Forza Horizon 5

• 1. Introduction

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  Forza Horizon 5, a racing game from Playground Games and Xbox Game Studios, crossed a remarkable line within a single day. On the 9th of November 2021, Xbox head Phil Spencer announced that more than 4.5 million people had already played it. That made it the biggest launch ever for an Xbox Game Studios title. It also held three times as many simultaneous players as its predecessor, Forza Horizon 4. The game is the fifth Forza Horizon and the twelfth main entry in the wider Forza series. It sends drivers across a fictionalised Mexico, where a volcano towers above jungles, beaches and ancient temples. Why did the studio choose that country? How do you make a virtual engine sound trustworthy? And what kept a racing game changing for years after release?

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• 2. Mexico at Scale

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  Mexico won its place because of its variety. Playground Games wanted a game far larger than anything earlier in the series, and the country's varied landscape gave that ambition room to grow.

  The finished map is 50% larger than the one in Forza Horizon 4, and it contains the highest point in the Horizon series. Creative director Mike Brown called it one of the most diverse maps the team has built. It holds an active caldera volcano, jungles, beaches, ancient Mayan temples and cities such as Guanajuato.

  To make the place feel real, the studio sent a team to Mexico to capture actual light and sky data. Mexican artists created the murals that appear in the game, and Mexican musicians produced the soundtracks. Photogrammetry data was used extensively to make the virtual world resemble its real counterpart. The rocks on the side of the caldera volcano can be studied in close detail. Even the needles of cholla cacti are drawn, although only on Xbox Series consoles so far.

  A country with such a wide range of elevations suggested a new idea, which the team called local weather. A player can stand on one side of the map and watch a storm on another. Several climates therefore appear at around the same time. The four seasons still turn, but they act on eleven unique biomes. Dust storms arrive in the dry season, and tropical storms strike during the fall storm season. In the jungle, the environment responds to the weather, and leaves go flying everywhere.

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• 3. The Sound of Engines

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  More than 320 unique engine sweeps were recorded for this game. Each one tracked every note from idle up to redline and back down to a standstill.

  That effort came from a decision to abandon traditional looping audio. Playground Games moved to a granular synthesis system, which demanded a fresh recording campaign built from the ground up.

  Microphone choices mattered as much as the volume of recordings. The team used flat-response microphones with specialised padding so that loud exhausts would not clip. Stereo and ambisonic microphones sat centrally in cockpits to capture the acoustics of the cabin.

  Working with audio outsourcing firms, the developers built a bespoke library of engines, ambient environments and collisions. Every sound was recorded for this title instead of being pulled from existing libraries. The finished soundtrack can be output through Dolby Atmos.

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• 4. Festival Playground

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  There are over 1,800 accolades in the game, a system new to the Forza Horizon series. Completing certain tasks earns points and prizes, and some vehicles can only be unlocked through accolades.

  The Horizon Arcade scatters mini-multiplayer games across the map. In one called Piñata Pop, the cargo plane of the Horizon Festival drops piñatas. Players cooperate to pop as many as they can.

  A toolset named EventLab lets players build their own games and races to suit their tastes. Mike Brown described Forza Link as an AI assistant that tracks each player's status and helps friends find one another online. It can even link players' GPS systems when an invitation is accepted.

  Cars and drivers can both be customised extensively. Players can design liveries and tunes, and on certain vehicles they can swap engines and drivetrains or fit body kits. This is also the first game in the franchise to support ray tracing on cars. Houses are for sale too, from small beachside cabanas to a hotel. Owning one can unlock Wheelspins and the right to Fast Travel.

  The battle royale mode called The Eliminator returns from Forza Horizon 4, but contestants now begin in a 1963 Volkswagen Beetle instead of a 1965 Mini. This time the world was designed around the mode, whereas the earlier game only received it after launch. Winning is so difficult that TrueAchievements hosts 12 guides for that one achievement, the most of the game's 164.

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• 5. Missing Marques

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  A 2021 Mercedes-AMG One fills the foreground of the cover art, with two 2021 Ford Bronco Badlands behind it. Under the hood of the garage, the count of licensed vehicles stood at 799 as of May 2026.

  Three more cars came through collaborations. A 2017 Ford GT in an OPI Edition tied in with OPI Products, and a 2009 Pagani Zonda Cinque Roadster in an Oreo Edition came from Oreo. A further car was obtainable with the Forza Horizon 5 Xbox Wireless Controller.

  Some famous names were absent at launch. Licensing issues kept Alfa Romeo, Fiat, including its Abarth marque, and Lancia out of the base game. Before release, a Stratos HF Stradale had appeared in a video about car audio, yet it never made it into the shipped game.

  On the 17th of July 2023, the studio announced that the Italian brands would return. They arrived with the Series 24 update on the 17th of August 2023.

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• 6. Never Finished

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  Monthly content updates, called series, have steadily added cars, collectibles, horns, clothing and more. Each usually follows a theme. The Series 2 update in December 2021 centred on Christmas, and the Series 5 update added a stunt park inside the stadium on the map. This is the first game in the franchise to change the map beyond its seasons.

  On the 1st of March 2022, picture-in-picture interpreter videos for cinematics arrived in American Sign Language and British Sign Language.

  The Series 13 update of the 11th of October 2022 celebrated ten years of Forza Horizon. It added a radio station called Horizon Mixtape, with fifteen tracks from the previous four games. Six were available from the start, five unlocked through accolades, and four came from limited-time championships. A new Horizon Story, Horizon Origins, recreated the opening drives of the five games. Scott Tyler, voiced by Ronan Summers, joined the player there. He is the only series character to have appeared in every game. Midnight Battles returned from Forza Horizon 3. Playground also rebuilt the title screens of the four earlier games inside the world. Forza Horizon appeared in summer, Forza Horizon 2 in autumn, Forza Horizon 3 in winter and Forza Horizon 4 in spring.

  The Series 14 update of the 10th of November 2022 brought a Horizon Story featuring the members of Donut Media. That same month, players found a money-making exploit in the Super7 mode. Playground Games disabled the auction house and patched the exploit, but kept the auction house closed to rebalance the game's economy.

  The first expansion, Hot Wheels, followed a similar expansion for Forza Horizon 3 and arrived on the 19th of July 2022. A Steam listing leaked it three days before its official announcement. The second expansion, Rally Adventure, came out on the 29th of March 2023. It brought a new map, trophy trucks and buggies, and a new career mode.

  In June 2023, a 1956 Chevrolet Corvette and a 2022 GMC Hummer EV pickup with details inspired by the film Barbie joined the game. Xbox Game Studios and Mattel arranged the collaboration ahead of the film's release. On the 5th of December 2023, the Fast X Car Pack added vehicles from the tenth Fast & Furious film. It was the second such tie-in since Forza Horizon 2 in 2015.

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• 7. Critics and Prizes

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  Metacritic summarised the reviews as "universal acclaim". Individual critics found different things to love.

  Game Informer enjoyed the social side, noting "More times than I could count, I noticed my friend hit a higher top speed". Ars Technica praised the visuals as next-gen and wrote "I seriously cannot keep track of how many times FH5 made my eyes bulge". Eurogamer called the map "an absolute wonder" and singled out the view from the summit of the volcano.

  Rock Paper Shotgun thought the car handling made the game too easy. Even so, it enjoyed additions such as the EventLab creator and Super7 events, and judged that "the formula has been perfected at last".

  Polygon liked the settings for tuning difficulty and handling. It felt overwhelmed by the number of activities, saying it felt pinged "like two teenagers are blowing up my DMs". The Verge found the progression systems less confusing than in Forza Horizon 3. It liked that players could choose which types of events to unlock as they advanced.

  IGN selected the game as its Game of the Year. At the Game Awards 2021, it won three jury-voted awards, tying It Takes Two for the most wins that night. It then took Racing Game of the Year at the 25th Annual D.I.C.E. Awards.

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• 8. Crowds and Consoles

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  Before the 9th of November 2021 even arrived, over 1.2 million people had gotten in early. They were Xbox Game Pass subscribers who bought the premium edition or the premium add-ons bundle. Video Games Chronicle estimated pre-release gross revenue of between $54 million and $118 million. The game also reached number one on the Steam weekly charts for the 1st to the 7th of November 2021.

  On the 18th of November, the official Forza Horizon Twitter account announced that over ten million people had played in the first week. That was the largest first-week audience in the history of the Xbox brand. Forbes writer Erik Kain credited availability on Xbox Game Pass at launch, cross-platform play between Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and PC, and Xbox Cloud Gaming support. He also credited the quality of the game itself.

  On the 9th of January 2022, two months after release, the player count passed 15 million. That broke the previous game's record in under a year. Seven months after launch, more than 20 million people had played.

  The game is the final mainline Forza release on Xbox One. On the 29th of April 2025 it reached PlayStation 5, in a version developed by Panic Button. That made it the first mainline Forza game on a non-Microsoft platform. It became the second best-selling game of April 2025 in the US, and by April 2026 the PlayStation 5 version had sold around 5.8 million units. A sequel, Forza Horizon 6, launched on the 19th of May 2026.

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