Forza Horizon 5: Rally Adventure - Review
When Forza Horizon 5 raced onto the scene, I quickly placed it up there below the third entry, in my favourite rankings. However, when the first expansion released and it was again Hot Wheels, something that already happened in 3, so I was worried for the second expansion. Now that Rally Adventure has sped to release, was this an easy right as far as content goes, or did they drive of course once again?
This new rally experience takes place in the new location of Sierra Nueva, a fictional location that takes more of Mexico and combines it into a playground. If the main map is the best of Mexico combined into one map, this is the best of the rest. Much like the Hot Wheels expansion, there is only one festival center, and the rest of the map is ready for you to explore. The main goal here is to learn how to be a rally driver and while they could have just dumped you into the map and called it a day, there is a story. Well story might be a tad generous, there is a competition between Alex, Rami and Alejandra, with each having a different version of what rally can be. As they can’t decide between them, they give you the choice, pick a side and then complete a series of races and challenges to prove it.
All that would be great, except for one small problem, once you have achieved like 70% of your selected group, you are forced to pick another one and then once you clear 70% of that, you have to select the last. As far as progression goes, it does keep things moving forward, but as far as a story goes, it makes no sense. Once I completed the second teams events, the comment that was said indicated that I now had to beat the other two, but as I had already completed one, it made no sense. The other issue is that the game forces you to choose and again, I get it from a progression point of view, but that is not what they are telling you its for. The game insists that you have to select a team, in order to prove that type of rally is better than the others, so then being forced to select another one and I do mean forced, you can’t leave the menu screen until you do, it just stupid. That sadly sums up some of the progression decisions in the expansion, they are not horrible, they are just stupid.
As far as the gameplay goes, many of the staples of the series make a return here, speed traps, speed zones, danger zones and so on. Of course, the bulk of the gameplay is dedicated to the rally experience, but as the game knows that not everyone will want all rally, all the time, you can opt to make the events standard races. If you do elect for rally, which you should, then you will get to experience the call out of your selected team leader, as they attempt to help you navigate. So, rally staples like ‘easy left’ and ‘hard right’ fill up the screen, complete with the coloured icons at the top, it all feels quite authentic. The problem is that it also feels quite unnecessary, given that I have spent dozens of hours in the main game and the Hot Wheels expansion, learning how to keep an eye on the map, track markers ahead of me and everything else that makes up the world, having someone call them out, just seemed to be a waste of effort. Don’t get me wrong, they do a good job of it, though hearing chicken for the umpteenth time does wear thin, but if you turned it off, the game wouldn’t lose anything for it.
The main meat of the rally comes in the actual tracks themselves, almost all of them are highly technical, with sharp turns and cambered roads, oh wait, that is how they are almost always described. The tracks are quite tricky, you can’t just go barrelling into them and hope that you can make it through to the end, without taking serious damage. Most of the time the turns are either easy or hard and again the call outs help indicate that, but unlike the main game you get a lot of hairpin turns here. As they are rally based, you don’t compete against other racers on the track, but instead compete based on time, you have multiple checkpoints in each event and depending on how long it takes you to get from one to the next, you might rise up the ranks or sink lower in them. Having the game tell you that you are just a few fractions of a second faster than second place, is a great impetus for ensuring you try to stick to each turn like you absolutely have to. Perhaps the biggest letdown is that the map is quite small and more often than not, the tracks tend to overlap quite a bit and while Rami’s events are visually different, the locations are not.
Speaking of the visuals, the game looks just as good as the main experience, as you might expect. Of course, the maps size means that you can often see a different landscape or two, without much effort on your part from the location you are in. While there are a few new themes, like a palm tree forest and an abandoned quarry, the rest is just more of what we get in the main locale. I did notice a few more visual issues here though, often the towns or objects the fill the world popping in, but there was an instance where I spun out off the top of a danger zone ramp and found the world behind me was not there. The game kept a smooth experience in playing, but those visual issues are not ideal, more so given how the rest of the game doesn’t have them.
On the sound design side of things, there is very little change from the main game, of course there are new lines of dialogue to hear. The two biggest additions are that of the rally machine sounds, for when you create your own car and the second is Epitaph Records Radio. The addition of a new radio station is a good thing, but only in the sense that its more music. My own musical tastes, nothing in that station appealed to me, but that is why there are others. I would have liked to have seen a new song or two added to the other stations in this expansion, because the people of Mexico, like myself are likely sick of the same songs that have been playing for the past 16 months.
Forza Horizon 5 Rally Adventure does add a fun new game mode to the Horizon experience, but it likely won’t impress die hard rally game fans. The mode is challenging at time and trying to shave those precious few micro-seconds off the clock to score first, is a great reason to replay events. That being said there really isn’t much else to do in the new map, which itself is quite small, as the rest of it comes with a handful of additional challenges. If you are a fan of the main series, then you will likely enjoy this addition, but if the demanding nature of some of the modes turns you away, this won’t change that. Out of the two expansions released, Rally Adventure is the far more entertaining of the two, not only because its original, but because it offers something new to the decade long series.
The Score
8.0
Review code provided by Xbox Game Studios
The Pros
+Rally events are quite challenging, trying to get the perfect line to get first, plus new challenges to complete
+The competition aspect helping to drive you forward is an interesting turn…
The Cons
-… but it suffers from you having to choose all three in the end, which undercuts the competition aspect
-The map is quite small and once you have done a handful of races, you will have seen all it has to offer
