Forza Horizon 5
Games That Carried the 2021 Holiday Season
Microsoft was on a bit of a roll in the tail-end of 2021. September brought the delightful platformer Psychonauts 2, and Forza Horizon 5 kept that momentum going when it drifted its way onto Xbox consoles and PC at the end of October.
Playground Games’ open-world racer was a smash-hit, delivering a 90 on Metacritic and going down just as positively with fans, reaching an impressive 10 million players in its first week. Already, there’s a thriving community of players sharing their own custom decals, challenging one another on online leaderboards, and generally just having a blast fooling around in the Horizon Festival this time around set in Mexico.
It’s the open world that makes it so easy to sink countless hours behind the wheel of your favorite ride, too. Mexico is an enormous, varied landmass just waiting to be fully explored. Danger signs lure you towards epic stunt jumps, a series of tight hairpins make up a road that winds its way up the side of a volcano, and the large stretches of dunes make for some seriously fun off-roading action.
The stunning visuals, roster of 500+ cars, and rotating weather seasons every fortnight only furthered Forza Horizon 5’s lead over the trailing pack of racers out there, and with two upcoming expansions set to give racing fans even more content to sink their teeth into in the future, the future is looking mighty bright for the Mexico stint of the Horizon festival.
