Review of Forza Horizon 5 -apkrig

One of the most anticipated celebrations of this year’s video game year will start tomorrow. Developers from Playground Games will open the gateway to Mexico and let the first player on the roads and dusty roads. Forza Horizon 5 is finally arriving, and after several days of furious testing on both the Xbox Series X and the computer, I can boldly say that fans will definitely not be disappointed. Following the example of previous parts, the authors decided not to take any risks, not to change anything that worked in the fourth, but also the third or second part, and they serve a beautiful, very content-rich racing arcade, to which we can place the highest demands. Nevertheless, with each new race, I was less and less able to resist the feeling that the Forzu Horizon 5 can also be seen only as a large data disk, which can easily catch its breath, regardless of the massive load of content. So it will depend on the context in which you expect the news from Playground Games, and whether you will be satisfied with the fact that, with a few exceptions, it does not bring anything new to the concept.

Repeat, please!

Don’t let my words derail too much from the beginning. Forza Horizon 5 is another fully functional notch on the stock of the mentioned studio and will offer exactly what fans expect from the series. The racing festival moved from Great Britain to Mexico and spreads over several biomes, promising not only a different environment and scenery, but above all the conditions for racing. If the developers at Playground Games are really good at it, it’s landscaping, which can be thanked even by those who are already looking forward to the next Fable. Mexico is detailed in Forza Horizon 5 and does not spare an astonishing number of different objects, such as cacti, rock formations, palm trees, houses with hanging clothes, greenhouses, fences, fields or barns full of cars. The number of scenery around roads and paths is literally stunning in places and far surpasses Great Britain in the fourth part in terms of wealth. But Mexico can pay for the fact that it doesn’t have to suit everyone’s taste to a greater extent, and it must be added that the individual parts of the map do not differ from each other in the end, as the developers suggested. Although I’m far from claiming that the landscape would be monotonous, because you can always go to the volcano or get lost in the jungle, after a few hours of playing, I realized that I probably didn’t have much surprises in any of the corners of the map.

To what extent this will change the system of changing seasons, which are linked to free variations on battle passes with a number of challenges and rewards, will be the subject of further research by all of us. During the review, only the summer was available, when the entire map and all types of races in which it often rains are accessible. As the whole mechanism is designed, it definitely stimulates the motivation to return to the game and complete the assigned tasks in the allotted time, for which you will usually receive a reward in the form of a unique vehicle. It’s not the main game mode, but considering that to-do lists and rewards are provided for free, they evoked something in me that the campaign can’t offer this time either. So the belief that you really have to try to achieve something, because the rest of Forza Horizon 5, on the other hand, is designed so that the supply of rewards never stops if possible. This brings me to what bothered me in the previous part – although the paper game impresses with more than 500 vehicles, hundreds of kilometers of potential racetracks and an endless supply of various disciplines and competitions, it did not make me feel like I could do any of these things. he esteemed and longed for their full disclosure.

Everything and now

The Forzy Horizon 5 campaign will begin almost identically to the introduction of the previous episode. After a semi-interactive animation, in which you briefly take on several vehicles, the base of the festival will materialize in front of you, from where you will set off for the individual races. But it only takes a few minutes and the map will start to fill with the icons of the competition, which you have not yet left, when there will be two literally countless in an hour. Experience for whatever you do in the game keeps falling into your lap, you can spin a wheel of fortune on a regular basis, from where rewards rain on you without explicitly needing it, and what’s more astonishing, the best, fastest and most versatile vehicles you get basically right at the beginning. The new Forza Horizon will also not penalize you too much when you stop winning races, so playing will continue to be interrupted each time you collect enough in a separate basket of experience to expand the festival with another tent elsewhere on the map. This is basically the only indicator of the progress of the game, shown by the unlocking of individual types of races and the leveling of the main festival center or side cells. You can get it done in ten to twelve hours, depending on how you focus on meeting specific challenges, but that will definitely not end the game.

If you’re in the mood for a seemingly endless arcade sandbox, then you probably can’t reach for a better title. The races are divided into traditional categories, such as road, off-road, drifts, tracks, baja races and many others, from which you simply choose what you like and you don’t have to do anything else until the morning. However, as I mentioned at the beginning, individual encounters with artificial intelligence or live players begin to repeat uncomfortably after a relatively short time, regardless of their different placement on the map. You always start from the middle of the field, every time everyone starts a little at the beginning, you always catch up with them thanks to a different road track and different braking into corners, and you always shake your head when someone reaches you and overtakes you on the plane where cars of the same category reached maximum speed long ago. At such moments, of course, there is a tuning of difficulty, which is sufficiently stratified between the power of artificial intelligence and individual helpers, but even after several tests, I could not remove the unpleasant rubber rope from the new Forzy Horizon and the feeling of racing remained the same. But what bothered me even more is the insufficient signaling, which turn is waiting for you, if you do not have the guide line turned on, which was, for example, a well-managed Driveclub. In Forz, however, you are simply groping, and in combination with a mild deception of artificial intelligence, especially long races in story dividers become a festival of rewinding and repeated attempts.

Cars as a passion

But there is another element that should not be overlooked and which at the same time significantly enters the overall experience. It is, of course, the tuning of individual cars and the perk system, which is applied to each available model separately. Perks are unlocked using your character’s experience points, and every single square on the board brings with it an advantage that affects you from reaping more experience. You can create a vehicle that will act as an efficient harvester and speed up leveling and collecting the money needed to buy specific vehicles. But tuning is much better, which expands the possibilities of the fourth part and allows you to specialize almost any car on specific surfaces and types of races. Everything is due to a better selection of specific transmissions, differentials or tires, which dramatically affect the driving characteristics and focus of the vehicle. It is therefore nothing special when, for example, you make a Subaru Impreza a road special, so that you can just adapt it for rallies by just a quick jump into the garage. Everything is clearly legible, well explained and very fast, so you can experiment to insanity.

Or you can simply take advantage of the fact that the money is just pouring into your money box and you will choose specific vehicles from a wide range as you wish. The developers also wanted to underline the collector’s element, so in addition to the catalog, it also offers a look at the album, where – you guessed it – further rewards await you if you manage to assemble, for example, all represented cars of a specific brand. But no matter what you’re driving, look forward to different driving characteristics, really significant differences between front and rear axle drive and fantastic sound, which takes the experience of the previous part much higher. In addition, the sounds spread perfectly through the environment, they really react very faithfully to the surroundings and it sounds significantly different even in connection with the chosen camera. If nothing else, the audiovisual processing of hundreds of available vehicles is a huge attraction for Forzy Horizon 5, and I have no objection to them. Every single car is wonderful, even without intervention in the paint shop or parts shop, and it is great to enjoy it even during free driving through the countryside.

We are definitely not done

But even this is not all that Forza Horizon 5 offers, as you probably expect after the experience with the fourth part. Above single-player content is the online layer, which includes instant races with whoever challenges you, as well as team battles of individual convoys. Unfortunately, as is often the case with online elements of reviewed titles, although the developers have prepared several windows where multiplayer was fully available, no in-depth test could be performed. So I can only say that multiplayer works, if you run into a jerk, it can ruin your race, but there are no lags or lost connections and everything seems to be ready to launch. And if you don’t want a direct confrontation on the track, you can also use other players as a creator of other content, ie individual races that are already starting to appear, or great designs of individual cars.

As a signal that the content of the game has huge potential, then serve more and more types of races, linked to a simple story of the campaign, there are also a huge number of signs to break, a radar mini-game for the fastest possible time in the section, big landscapes, buying houses with other perks and bonuses or a photo mode, in which ray tracing also works as the only place in the game, encouraging you to take nice pictures in a virtual album. You will certainly admit that there are a lot of activities and possibilities to approach the game, but the most important is the actual ride and the course of the race, which despite the criticism of artificial intelligence is not bad, only after a few hours you feel that you already know the game through and have everything you need. Unfortunately, the developers have not taken any step forward in this, and despite all the technical sophistication and a great presentation that can serve as a model for the whole industry, the game is gradually losing its ferocity and desire to face all obstacles with its feet on the gas.