Anyone who grew up playing racing games from the video rental store will understand the excitement. In August 2021, Playground Games showed the first eight minutes of Forza Horizon 5 gameplay, in the video “Initial Drive”, and gave a good glimpse of the new Horizon festival, this time in Mexico.
Forza Horizon 5 is the fifth game in the Horizon series and the 12th main title in the Forza franchise. The map, a fictional version of Mexico, is the largest in the series, 50% bigger than Forza Horizon 4’s, and also has the highest point ever seen in a Horizon. It holds a volcano with an active caldera, jungles, beaches, ancient Mayan temples and cities such as Guanajuato.
One of the novelties was the local weather: since Mexico has very different altitudes, several climates appear at once, and the player can watch a storm forming on the other side of the map. The four seasons remained, now affecting eleven different biomes, with sandstorms in the dry season and tropical storms in autumn. It was also the first game in the franchise with ray tracing on the cars.
As always in the series, customization is part of the fun: you can create paint jobs, tweak the tuning and even swap the engine and drivetrain of the cars. The game was set for November 9, 2021, on Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S and PC.
What came next
Forza Horizon 5 was released on November 9, 2021 and had more than 10 million players in its first week, the biggest launch for an Xbox Game Studios game up to that point. It won three jury awards at The Game Awards 2021 and was IGN’s Game of the Year. On April 29, 2025, it arrived on PlayStation 5, the first time a main Forza game came out on a non-Microsoft platform. The sequel, Forza Horizon 6, was released on May 19, 2026.
Where to buy
Source: Playground Games / Xbox.
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