Forza Horizon 5 PS5 review - no longer only on Xbox
One of the Xbox's most acclaimed exclusives is now available on PS5 and it's the best open world arcade racer ever made.
Microsoft's blockbuster Forza racing franchise comes in two contrasting flavours. Its Motorsport games are sober, poker-faced affairs that sit comfortably alongside Gran Turismo in their dedication to simulating car racing as accurately as possible. Forza Horizon, on the other hand, is open world, centres around a colourful made-up festival of speed, and generally takes itself a lot less seriously than its sim-orientated older brother.
They both feature a vast line-up of cars and tracks, fastidiously authentic car handling, and a range of different motorsports. They both also clearly want you to enjoy yourself, letting you rewind time when you mess up a series of corners or a tricky overtaking manoeuvre, but Horizon's open world and far more varied set of challenges make it look and feel about as riotously entertaining as a driving game could possible get.
More important than all of that, is that alongside Halo, Forza is a founding pillar of Xbox exclusivity. The term killer app now sounds quaintly old fashioned, but the Forza franchise has helped encourage a generation of players to buy an Xbox just to play the game. Its playful brilliance, marrying accurate car physics with an irrepressible sense of knockabout fun has been a Microsoft system seller for decades. Until now that is.
Forza Horizon 5 is the first game in the long running series that you can enjoy on PlayStation. It's a momentous occasion. Like the moment you could finally play Sega's jealously guarded mascot Sonic the Hedgehog on a Nintendo GameCube, or saw Mario on your mobile, there's a peculiar cognitive dissonance that comes with playing Forza using a DualSense. Exactly how committed Microsoft is to the multiformat concept to is anyone's guess, but for PlayStation owners this is a watershed moment.
Set in an artfully designed microcosm of Mexico, Forza Horizon 5 is a near perfect apotheosis of the series so far, helped by the extraordinary variety of roads and countryside you'll explore. As in past Horizon outings, roads are strictly optional, and even exotic supercars can cheerfully plough through crash barriers and small trees, bouncing across swamps and scrub land on their way to your next destination.
From the azure seas of its coastal roads, through gloriously colourful jungle, mangrove swamps, desert, and, at the heart of it all, the biggest mountain the series has ever seen, Horizon's Mexico has been built purely for entertainment. There are hairpin-laden switchbacks for drifting, long straights to test your car's top speed, and the narrow cobbled streets of old towns to tear through at suicidal velocity.
The game's hugely varied set of challenges encourages a range of approaches using its collection of over 500 vehicles. There are speed cameras to trigger, dirt rallies, night races, performance car challenges, vintage events, and racing meets featuring various nationalities' automobiles, delivered through the game's rotating Festival Playlist that changes as it cycles through four seasons.
There are also plenty of non-race events to keep you distracted, such as the discrete open areas created to let you show off your drifting and stunt skills. Driving around a brightly coloured and tourist free recreation of the spectacular ziggurats at Chichen Itza, you can do doughnuts and make unlikely jumps off its ancient ruins in a way that in real life might not go down too well with Mexico's Department of Antiquities.
Chichen Itza is just one of 12 Horizon Realms built for exactly those type of stunts, with leaderboards to compare your skill scores with virtual tourists from around the world. These were previously timed, one-off events that once expired you could never replay, but are now continuously available with the launch of the PlayStation 5 edition, in a change that's also available as an update for Xbox players.
A common complaint about open world driving games, and one that dogged both Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown and The Crew 2, is that while races are tightly focused competitive affairs, that really get the adrenaline flowing, driving between them can end up being unexpectedly dull. Forza Horizon 5 prevents that in several ways. The first being the variation in its landscapes, with roads that demand quite different driving styles.
The other is in the range of things to do as you plunge cross country, from A to B. There are experience point-giving signboards to find and smash, others that reduce the cost of fast travel, and rewards for discovering new roads as well as just about everything you do on them.
Overtaking, near misses, drifts, burnouts, and even smashing through roadside cacti all clock up rewards in an endless procession of miniature victories as you drive to your next event, sometimes on roads and sometimes bouncing across the wilderness in-between.
It looks and sounds just as wonderful on PlayStation, and while it makes perfectly adequate use of the DualSense's haptics, it's not markedly different from playing on Xbox, whose controllers generally don't offer the same degree of subtlety in their physical feedback. It's certainly a world away from Gran Turismo 7's masterclass in haptics, which let you experience everything from road feel to rain effects through the palms of your hands. More Trending
Load times are possibly fractionally shorter, but aside from the higher resolution patch available to PS5 Pro owners, this is almost exactly the same game as it was on Xbox Series X. That includes some fairly prominent microtransactions, that the game leads you towards early on in your driving career, which in a full priced title feels like an unwelcome imposition.
In terms of pure driving fun though, Horizon is in a class of its own, and while PlayStation owners can't yet play Forza Motorsport, they still have Gran Turismo 7, giving them access to arguably the two best driving games of the modern era – which is not a claim Microsoft can make for Xbox.
For PlayStation owners the news is all good and, if you like racing games, Forza Horizon 5 is a joyous, brightly coloured extravaganza of motoring, even if you can't help feeling it would be even better without the toe-curling dudebro petrolhead banter.
In Short: Thrilling open world driving peppered with a massive variety of challenges, events, racing styles and carefully orchestrated, motoring mayhem, as one Xbox's tentpole exclusives arrives on PlayStation 5.
Pros: Wonderful miniature recreation of Mexico, incredible diversity of cars and events, and brilliantly engineered simcade handling model makes the open world lively and engaging.
Cons: Premium upsells in a paid-for game are always gross. The contrived wisecracking is as embarrassing as ever. Doesn't take full advantage of the DualSense controller.
Score: 9/10
Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PCPrice: £54.99Publisher: Xbox Game StudiosDeveloper: Panic Button (original: Playground Games)Release Date: 29th April 2025
Age Rating: 3
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