Your enjoyment of Forza Horizon 5 will depend a whole lot on your ability to overlook the presentation layer. I know, I know - Backloggd hyper-analysis of a corporate car-driving game - but you straight-up invade the Mexican backwaters in a military cargo plane that smash-drops Broncos and Mercedes and Chevys onto farmlands, for fuck's sake lol!!
Once you've established military/music outpost, the game spends altogether too much time establishing the little dude who is going to be leading the invasion, which more or less sets the tone for this game constantly grappling between "driving good" and "talking bad". I'm all for expression of personal identity in video games, but juxtaposing the aggressive capital-wank (car logo!!!!!!!!) and colonial-wank with a "i'm a disabled they/them :)" character-creation gives this thing huge "Gaming in the Biden Years" energy. Between this and Call of Duty: Vanguard's "world war ii but make it yass qween" stuff, it's been a great week for rainbow flags on the proverbial B52 bomber.
The game starting you out with one insufferably offensive "¡ayyyy cabron we drive the car loco, si!" sidekick and then almost immediately transplanting in the British people from the previous game is really funny! There are more Scottish characters in this than there are Mexicans! But that feels wholly fitting for a game like this, which doesn't really want you thinking about too much of anything; best exemplified by your sidekick explaining the meaning of "mi casa es su casa" to you in an unskippable cutscene that caps off an unskippable tutorial on how to click A to buy a house.
When you're not thinking, you're driving a car - and suddenly, the game becomes transportive. Even on the Series S, it looks absolutely unbelievable - this is a racing game where you can make decisions by looking at the mud tracks the cars in front have made and check encroaching shadows of racers behind you to work out where you should be blocking the road without ever using the rear-view. The cars move within this well-tuned sweet-spot between arcade and sim driving (on Hard assist settings, at least) that lets you feel like you're in control without foisting all the real-life considerations of the machine on you. It's incredibly immersive and fantasy-enabling, but the dream rarely lasts - finish a race, and the alarm clock will ring, forcing you to A-button through minutes of menus and roulettes and Xbox avatars doing the nay-nay in front of an unbelievably realistic render of a Porsche 911 Turbo before you'll be allowed to turn the keys again.
I gotta admit - I'm a sucker for in-game gambling mechanics. I like spinning wheels and opening crates and ticking boxes and all that - but the driving here is so good that all the progression mechanics and open-worlding feel like obstructions in the way of what could be a series of menus to action if it wanted. Driving from point-to-point between events is pleasant, but the game will invariably just stick you on the map's sprawling motorway to get between objectives, which leads to minutes upon mindless minutes spent barreling in top gear like some kind of high-octane version of Truck Simulator: Latin America.
I don't really have a problem with the way Microsoft have set up the actual timeline of progression here, though - it's scattershot and unordered, but it does let casual players get straight to the 1989 Ferrari Testarossa (shoutouts to OutRun, this game's essential antithesis) without having to give away months of their lifespan unless they really want to. Horizon 5's a great idle distraction - especially with Quick Resume allowing you to jump in and out of it within like 20 seconds - but it also takes up like half of my hard disk. You could fit 22 Mario Kart 8's into that bytespace!!
Once you've established military/music outpost, the game spends altogether too much time establishing the little dude who is going to be leading the invasion, which more or less sets the tone for this game constantly grappling between "driving good" and "talking bad". I'm all for expression of personal identity in video games, but juxtaposing the aggressive capital-wank (car logo!!!!!!!!) and colonial-wank with a "i'm a disabled they/them :)" character-creation gives this thing huge "Gaming in the Biden Years" energy. Between this and Call of Duty: Vanguard's "world war ii but make it yass qween" stuff, it's been a great week for rainbow flags on the proverbial B52 bomber.
The game starting you out with one insufferably offensive "¡ayyyy cabron we drive the car loco, si!" sidekick and then almost immediately transplanting in the British people from the previous game is really funny! There are more Scottish characters in this than there are Mexicans! But that feels wholly fitting for a game like this, which doesn't really want you thinking about too much of anything; best exemplified by your sidekick explaining the meaning of "mi casa es su casa" to you in an unskippable cutscene that caps off an unskippable tutorial on how to click A to buy a house.
When you're not thinking, you're driving a car - and suddenly, the game becomes transportive. Even on the Series S, it looks absolutely unbelievable - this is a racing game where you can make decisions by looking at the mud tracks the cars in front have made and check encroaching shadows of racers behind you to work out where you should be blocking the road without ever using the rear-view. The cars move within this well-tuned sweet-spot between arcade and sim driving (on Hard assist settings, at least) that lets you feel like you're in control without foisting all the real-life considerations of the machine on you. It's incredibly immersive and fantasy-enabling, but the dream rarely lasts - finish a race, and the alarm clock will ring, forcing you to A-button through minutes of menus and roulettes and Xbox avatars doing the nay-nay in front of an unbelievably realistic render of a Porsche 911 Turbo before you'll be allowed to turn the keys again.
I gotta admit - I'm a sucker for in-game gambling mechanics. I like spinning wheels and opening crates and ticking boxes and all that - but the driving here is so good that all the progression mechanics and open-worlding feel like obstructions in the way of what could be a series of menus to action if it wanted. Driving from point-to-point between events is pleasant, but the game will invariably just stick you on the map's sprawling motorway to get between objectives, which leads to minutes upon mindless minutes spent barreling in top gear like some kind of high-octane version of Truck Simulator: Latin America.
I don't really have a problem with the way Microsoft have set up the actual timeline of progression here, though - it's scattershot and unordered, but it does let casual players get straight to the 1989 Ferrari Testarossa (shoutouts to OutRun, this game's essential antithesis) without having to give away months of their lifespan unless they really want to. Horizon 5's a great idle distraction - especially with Quick Resume allowing you to jump in and out of it within like 20 seconds - but it also takes up like half of my hard disk. You could fit 22 Mario Kart 8's into that bytespace!!
DJSCheddar
2 years ago