- Spoiler: show
-
05/01 - Brutal Legend
07/01 - Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs
13/01 - Sludge Life
17/01 - AER: Memories of Old
19/01 - Devil May Cry 4: Special Edition (Human - Nero/Dante)
05/03 - CrossCode: A New Home
14/03 - Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen
17/03 - Mario Kart: Double Dash!! (100cc)
02/04 - Drakengard (Endings A-D)
14/04 - Drakengard 2 (Ending A)
28/04 - Drakengard 3 (Endings A-D)
02/05 - Rain
10/05 - God of War: Chains of Olympus HD
15/05 - God of War: Ghost of Sparta HD
24/05 - NieR Replicant ver. 1.22474487139... (Endings A-E)
08/06 - Final Fantasy XV (NG+)
02/07 - God of War II HD
15/07 - Scarlet Nexus (Yuito)
20/07 - TRON: Evolution
21/07 - Sky: Children of the Light
01/08 - Scarlet Nexus (Kasane, NG+)
12/08 - Forza Horizon
18/08 - A Plague Tale: Innocence
21/08 - Contrast
31/08 - Forza Motorsport 7
04/09 - No More Heroes III
13/09 - Metal Gear Solid
23/09 - Metal Gear Solid 2 HD
09/10 - Psychonauts 2
15/10 - Unsighted
17/10 - Sable
18/10 - Halo: Reach (Master Chief Collection)
23/10 - Split/Second
29/10 - Darq
11/11 - Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Director's Cut
14/11 - Darksiders II (Apocalyptic)
21/11 - Kid A Mnesia Exhibition
23/11 -
Forza Horizon 5
Another Forza Horizon game under the belt then. Or at least all the main single player content anyway. Still a very fun game that does a lot way better than any competition, but one that I did end up with a long list of criticisms for.
The core mechanics are still as great as ever. Still has easily the best feeling handling of any game that is even remotely similar. It’s got that signature subtlety to it that has a feeling depth to the cars allowing you to really dig in to how they control and respond to your input. Yet it’s also approachable and forgiving enough that it encourages a playful approach that gives you a lot of room to explore and experiment with different approaches, but where you still have to be attentive of things like weight shifting, grip levels, etc. It feels more or less exactly the same as FH4, but with a few minor adjustments that are so minute it’s hard to pinpoint what the difference is. But it did take me a little while to get in to the groove of this new handling. It usually does with each new entry, but between earlier games there was always a more obvious change in physics. One thing I can point to though is that they have finally ironed out the issue of brakes locking up too easily. To be fair, 4 might have done as well, but I never tested it much there. But after finding FM7 had fixed this issue too recently it gave me the confidence to try it out here as well. And sure enough I’m back to being free from using ABS. It’s definitely an improvement and gives back that extra layer of interactivity.
There’s been a few small additions relevant to drifting which are rather interesting too. They added more car upgrades specifically for this purpose, and they go even further than the drift suspension in 4 at making building a drift car approachable. But it’s not quite as clear cut as these new parts simply being the go-to for all drift builds. The new drift tyres work well, but I found they are somewhat limited in how much power they can handle. They’re good for low to medium powered builds, but if you want to make something that can hit those long wide corners, you’ll still need the semi-slick race tyres to handle the necessary power. Then there’s the drift differential too. I’m not sure it’s actually a unique upgrade though, and instead it’s just the normal race diff that comes with a drift appropriate tune setting. I still generally felt like it needed changing from that setting though, for how I like my cars to feel anyway. Another thing relevant to drifting is that it feels like they have put a bit of extra effort in to making roads in the open world that work well for it. One of course being the volcano road drift zone. 4 had a similar road in one of the expansions, but I think this one has it beat, and it’s cool to see it as part of the base game too. The thickness of the tyre smoke is also much improved in this game too, which is a nice little bonus.
Speaking of the world, that’s another thing this game still hits it out of the park on. The setting is a really enjoyable place to explore around. Unlike 4 there’s lots of unique and interesting things to see, both natural and man-made. The swampy areas with the hazy mist and mangrove trees, the valley up in the north with the unusual rock faces and impressive vistas, the old airstrip with broken plane parts being engulfed by the jungle, the ancient temples, and the colourful dense city are all really cool places to be in and poke around. Graphically it’s very nice too, with great lighting and volumetrics that give atmosphere to the world. Although if I’m completely honest, I’m not entirely sure it has the third game beat on aesthetics. And as much as I like the look of the city, I’m not really a huge fan of racing around it. The roads are very narrow and windy, with loads of drastic elevation changes. Usually in this series the urban area is one where I spent a huge chunk of time, but here it’s not really as enjoyable to drive around. But when there’s so much else in the world that is so good, it’s hard to hold it against the game.
One thing that is yet to be seen when it comes to the world design that 4 might have over this game however is how the seasons change things. It seems safe to say that it might not be quite as impressive, since Mexico has far less variation in weather between the seasons, but it hasn’t yet been long enough to see the full seasonal cycle and how everything changes. The two seasons that the game has gone through so far have been extremely similar though, and there’s not going to be anything like full snow coverage or foliage completely changing colour in the seasons we haven’t seen either. But that’s just the nature of the setting, and for what it may lack it has other qualities that stand out.
One more little thing that might be worth mentioning is the improved sound effects for engines too. 4 got a lot of flak for subpar engine audio on some pretty prominent cars, and while the problems were perhaps a bit overstated, it was definitely true the game was slightly lacking on the audio front, and a step down from previous games. They have more or less fixed that here. All the engines that sounded bad before at least sound good, and there’s more nuances to the effects now too, with how different upgrades alter the sound in appropriate ways. It’s a small thing in the grand scheme, but it’s good that it wasn’t forgotten and a problem that could have easily been glossed over was given the care it needed.
So there’s a lot to like about the game. In many of the important areas it’s still a banger. Driving feels great, and the places you drive through are also great. That goes a long way. But there are quite a few things that feel a bit lacking that I can’t ignore. Most of these are actually problems that have been creeping in to the series for a long time, almost even from the start, so they’re not exactly unique to this game either. But in earlier entries I could overlook them to a degree, here it feels like they have reached a point where they can no longer be brushed aside as niggling issues.
The biggest issue being the extremely loose structure to the career mode. It can barely be called a “career” if we’re being totally honest. It has little to no feeling of meaningful progression or advancement to it. No difficulty curve, no milestones, and the only thing resembling a final goal is completely undermined by the way you unlock new events through the Horizon Adventure system. There’s an overwhelming abundance of content that gets dumped on you very rapidly without any sense of pacing. For a very long time I felt like I was barely making any progress as I was trying to chip away at this huge mountain of stuff that just kept getting bigger. I spent most of the career with 9+ unspent tokens for the Horizon Adventure screen as I was trying to do something to space out the game more appropriately. It felt like the game was fighting against that. And of course there are the races themselves, which are a sea of individual events with nothing stringing them together or any order to them. No championships outside the seasonal content, with every race allowing any type of car to be used, so not providing any kind of progression in what you drive. Again, most of this could be said about the previous games, but when there’s just so many races that all unlock at once, and how it keeps throwing more on the pile, it tips over in to something that makes the experience noticeably worse.
The Stories that are also a part of the career mode have a much bigger emphasis now too. Or at least more than 4 did at launch. I’m not sure why they decided to go so hard with these this time, I don’t think I’ve heard anyone say they are particularly fond of them. Again they suffer from an overabundance issue, and individual experiences they are hit and miss. They’re never especially interesting, and often feel quite underwhelming and short. Sometimes they send you to a cool part of the world you haven’t seen before, or they set up some custom environment to mess around in for a bit, and that can be fun. But they’re frequently accompanied by some awful grating dialogue. Characters that put on very fake sounding over-enthusiasm for everything, and seem to draw out the line delivery despite nothing of value being said. It also makes replaying these missions pretty unappealing since you can’t skip the intro dialogue. It’s strange they still don’t allow that when it should have seemed like an obvious glaring issue in the last game.
These issues with the career are hard to compare exactly against 4 though, since a lot of this stuff was added in to that game over the years post-launch. It doesn’t seem to bad having a new thing to do every now and then when it’s spread over the months. I can see a new player coming to 4 being overwhelmed with it these days too. But 4 also had a long intro sequence where it got you through a whole four season cycle quickly first, before dropping you in the deep end. While perhaps that intro took too long in retrospect, going so hard in the opposite direction was clearly not the answer. It ended up making other issues that 4 had much worse, instead of fixing that one minor problem of a slow start.
The Showcase events are another aspect that feels like it has reached a kind of tipping point too. Unlike with the Stories, there seems to be less emphasis on them this time around. They’ve always been very obviously staged set pieces, but now the strings that hold them together look more obvious than ever. In practically all of them your opponent is always just ahead of you for the whole event, without you being able to catch up. They obviously rubber band and get tons of speed out of nowhere to leap in front of you, but never too far. Then when you reach the finish line they very conspicuously slow down suddenly to let you pass in the last second. While they always did that to an extent, it feels much more aggressively noticeable now than ever before. And this is just from playing them once, not over and over again like 4 had you doing. Perhaps they will be repeated again here with upcoming seasonal content, but as part of the base content of the game, they feel almost more an obligation than the big show pieces they used to be. Like they’re here because the series has always done them, now lacking purpose as being a career milestone, they simply exist.
Another disappointing thing is the soundtrack. Music used to be core to the identity of this series, especially early on, and it’s sad to see that declining over the years. It was a big part of the summery party atmosphere, and added a sense of energy to races or just driving around. The games haven’t really had an outstanding soundtrack since 2, and after a while I almost entirely stopped listening to the radio at all in 4. I turned it off much quicker this time around. There’s very few songs that are above mediocrity, and zero bangers whatsoever. I think a significant part of it is down to the split of Fred V and Grafix as a duo making music together. They made a lot of the best music in the games from 2 to 4, and even composed the opening tracks used in the initial drive sequence specifically for the games. It was often some of the best music on the soundtracks, but they split up shortly after 4 launched. Their music is still in 5, as separate artists, but it’s nowhere near as good as what they contributed to older games. No other artist has been able to step up and take their place either. It’s something of a shame, because that guitar piece used on the start screen isn’t bad, and when I heard that for the first time I was imagining hearing that evolve in to some awesome DnB remix after a build-up, fleshing it out around that instrument and melody. But it never happens. I’d love to see someone make that a reality though.
The game also has some technical issues, at this early stage at least. And while I’m a little hesitant to be too harsh on this as some of this is definitely down to my own ageing PC struggling to keep up, other parts are not. None of the stuff that isn’t on my end is a huge game breaking problem or anything, but it does feel unusually unpolished for this series. Things that I can blame on my own hardware are stuff like the game world failing to load in as I’m driving fast, lighting looking wrong when entering a tunnel or cave, and audio not loading. Things like connection issues seem to be common for everyone though, including that bug of your car just stopping dead in place. Some of that has been fixed already, and even my issue of world streaming has been reduced a little. But I’m still getting jarring slowdown and even lock-ups randomly in free roam, and the game still running (uncontrollably) for a second whenever I enter or exit photo mode. I don’t think those issues are on my end. The former I think is another network issue, and the latter only happens in certain situations that don’t seem to have anything to do with hardware limitations. I guess a lot of this can be blamed on covid, as well as building a huge cross-generational game at the same time as constantly updating the last one, so Playground probably had a lot on their plate when making this.
All in all, I still like the game a lot, and it still delivers on most of the things I really like the series for. It has that quality of always making you want to play more and more, drawing you in for hours at a time longer than you planned. But there’s too much about it that I’m not really keen on. Things that have been a growing issue over time, and if you’ve been playing these games for a while come as no surprise. But now it has reached a point where it can’t be waved away as just a nitpick that doesn’t impact the wider experience. It’s a great game and I love messing around in it, but I think we’re starting to need someone to come along to challenge this series for its crown, and make up on the things this game lacks.