Forza Horizon 5 is a pretty game, with cars.


The biggest issue with the Festival Format is the forced happiness and perkiness of everyone around you. It's also an incredibly sterile version of a what a music festival usually is. There isn't mess or trash everywhere. The people are partying nonstop in fensed off areas, the music constantly throbs through speakers.


The Festival Format is a pretty clever framing device to driving cars on public roads. In the Need For Speed series this was relegated to outlaw racing for a few iterations. Horizon seems to have plucked the aesthetics from Need For Speed's "Pro Street" which aimed to legitimize the underground racing scene after so many sequels consisting of illegal street racing.


I think it's the ever present praise from other NPCs about your series of wins that grates on me. It feels unearned especially given how easy the AI is to beat in races.


At one point in the story you recover a VW beetle which belonged to an NPC's grandfather, and you go through several missions where you drive iterations of the car as a rally car, a drift car, a drag car. The Character in the game talks about her grandfather's exploits with glowing appreciation. At the end of the series, however, you are gifted the car. This seems weird and fucked up to me, especially given that the character in the game seems so attached to it.
The game tries to present the player as the center of the game's universe and so you're there just kind of at the center of everything with self esteem you don't really have, living a weird fantasy you didn't quite ask for, while the worst music in the world plays.


I played so many hours of the game because it is a well built game. There's lots of cars you can race, and you can approach the game's campaign and single player content however you like, with whatever cars you wish to build. While it has drawbacks, the online mode is deep enough that it sometimes rewards skilled play but without being a highly technical racing simulation.
Online play is a series of highs and lows. Mostly lows. Due to the unpredictability in race formats, tracks, and online conditions it's impossible to go into online mode with any sort of planning. Due to the game's "meta" being "solved" only certain cars are viable to win races and are raced exclusivly by a population of drivers.


Forza Online Play has one huge problem: physics. Cars are physical objects with weight distribution, different wheel sizes, different wheelbases, and shapes. Forza attempts to classify these cars into different performance classes, a combination of power to weight, grip, and downforce combine into the "performance index" which goes up and down as players modify the car. However players quickly learn that every car at a performance class will not perform the same. It's possible to have 2 versions of the same car at the same performance index, and they perform dramatically differently based on which combination of parts are applied.


As a result one car in particular: The Boneshaker, has a power and handling advantage over every other car in the game, and so drivers use this to win races easily. The flip side to this is, it's very easy to spot a bad driver, because they're behind the wheel of a Boneshaker.
It can't go unsaid that a dominant racing strategy in the game is to ram opponants into walls. The game tries to compensate for this by disabling collision between drivers for the first 15 or so seconds of the race, to give the feild time to spread out. It also tries to detect drivers who are about to collide at high speeds and disables collisions between these two drivers.


Therefore the only fun to be had is to create absolute goblin mode cars and race them online. Here is where Forza Horizon's real strength lies. Do you want to go 200mph on dirt in a Mini Cooper? You can. Do you want to stick an engine from a rally car into a Renault 4 and go wheel to wheel againts sweaty tryhards? My friend, welcome to the wonderful world of rolling shitposts.
...At least for a time. And then the long wait times between races starts to drag on. And you're caught flat-footed against better opponants with better cars. Or you're rammed off the road. Or a build you spent hours tinkering with is finally revealed to be usless because a race finally came up on the playlist that is qualifies for. Or you get online wanting to do street races and the online queue is nothing but dirt races, or worse, S2 street, or even worse S2 "Mixed surface" which is rally racing. For this I have a Porsche 918 with the words "S2 Dirt Is Bad" emblazoned on the side. Due to a bug in the game, participating in a street race at night and then going into any other race will result in the lighting for the world not being fixed, so the world appears unlit, forcing the player to back out and re-enter online after waiting for the lighting to fix itself.


Some of the tracks have design flaws in them. You race from one checkpoint to another, but the problem is a lot of checkpoints are sometimes very easy to miss because they are over a hill, and you cannot see them, so you go over a crest and by the time you land you have missed the checkpoint and have to use the game's rewind feature to fix your trajectory, by which time the rest of the racers are off into the distance. There is little to no warning for tight 90 degree turns except for having a photographic knowledge of all turns in all tracks, and it's very easy to overshoot, and this happens very frequently online with you and other drivers.


The game also has seasonal events, which go away after a time and have players jump through literal hoops doing timed races and events to earn points, getting enough points will yeild cars that are only available through the seasonal events. At first these were kind of fun because only certain cars would qualify for the events and I liked to pick which car I would use, tuning it to spec, and then making a basic livery for it before doing the races. Last month a bunch of Chinese cars were added, one of which being the Wuling Sunshine, a minivan. I greatly enjoy driving the minivan in online races despite it never winning, because racing a minivan is funny.


I used to play many hours of a game called Trackmania Nations Forever. This was a free version of Trackmania, a racing game built around building tracks using modular pieces. People could run their own server and hundreds of people could play at once. There were no collisions and so each round was essentially a group time attack where players would compete to set the fastest time. Since the car performance was uniform, everyone was on an equal playing field. It was also possible to download car models and drive a custom car, and see others custom cars. Servers would have a set rotation of challenging custom tracks built by the community with whacky themes. Servers would also play music on rotation. There was a lot of eurodance music.


Custom servers are a thing of the past now, with developers wanting a controlled player experience, except that most of the time it's what the developer thinks the player wants and not what they actually want. Forza could improve by adding player made tracks, opening online play to slower classes of cars (which are funner to drive and have greater variety), or just letting people curate the online experience better. The game has incredibly expressive custom route tools, allowing users to make and share elaborate custom tracks and game modes, I would love to have a set amount of these and race a playlist of them with my friends using our own custom rules.


After months of seasonal events, getting cars showered upon my like so much candy, the party feels empty. I want my many hours of the game to count for something but I don't feel like they do. The cars I built and race feel like the only tangible accomplishments.


I think my time at the festival is coming to an end. During last week's seasonal rotation there was a "Closing Ceremony" event where I raced the game's anonamous dirtbikers and the titular cargo plane. It was dusk. I won easily. It felt like the party was over somehow.