Do you have your curry place? No need to look through all the menus, thanks, we’re ordering from where we always order, Taste of India. I’ll have the Butter Chicken (but hold the chicken and use paneer), pilau rice, and peshwari naan – some onion bhaji if I’m feeling opulent. This order brings me happiness, guaranteed. OK, I have been known to throw in a saag paneer, too, but if you’re going to go big, go big! I’ll never betray Taste of India.
I love Forza Horizon. Maybe I don’t love it as much as I adore the PGR series (2-4), but it’s right up there amongst my favourite racing game franchises. It’s been a consistent point of excellence on Xbox across its five entries and numerous DLC add-ons ever since 2012 back on the Xbox 360. In those 12 and a bit years I reckon I’ve booted a Forza Horizon game on an Xbox something like a thousand times. It’s my go to racing game if I don’t really know what I want to play. I seemingly just don’t get bored of it. It’s now on PS5, and I’m loving it on the PS5 Pro, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t stirring up some mixed feelings. I’ve got Butter Chicken but I ordered from Bengal Spice! And it is actually better!
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This might sound like a rather silly overreaction to a video game being played on a different console to the one it was previously tied to, and it is (I acknowledge that), but we’re creatures of habit, and we’re fiercely tribal. My wife often asks me why, if I’m so miserable about Tottenham all the time, I don’t just support another football team. I scoff, making a noise that suggests this is an absurd idea, but I struggle to explain why I simply can’t do that. I’m sure there are many books and studies about why people become attached to things, be it a sports team, a pop star, a curry restaurant… but the most basic point I make to my wife is that Tottenham is my team. The Xbox was Forza’s console, and in turn my console. It’s silly, but it’s true.
I’m not going to get all ‘console wars’ about this, mostly because I’m a professional and have pushed irrational personal feelings about as far as I can already, but Forza Horizon coming to PlayStation is a big deal. I’m playing it on PS5 Pro, and I know I’m not going to play it on Xbox again for a while. Like I’ve already said, I play Forza a lot so the improvements on the Pro are clear. The 60 FPS performance mode is a huge leap over the Series X version in visual detail. There’s no going back. And it feels really nice in your hands thanks to the DualSense’s vastly superior tactile feedback in comparison to the Xbox’s comparatively rudimentary buzzing.
Newcomers to Forza Horizon 5 likely won’t believe this game is four years old this November. It was actually built to run on the original Xbox One, but Playground Games did a wonderful job making every release feel as if it was made for the system you played it on. Panic Button, the PS5 port handlers, has done a neat job, bringing FH5’s chill-vibe heavy, upbeat, hedonistic, Mexico adventure holiday racing experience to a new audience. This is a game that has been tweaked, improved, and added to for years, and PS players now get the complete experience: one of tight street races, point-to-point charges over rough terrain, exciting excursions to find new locations, sightseeing, speed chasing, and car exuberance. There’s no open-world racer that packs in as much and presents it so slickly. It’s a game you can get lost in, in the best possible way, with friends or on your own, always with something to do.
Newly added in time for this PS5 release, but available to all players, is Realms. Over the years Playground Games released time-limited Evolving Worlds events, in which you’d compete for high scores based around how skillfully you could drive over a set amount of time in a closed-off location. These special areas came and went, but Realms makes them accessible again, plus there’s a brand new Stadium Circuit location, bringing the total to 12. There’s so much to do in FH5 that Realms wasn’t really needed, but it’s another way to spend some time in the game, noodling around with friends or just to get that drifting fix – and a bunch of new accolades to earn gives lapsed players something to return for.
The Forza Horizon series, I probably should have made clear earlier, is the easier going, playful sibling of the Forza Motorsport series. Whereas Motorsport is all gear ratios and torque (I don’t know what these are either), Horizon does its best to make you feel like the coolest person alive, like if Ryan Gosling in a souped up Ford Focus RS did a powerslide between two aeroplanes. He can probably do that, I/you can’t, because he’s cool as hell and, well… let’s say no more.
Forza Horizon is deservedly one of Xbox’s most successful franchises. PlayStation owners should be rubbing their hands together with glee. One of the golden geese got loose and left the gate open behind it. There’s no going back now. Butter Chicken for everyone, the way it should be.
A copy of Forza Horizon 5 for PlayStation 5 was provided by Xbox.
