So yeah I have some time on hand and get to play some vidya again.

I was looking forward to giving FH5 a shot after I semi-recently "completed" (as in I did all the stuff I wanted in the missions and stuff) FH4. I liked that game a lot. There is problems with the game but it is fun.

So here are some initial thoughts on FH5.

The Game shares a similar problem with FH4 in that cars feel very meaningless in it. You just so many of them, you are showered in them (made worse by that wheelspin mechanic they introduced in FH4 I think). They just feel not very rewarding. But atleast you can use like almost every car in many of the events adds freedom and you can choose your favorites and just drive those I guess.

In FH4 I really liked those story events they were truely fun and special. Where else do you get to race against a train and get to utterly confuse James May by driving a Lotus Elise through water (The TopGear Stuff was fun)

In FH5 we have a Donut Media Collab. I really used to watch them a lot a few years back and am happy to see them in the game with stuff like Hi/Low. Looking forward what the events have in store for me here.

FH5 also has a voiced main-character (for the first time I think?) which leads to funny stuff. As Donut is an american outlet they obviously recorded english voicelines only. I play the game in german, which has voices in german for the main character. So the Donut Team speaks english, while my character answers and comments in german. Kinda funny.

I like the music selection Turn 10 made in FH5 generally. They again licensed stuff from MonsterCat so I do recognize stuff on one of the radios a lot. They also added more stations one for Punk stuff and Synthwave.

There is varriying music types which I like really much. Have a look; https://forza.fandom.com/wiki/Forza_Horizon_5/Soundtrack

I even bought the Horizon Albums from Hospital Records (they are on bandcamp) since I liked that D&B very much.

I will have some more fun now lol-.

So I had some time playing this game now. There is one thing I would just want to write down lol. Progression in Forza Horizon 5 feels way different from 4.

In general there are few types of races which are all fun in their own right. You have normal circuit-racing as well as point-to-points, The same but at night called street racing, dirt-races which are on a muddy surface, races through basically everywhere (german calls them querfeldein) and drag-races.

In 4 you would need to complete a certain number of events for each category to progress through the rounds. After three rounds you would have a big race (like a long one). I had fun with that progression.

5 throws all of that in the bin. the progression is only tied to points you can collect in story-missions, danger-signs, the races, etc. The big races at the end is not tied to progressing through the respective "series" at all. I was doing a lot of story missions (which are fun tbh) but that lead to me getting many points. So I already unlocked the big races for street-races and curcuit without even doing one race in the respective series. That feels weird.

Though I suppose they did it that way since it is required to get into the "Hall of Fame" for the last missions of some stories. This one is unlocked by getting enough points,