For years now I’ve been told how Forza Horizon series are “arcade racing”, a type of racing games that defined the 1990s and most of 2000s, the one I used to like a lot. And for years I didn’t believe people and refused to try them out for myself. Well, now that I’ve played Forza Horizon 5, I feel much better knowing that I was right – it’s not an arcade racing game, not what it used to mean. And while it’s a pretty good title in many ways, and I’ve had a fair bit of fun playing the game, it also made me feel very depressed about the current state of the genre I used to find so relaxing.
To provide more context – last racing games I’ve loved playing (so much, that I’ve replayed them several times since) were FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage, Split/Second and Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (the 2010 one and its remaster). That’s 14 years already without a single new racing game I genuinely enjoyed playing. Arcade racing titles used to be about driving really fast cars through exciting tracks, with some of them focusing on challenging mechanics (like drifting in Ridge Racer), but most of them balancing out the fun of high speeds with relatively low challenge of driving a vehicle at those speeds. You’d slide into corners, jump over bumps and hills, barely ever braking unless it’s to drift and if you did hit something along the way, it would be just a fun little distraction from which you quickly recover and go back into the race.
But then two very important games released and changed everything. Race Driver: GRiD was the first technically arcade racing game to feel far more like a sim. It wasn’t quite as much of a sim as real racing simulations and was even simpler than Gran Turismo and, yes, first Forza Motorsport titles. But it was far more “realistic” than what you would get in Need for Speed or Burnout. It was also the first racing game, to my knowledge, to utilize the “rewind” feature and among the key ones to popularise the visual recommendation for speed you should take while driving – two important things, because making mistakes in that title was far costlier than in your typical arcade racer as well. And a few years before this game came Test Drive Unlimited – a racing game in a fully open world that worked almost like an MMO. With huge focus on online and on potentially infinite content.
Fast forwarding to 2021, when Forza Horizon 5 was released as a fifth entry in its own sub-series, it is the evolution of all those above mentioned concepts taken to the maximum, in some good and lots of bad ways. There is no “ending” in this game, no “New game” once you’ve started playing, as it is designed to be an always active live service content delivery box with multiplayer, “seasons”, player made races, online interactions and, of course, slot machine mechanics that technically don’t work with real world money and microtransactions, but only technically.
It is also a game built entirely around this “not arcade racing, nor sim racing” in-between space mechanics which people seem to like a lot, yet I fail to understand. The cars will spin out of control, failing does lose you lots of time, trying to brake at high speeds will send your car spinning for half a kilometer before you can turn around… Because it’s “realistic” I guess? Also “realistic” is the need to spend 10+ minutes of driving to the place you can start the race you actually want to play and then doing the exact same thing to get to the next one. With the focus on “checkpoints” you must cross, which remove any concept of “shortcuts” or real creativity in fun fast racing in favor of… I guess “fairness” and “balance”? And that racing line seemingly evolved into a terrible crutch that the game relies very heavily upon, because if you disable it, you constantly need to move your eyes from the road to the mini-map to know where the hell the track is going, as it may have unexpected bs turns with no clear in-world indication. Plus, it optimizes the fun out of enjoying the racing.
Yet, I did disable most of the multiplayer and online crap, disabled the racing line and most of notifications, ignored the “skills”, the gacha, the live service crap and tried to enjoy Forza Horizon 5 as an arcade-ish racing game. And it kinda gets there? The mechanics and the driving, even though I wish it was far less “realistic” is very fun underneath all the crap. And it’s as fun to have the car go fast on a paved highway or across the sand dunes. But then, there are those constant weird cutscenes and the obnoxiously pointless unlock system… The disgustingly fake smile characters, car bro youtubers with MTV personalities, idiotic unskippable plot. The licensed songs are censored! No, really, the licensed songs in this game, and there are some really good ones, are censored, seemingly more harshly than they would be for a typical “Radio Edit”. And it all feels less like a “racing game” and more like a “car game” – a game about car culture, cars, whatever there is but not fast cars going fast because it’s fun. Also, who had the bright idea of making some of the races last for 25 minutes in real time?
The two expansions for the game are even more odd and I’ve dropped playing both of them before I stopped playing the main game after “finishing” it (as much as you can get an “ending” here). Hot Wheels expansion feels fun to race, but the unlock system and the need to pointlessly ride around the open world is horribly boring and drains all of the fun out of the actual fun bits. And the Rally Adventure is… well, it’s Rally. Did you want the more off-road tracks from the main game to be slower and have someone warn you about the upcoming turns? If yes, you’d probably enjoy it. I didn’t.
Given that this is what “arcade racing” has been for the past 15 years, and given the huge sales numbers of the Forza Horizon titles, I can only assume there is a big audience for this type of game. People who love these vast and boring open worlds, looking at cars instead of racing them and having more “realism” to driving. People who recognize whomever personalities are inserted in the title for cross-promotion and who know the car brands and care about them. I just want to drive cars fast in videogames. And it seems like the type of audience like me has not been served for a very long time and it seems unlikely it will ever be again, because these tiresome open world infinite content titles bring more money. But hey, I won’t lie – Forza Horizon 5 has some fun driving in it. I just couldn’t get past all of the other horrible crap that gets in the way of just enjoying it.