
 * 10) The Eliminator, the Battle Royale mode introduced in the previous game via a free update, returns and now goes up to 96 cars, and the map's design has been made with this game mode in mind.
 * 11) The seasonal change system from Forza Horizon 4 returns, but now makes use of the more varied environment with localized weather, which is much more enjoyable than the more uniform seasonal effects in Horizon 4's Great Britain.
 * 12) After having music continue to play in the background while the game is paused in Forza Horizon 4, which led to an early exploit regarding Skill Songs that Playground Games had to patch out and thus forcing players to drop everything for a few minutes during Skill Songs as a result, the pause menu returns to being music-less as with earlier games, so now players can at least pause the game during Skill Songs again if they want or need to.
 * 13) One of the best story-based features in Horizon 3, expanding the Horizon Festival by opening up new Horizon Festival sites in the game world as you progress in the game, returns with unique Festival sites focusing on various disciplines of racing, such as Horizon Apex for road racing and Horizon Baja for cross-country racing (and there are still purchasable homes like in Forza Horizon 4).
 * 14) Forzathon Live's co-op challenges from Horizon 4 have been expanded into Horizon Arcade, which includes new mini-games like Piñata Pop where drivers have to smash certain piñatas and avoid cacti-shaped ones.
 * 15) Toyota returned after being mostly absent in Motorsport 7 with the only exceptions of the NASCAR and Arctic Trucks, aside from the road cars being added back in Horizon 4 in the December 2019 update with the return of the JZA80 Supra, this game marks the Forza debut of the J29/DB42/A90 GR Supra.
 * 16) Cool horns such as Doom's E1M1, the classic Windows Tada, the returning Windows XP shutdown from Forza Horizon 4, and even Microsoft Teams calling sound and Windows 10 notification, which can be used for trolling since both of the sounds give people anxiety.
 * 17) In July 2022, Forza Horizon 5 added its first DLC pack, a world based on Hot Wheels toy cars, like in FH3, with its map hovering above Mexico in the clouds, and having three distinct segments with their own unique environments: the jungle, the desert and the snowy landscape.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) The PC version has various bugs, glitches, and crashes, compared to the PC version of Forza Horizon 4.
 * 2) The current song display in the pause menu from Forza Horizon 4 was removed, meaning players now have to switch between radio stations again if they want to know what's the name of the current song and artist(s) on that station. And considering that there's only one button for switching stations in Horizon 5 (unless one changes the settings), that means players now have to go through all the stations and the radio off option just to get the title again.
 * 3) Seasonal championships are now restricted to the "Highly Skilled" Drivatar difficulty no matter what, which can be a problem for players that want to race on harder difficulties of "Expert", "Pro", or "Unbeatable".
 * 4) There's still no option to play custom music after the removal of the Groove Music station in Forza Horizon 3. And again, sideloading a media player like Spotify is not a real workaround since that's just running a separate program without being affected by the game and its environmental audio effects whatsoever.
 * 5) The Xbox One version suffers from long load times, as well as the PC version if you have it installed on an HDD.
 * 6) An update in February 2022 nerfed many wheelspins by removing the Super Wheelspin perk from certain cars such as the 2015 Porsche Cayman GTS (981), 1987 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am GTA or the 1997 Mazda RX-7 (FD3S), as well as adding a possible small reward of 1,000 credits.
 * 7) * This is due to the Willys Jeep, one of the most inexpensive cars in the game, having the perk prior to the said update. Many players bought the car en masse to grab as many Super Wheelspins as possible since they only needed five skill points to get the Supply Drop perk (one for the first perk, one for the one-point perk next to it, and then three for the Supply Drop perk) for each car. Playground Games noticed this, saw this as abusing the system, and removed the perk as a result.
 * 8) Four of the Stellantis Brand Cars (Abarth, Alfa Romeo, Fiat, Lancia) are missing from the game due to licensing issues.
 * 9) The Rocket Bunny/Pandem widebody kits were removed due to unknown reasons (probably licensing issues). This affected many Japanese tuner cars such as the entire Nissan Silvia model family, the Toyota GT86/Subaru BRZ (ZN/ZC6), the Mazda RX-7 (FD3S), Honda S2000 (AP1), Lexus RC F, Honda NSX-R (NA1), Nissan Skyline GT-R V-Spec (R32) and the Nissan 350Z (Z33) and certain European cars such as the Porsche Cayman GT-S (981), Volkswagen Golf R (Mk7) and BMW M3 (both E36 and E46).
 * 10) The lyrics to Teardrops by Bring Me the Horizon are heavily censored in-game.