Playground Games' 2021 open-world racer traded the closed-road festival for a volcanic, weather-shifting Mexico, and it became the biggest launch for an Xbox Game Studios title.
Playground Games made Forza Horizon 5, released on 9 November 2021 for Windows and Xbox consoles. It is set in a fictional Mexico with a map 50% larger than its predecessor, and it added local weather and Accolades. It was later released on PlayStation 5 in April 2025.
Forza Horizon 5 is a 2021 open-world racing game from Playground Games, published by Xbox Game Studios. Playground built it as the fifth release in the Forza Horizon line and the twelfth main Forza game, set in a fictional version of Mexico. It later became the first mainline Forza game on a non-Microsoft console when it reached PlayStation 5.
What is Forza Horizon 5?
Forza Horizon 5 is a racing game set in a fictional Mexico. The launch date was 9 November 2021, on PC and on the Xbox One and Series X/S consoles. It carries the series' festival format into a larger, more varied map that follows on from Forza Horizon 4. The game marks the last mainline Forza release on Xbox One.
The map is 50% larger than the one in Forza Horizon 4 and reaches the highest point in the Horizon series. It includes an active caldera volcano, jungles, beaches, ancient Mayan temples and towns such as Guanajuato. The game was also the first in the franchise to bring ray tracing to the cars themselves.
A new local weather system lets players drive to one side of the map and see a storm developing. The four seasons still exist, but they affect eleven unique biomes, so dust storms appear in the dry season and tropical storms arrive in the fall storm season. The jungle reacts to the weather too, with leaves blown through the air.
A Mexico map with volcanoes, storms and ray-traced cars, built to be the biggest Forza Horizon yet.
What new features does the game add?
Forza Horizon 5 introduces the Horizon Arcade, a set of mini-multiplayer games spread across the map. One of them, a pinata-popping game, has a cargo plane drop pinatas for players to break. The EventLab toolset lets players build their own games and races, and the Forza Link assistant helps players find and join one another online.
Licensing problems kept cars from Alfa Romeo, Fiat and its Abarth badge, and Lancia out of the base release. The Italian brands returned in the Series 24 update, which arrived on 17 August 2023 after being announced in July 2023.
Accolades are a new idea for the series. They earn players points and prizes for completing tasks, and some vehicles can be unlocked only through them. There are more than 1,800 accolades in the game, and the Eliminator battle royale mode returns with players starting in a 1963 Volkswagen Beetle. Winning it is so hard that TrueAchievements lists 12 guides for its achievement alone.
Houses, from small beachside cabanas to a full hotel, can be bought across the map. Each house unlocks Wheelspins and the ability to Fast Travel.
Why was Mexico chosen as the setting?
The scale was a deliberate goal. The team wanted a game far bigger than its predecessors, and Mexico's range of landscapes made it a natural choice. The team chose Mexico because of its diverse and varied landscape, which spans very different elevations and climates. It also sent a team to Mexico to capture real-world light and sky data for the game's rendering.
The developers partnered with Mexican artists to paint the in-game murals and with Mexican musicians to create the soundtracks. Photogrammetry was used extensively, so rocks on the caldera volcano and the needles of cholla cactus look close to their real-world counterparts. The most detailed cactus needles are shown only on Xbox Series consoles.
How was the sound made?
To achieve a more authentic sound, the team moved away from traditional looping audio and adopted granular synthesis. That change needed a large recording effort, in which the team captured more than 320 distinct engine sweeps, covering each note from idle up to redline and back down to rest.
Flat-response microphones with specialised padding stopped loud exhausts from clipping, and stereo and ambisonic microphones in the cockpits captured the cabin acoustics. The developers built a bespoke library of engines, ambient environments and collisions rather than using existing sound libraries. The soundtrack can be output through Dolby Atmos.
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Released | 9 November 2021 on Windows, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S |
| PlayStation 5 | 29 April 2025, developed by Panic Button |
| Publisher | Xbox Game Studios |
| Map | Fictional Mexico, 50% larger than Forza Horizon 4 |
| Vehicles | 799 obtainable licensed vehicles as of May 2026 |
| Accolades | More than 1,800 |
| Achievements | 164 in total |
| PS5 sales | Around 5.8 million units as of April 2026 |
What updates and expansions followed?
Updates arrived on a regular schedule, so the car list and events kept growing for years after launch.
The game received monthly content updates with new cars, collectibles, horns and clothing, usually with a theme. The Series 2 update in December 2021 was built around Christmas, and the Series 5 update added a stunt park in the stadium. On 1 March 2022 the team added cinematic sign-language inserts, covering both American and British forms of the language.
Series 13 arrived on 11 October 2022 to celebrate a decade of the Forza Horizon series. It added the Horizon Mixtape radio station, with fifteen tracks from the earlier games, and the Horizon Origins story, which recreates the opening drives of all five games. Series 14 followed on 10 November 2022 with a story featuring the members of Donut Media.
The first expansion, Hot Wheels, arrived on 19 July 2022. Rally Adventure followed on 29 March 2023 with a new map, trophy trucks, buggies and a career mode. A car pack themed on Fast X, the tenth Fast and Furious film, followed on 5 December 2023.
In June 2023 a 1956 Chevrolet Corvette and a 2022 GMC Hummer EV pickup, both with details drawn from the Barbie film, joined the game. The collaboration with Mattel came ahead of the film's release. The Hot Wheels expansion had leaked through a Steam listing three days before its official announcement.
How did critics respond?
Forza Horizon 5 received universal acclaim on Metacritic. Ars Technica praised its HDR visuals and its sense of scale, and Game Informer enjoyed the score comparisons that let friends challenge one another. The game was also selected as IGN's Game of the Year.
Eurogamer praised the open world, calling the views from the volcano's summit staggering.
Polygon liked the difficulty settings but felt the game bombarded players with too many events at once. The Verge found the progression less confusing than in Forza Horizon 3, and Rock Paper Shotgun said the formula had finally been perfected. Three jury-voted awards at The Game Awards 2021 tied the game with It Takes Two for the most wins.
How well did the game sell?
Before release, more than 1.2 million players had accessed the game through the premium edition or add-ons, and the game topped the Steam weekly charts from 1 to 7 November 2021. Phil Spencer announced more than 4.5 million players within 24 hours of launch, with three times more concurrent players than Forza Horizon 4.
Over 10 million people played in the first week, and the total passed 15 million by 9 January 2022. Forbes writer Erik Kain credited the success to launch availability on Xbox Game Pass, cross-play, cloud gaming and the quality of the game itself. The PlayStation 5 release later made it the second best-selling game in the US in April 2025.
