EDIT: Game is now crashing in the main-menu right when it signs into the Xbox Live account. Deleting all the items starting with "Xbl" in the Credential Manager in Windows used to help, but now it's not working anymore. The only way to fix it is probably a fresh start with clean save file, but I don't want to lose all my cars :(

----------------

- Amazing physics, a proper simcade.
- Totally playable with a keyboard. I only have anti-break-lock assist enabled, but for some RWD muscle cars I also enable traction control. No other assists needed.
- Nice location. You can enjoy a vacation to Mexico, see 1:1 replicas of real-life landmarks (e.g. Aztec/Mayan pyramids).
- 600+ cars. Yes, some are duplicates in different configurations (e.g. a regular 240SX and a Formula Drift 240SX), but it's still hilarious to me that people complain about the car roster, when they probably haven't used a 10th of what's in the game. Admittedly, having some eastern-European car brands like Škoda and Lada would be nice though. EDIT: they just added the Lotus Espirit V8, my favourite!
- very pretty graphics with good performance. This is the 2nd prettiest RTX game I own (after Amid Evil). My AMD 5800X + NVidia RTX2070 run it at solid 90 fps on ultra/extreme settings with ray-tracing on.
- The AI is strong without cheating - It knows how to defend the inside line leading to corner and seems to have personalities: some are cheeky and will use you as a wall in corners, while others respect your space. On hardest difficulty you might even have to strategize in order to win, e.g. in one of my early races I started last and the 1st guy always built up a big lead and the race ended by the time I would've reached him. The trick was to not overtake the 2nd guy too early, because he was able to stay in drafting distance of the 1st guy, so I had to do a slipstream train with him and bumper-boost him, until we eventually both overtook the 1st guy at the same time.
- The AI will match your car class, car setup, upgrades - this goes as far as everyone taking rally cars with official liveries if you take one like that, or e.g. If you upgraded some old Toyota Celica to 800bhp, the AI will also take old cars that got tuned up to beasts. If you take an classic 356 Porsche, everyone else will also take old cars and even have the drivers dressed 50s fashion suits and dresses.
- Nice variety in game modes, if you're willing to take different cars to races - take a buggy, trophy truck or SUV and you can get something like a DiRT 2 Raid or Landrush race, because the AI will match the car class. Also, it's not just circuit races. There's A->B rally/trailblazer/road race type races, as well as stunts drifting, gymkhana, rallycross, Baja off-road stuff... There's also underground street racing, which is a road/circuit racing but with traffic enabled. It is possible to take any car to any race type, but you're obviously going to have a bad time, if you take a RWD 1600 bhp Koenigsegg with racing slicks to an off-road race (then again, so will the AI, because they match your car class).
- Car upgrading is very extensive
- Car coomer fan-service: If you're a car guy, this game will make you jizz. You can actually see the rear wheel steering on an R32 GT-R. A Rimac Neverra has a "drift mode" just like in real life. You can take a Lancia Stratos, put the rally full conversion kit on it, which changes the whole car to rally-spec and get the rally livery, Want an M3 GTR with the NFS Most Wanted livery and spec? Someone already made it. You can take a Nissan Silvia, turn it into drift monster with an anime livery. You can take a 1982 Porsche 911 Turbo, put the exact same famous RWB bodykit on it and give it a pure black Wangan Midnight Club paint job. Upgrading any car's exhaust changes the noise the car makes. So does swapping the engine, or changing it's aspiration to turbo charged or supercharged. Upgrading the camshaft will actually let the engine rev higher. Upgrading the intake will also affect the intake noise. The flywheel's weight actually affect how long the revs hang. Upgrading the transmission will change shifting time, how the car behaves during shifting and what noise it makes. In car setup you get all the tire, alignment, gear ratio, aero, diff options you could possibly want.
- Live service: the updates re great, the new cars are to die for. The best thing about it is that the seasonal grind doesn't overstay its welcome - you play for 1 day once a week is all you need, no pressure. Unlike the campaign mode, this is where the game actually shines.

- Non-existent progression. Other games (like NFS or DiRT) have you start with a slow car, which you can upgrade&tune to be better towards the end of the game, while also progressively unlocking better cars until you get a Lambo towards the end of the game. Forza Horizon 5 doesn't have that. You unlock stuff in the most random order. In fact, unlocking new stuff is partially tied to "wheelspins" (read: slotmachine), where you get a random cash reward or unlock a new cosmetic, a new car, whatever. Afaik, there's no way to buy additional rolls on the wheelspin for real money. You can also just buy new cars for in-game cash in any order you want. In just 2 hours I accumulated $1 million and the cars have their real-life prices reflected in-game, so I can buy almost any supercar with that money right off the bat. I started with a 2022 Supra, then rolled an old Celicia and a 2014 Porsche Spyder on the slotmachine. As you can probably tell, all 3 of these are in vastly different classes in terms of speed. Then I upgraded the Celica into a 800bhp rally monster for less than 100k. So like I said, there's no order to unlocking anything.
- Story is cringe and boring. I'm European, so seeing ancient Mayan pyramids is interesting for me, but only for the first time and some random latino guy going "Ese, let's explore this jungle as a new location for our festival, muy bien." kinda ruins the experience. Speak just Spanish or just English, make up your mind smh. While these are "main" missions, there's a not lot of them, and the races are very much fun. It's a sandbox, do whatever you want, the game isn't really meant to be finished 100%.
- Speaking of sandbox, after building some festivals, the game will take a crap on your world map and fill it to the brim with markers - basically you get the Ubisoft open-world game experience but for a racing game.
- The exploration story missions have these silly side-objectives, where you need to run over some boxes in some area, take some screenshots in photo mode etc.. Some of them can be a bit annoying to get, but you want the accolade rewards from them for unlocking new stuff.
- Online multiplayer is exactly what you expect it to be: just a bunch of crashers. I was doing a weekly event in multiplayer where a team of players was racing a team of hardest AI. The more AI we overtook the more points we got. I got a good exit out of the final corner, which set me up to overtake the my teammate just before the finish line, but he pushed me into a wall instead. It wasn't even a case of getting extra points for 1st place because we were 3rd/4th. We only get points for overtaking AI, so he did it for no reason other than having a fragile little ego. There's no punishing them for this, you can't report griefers like in simracers.

EDIT: Game is now crashing in the main-menu right when it signs into the Xbox Live account. Deleting all the items starting with "Xbl" in the Credential Manager in Windows used to help, but now it's not working anymore. The only way to fix it is probably a fresh start with clean save file, but I don't want to lose all my cars :( ---------------- [h1]The good:[/h1] - [b]Amazing physics[/b], a proper simcade. - Totally [b]playable with a keyboard[/b]. I only have anti-break-lock assist enabled, but for some RWD muscle cars I also enable traction control. No other assists needed. - [b]Nice location[/b]. You can enjoy a vacation to Mexico, see 1:1 replicas of real-life landmarks (e.g. Aztec/Mayan pyramids). - [b]600+ cars.[/b] Yes, some are duplicates in different configurations (e.g. a regular 240SX and a Formula Drift 240SX), but it's still hilarious to me that people complain about the car roster, when they probably haven't used a 10th of what's in the game. Admittedly, having some eastern-European car brands like Škoda and Lada would be nice though. [i]EDIT: they just added the Lotus Espirit V8, my favourite![/i] - very [b]pretty graphics with good performance[/b]. This is the 2nd prettiest RTX game I own (after Amid Evil). My AMD 5800X + NVidia RTX2070 run it at solid 90 fps on ultra/extreme settings with ray-tracing on. - The [b]AI is strong without cheating[/b] - It knows how to defend the inside line leading to corner and seems to have personalities: some are cheeky and will use you as a wall in corners, while others respect your space. On hardest difficulty you might even have to strategize in order to win, e.g. in one of my early races I started last and the 1st guy always built up a big lead and the race ended by the time I would've reached him. The trick was to not overtake the 2nd guy too early, because he was able to stay in drafting distance of the 1st guy, so I had to do a slipstream train with him and bumper-boost him, until we eventually both overtook the 1st guy at the same time. - The [b]AI will match your car class, car setup, upgrades[/b] - this goes as far as everyone taking rally cars with official liveries if you take one like that, or e.g. If you upgraded some old Toyota Celica to 800bhp, the AI will also take old cars that got tuned up to beasts. If you take an classic 356 Porsche, everyone else will also take old cars and even have the drivers dressed 50s fashion suits and dresses. - Nice [b]variety in game modes[/b], if you're willing to take different cars to races - take a buggy, trophy truck or SUV and you can get something like a DiRT 2 Raid or Landrush race, because the AI will match the car class. Also, it's not just circuit races. There's A->B rally/trailblazer/road race type races, as well as stunts drifting, gymkhana, rallycross, Baja off-road stuff... There's also underground street racing, which is a road/circuit racing but with traffic enabled. It is possible to take any car to any race type, but you're obviously going to have a bad time, if you take a RWD 1600 bhp Koenigsegg with racing slicks to an off-road race (then again, so will the AI, because they match your car class). - [b]Car upgrading[/b] is very extensive - [b]Car coomer fan-service:[/b] If you're a car guy, this game will make you jizz. You can actually see the rear wheel steering on an R32 GT-R. A Rimac Neverra has a "drift mode" just like in real life. You can take a Lancia Stratos, put the rally full conversion kit on it, which changes the whole car to rally-spec and get the rally livery, Want an M3 GTR with the NFS Most Wanted livery and spec? Someone already made it. You can take a Nissan Silvia, turn it into drift monster with an anime livery. You can take a 1982 Porsche 911 Turbo, put the exact same famous RWB bodykit on it and give it a pure black Wangan Midnight Club paint job. Upgrading any car's exhaust changes the noise the car makes. So does swapping the engine, or changing it's aspiration to turbo charged or supercharged. Upgrading the camshaft will actually let the engine rev higher. Upgrading the intake will also affect the intake noise. The flywheel's weight actually affect how long the revs hang. Upgrading the transmission will change shifting time, how the car behaves during shifting and what noise it makes. In car setup you get all the tire, alignment, gear ratio, aero, diff options you could possibly want. - [b]Live service:[/b] the updates re great, the new cars are to die for. The best thing about it is that the seasonal grind doesn't overstay its welcome - you play for 1 day once a week is all you need, no pressure. Unlike the campaign mode, this is where the game actually shines. [h1]The Bad:[/h1] - [b]Non-existent progression[/b]. Other games (like NFS or DiRT) have you start with a slow car, which you can upgrade&tune to be better towards the end of the game, while also progressively unlocking better cars until you get a Lambo towards the end of the game. Forza Horizon 5 doesn't have that. You unlock stuff in the most random order. In fact, unlocking new stuff is partially tied to "wheelspins" (read: slotmachine), where you get a random cash reward or unlock a new cosmetic, a new car, whatever. Afaik, there's no way to buy additional rolls on the wheelspin for real money. You can also just buy new cars for in-game cash in any order you want. In just 2 hours I accumulated $1 million and the cars have their real-life prices reflected in-game, so I can buy almost any supercar with that money right off the bat. I started with a 2022 Supra, then rolled an old Celicia and a 2014 Porsche Spyder on the slotmachine. As you can probably tell, all 3 of these are in vastly different classes in terms of speed. Then I upgraded the Celica into a 800bhp rally monster for less than 100k. So like I said, there's no order to unlocking anything. - [b]Story is cringe and boring[/b]. I'm European, so seeing ancient Mayan pyramids is interesting for me, but only for the first time and some random latino guy going [i]"Ese, let's explore this jungle as a new location for our festival, muy bien."[/i] kinda ruins the experience. Speak just Spanish or just English, make up your mind smh. While these are "main" missions, there's a not lot of them, and the races are very much fun. [b]It's a sandbox[/b], do whatever you want, the game isn't really meant to be finished 100%. - Speaking of sandbox, after building some festivals, the game will take a crap on your world map and fill it to the brim with markers - basically you get the [b]Ubisoft open-world game experience[/b] but for a racing game. - The [b]exploration story missions[/b] have these silly side-objectives, where you need to run over some boxes in some area, take some screenshots in photo mode etc.. Some of them can be a bit annoying to get, but you want the accolade rewards from them for unlocking new stuff. - [b]Online multiplayer[/b] is exactly what you expect it to be: just a bunch of [b]crashers[/b]. I was doing a weekly event in multiplayer where a team of players was racing a team of hardest AI. The more AI we overtook the more points we got. I got a good exit out of the final corner, which set me up to overtake the my teammate just before the finish line, but he pushed me into a wall instead. It wasn't even a case of getting extra points for 1st place because we were 3rd/4th. We only get points for overtaking AI, so he did it for no reason other than having a fragile little ego. There's no punishing them for this, you can't report griefers like in simracers.