By MaJ — Gaming systems analyst with 18+ years of industry experience. Full bio
The open-world racing genre has a visibility problem. Titles like The Crew, Test Drive Unlimited, and Need for Speed have all attempted to carve out space in a market that Forza Horizon has largely claimed since 2012. None have come close to matching its combination of map density, tuning depth, and sheer production polish. As of 2024, the Forza Horizon franchise has sold over 50 million copies across all entries, with Forza Horizon 5 alone becoming the best-selling racing game on Xbox and PC platforms. That kind of market dominance doesn’t come from marketing alone.
The gap between Forza Horizon and its closest competitors isn’t just a matter of budget. Playground Games has had over a decade to refine the formula, and that accumulated iteration shows in every aspect of Horizon 5. The Crew 2 offers a geographically massive map but struggles to fill it with meaningful content density. Horizon 5’s Mexico, by contrast, is packed with things to do every few hundred meters. Eleven distinct biomes, each with different surface physics, arranged so that three or four completely different environments can be traversed in the span of a few minutes. That’s the product of years of intentional design decisions that competitors can’t replicate in a single development cycle.
Mexico Done Right
The map in Horizon 5 covers a respectably sized chunk of virtual Mexico, but the genius isn’t in the raw square mileage. It’s in how the biomes are laid out.
You’ve got jungles, volcanoes, desert, farmland, canyons, dunes, swamps, beaches, reservoirs, ruins, and urban areas. Eleven distinct environments, each with different surface physics. Jungle roads get slick when it rains. Volcanic ash changes how your tires grip. Sand affects acceleration differently than asphalt does.
But here’s the thing that other developers keep missing: the biomes are arranged so you can drive through three or four completely different environments in the span of a few minutes. You can go from volcano to coast, hitting jungle and beach along the way, in about four minutes of driving. The visual and physics changes happen fast enough that you never get bored looking at the same scenery.
The Crew 2, by contrast, requires way too much driving between anything interesting. Horizon 5 figured out that players don’t want a bigger map—they want a map where the environment changes fast enough to stay engaging.
The Tuning Rabbit Hole
Here’s where Horizon 5 gets properly deep, and where a lot of casual players check out. The tuning system has eleven adjustable categories per car. Most people ignore eight of them and just upgrade everything to max.
Big mistake.
The single best tuning adjustment in the entire game costs absolutely nothing and takes about ten seconds: tire pressure. Drop it a few PSI below the stock setting, and you’ll shave seconds off your lap times for free. I’ve tested this across dozens of cars, and it works on basically everything.
Then there’s the Performance Index system, which is basically a resource management puzzle disguised as a car upgrade menu. Every upgrade increases your PI rating, and you want to stay within certain PI classes for different race types.
The smart play is to prioritize tire compound upgrades first—they give you the most lap time improvement per PI point spent. Then aero, then suspension. Engine upgrades are flashy but they’re usually not the most efficient use of your PI budget. The game doesn’t tell you any of this, which means there’s a whole community of players out there wondering why their fully-upgraded car is getting smoked by someone with a better-tuned setup.
Accessibility Without Shallowness
I’ll push back a bit against the “arcadey” label that sim racing purists slap on Horizon 5. Yeah, it’s not Assetto Corsa or iRacing. The physics are more forgiving.
But there’s actual design intent behind that forgiveness. When your car loses grip in Horizon, you’ve got a generous window to recover by counter-steering and managing throttle. In a hardcore sim, that same loss of control would be a guaranteed crash.
Playground Games deliberately widened that recovery window so people without sim racing experience can still have fun. That doesn’t mean there’s no skill ceiling—it just means the skill ceiling starts higher up. You can be a casual player and have a great time, but if you want to really master the tuning and handling, there’s depth there.
Different drivetrains still require different approaches. Rear-wheel drive oversteers under throttle. Front-wheel drive understeers. All-wheel drive is more neutral but heavier. The tuning system lets you tweak these behaviors, and it actually works.
The Progression Grind
Horizon 5 uses two currencies: Credits (which you earn from races) and Wheelspins (which are random rewards). The Wheelspin system is genuinely clever game design, even if it’s essentially a slot machine.
You get Wheelspins after completing major activities, and they can pay out Credits, cars, or cosmetic items. The distribution is weighted so most of your spins give you modest rewards, but there’s always that chance at something valuable. It creates exactly the kind of intermittent reinforcement that keeps you coming back.
And yeah, I know some people hate loot boxes on principle. But in Horizon 5, you can’t buy Wheelspins with real money. They’re purely earned through gameplay. It’s gambling mechanics without the predatory monetization, which makes it a lot more palatable.
The longest race on the map (the Goliath) is also the most efficient way to farm Credits per minute, which is a nice bit of game design—the longest activity is also the most rewarding, encouraging longer play sessions.
Why Nobody Has Replicated It
I keep coming back to this question: why hasn’t anyone made a legitimate competitor to Horizon? The Crew tried. Need for Speed has tried. Neither has come close to matching the combination of map density, tuning depth, and just plain polish that Playground Games delivers.
Part of it is just development cost. Horizon 5’s map alone took years of environmental art production. The tuning system required physics modeling across hundreds of cars. That’s not cheap.
But the bigger barrier is iteration. Playground has been refining this formula since 2012. They’ve had over a decade to tune the numbers—tire pressure effects, PI budget efficiency, grip recovery windows, biome placement. A competitor can’t replicate that depth in a single development cycle. You need a franchise’s worth of trial and error to get those numbers right.
And that’s really the secret sauce. Forza Horizon 5 isn’t special because of one big innovation. It’s special because thousands of tiny decisions, tested and refined over more than a decade, all came together at once. The numbers are calibrated so precisely that the game just feels right in a way that’s hard to articulate but impossible to miss once you’ve played it.