Forza Horizon 5 hasn't released, but there are already 800,000 people playing it

Forza Horizon 5 will be available from November 9 on Steam, the Microsoft Store, Xbox, and Game Pass. Unless you're one of those who paid for the Premium Edition or the Premium Add-Ons Bundle, in which case you've been playing it since November 5. You might think that being on Game Pass would cut down on the number of people willing to fork out for the full thing, but apparently not. As VGC noticed, the in-game Hall of Fame leaderboard already has 800,000 players on it.

This latest open-world racer is set in Mexico, and adds a new event type called expeditions and a custom race creator called Event Labs. Apart from that, it's the same Forza Horizon as always—only better. As Phil Savage wrote in his review, "I can't really criticise Forza Horizon 5 for not making big, sweeping changes for the sake of it feeling more different. It's easy to forget given how effortless everything feels, but the sheer detail of the environments and the level of craft evident in each of the over 500 cars is astounding. Forza Horizon 5 isn't a full sim, sure, but nor is it simplistic. Each car has its own personality, and it's capable of offering a serious challenge if you turn off the many optional assists. It's just realistic enough to give each car a personality, and the detail in their modelling is absurd—their interiors lovingly recreated for the Forzavista viewing mode."

Phil gave Forza Horizon 5 a score of 90, and had praise for its refinement, the speed at which you unlock cars, and the vibrancy of the Mexican setting and especially its weather. As he concluded, "While I'd love to know what Forza Horizon would look like if it had any serious rivals forcing it towards greater innovation, I'll happily make do with playing the most polished and confident Forza Horizon game made to date."

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.