Forza Horizon 5 Rally Adventure: Tragedy or blessing?

The second Forza Horizon 5 Rally Adventure expansion was released on March 29th. It introduced a new race style to FH5: rally races. You can now explore the “Sierra Nueva”, an area on the northwest coast of the map. The DLC includes a new map, new cars, new apparel rewards and lots of achievements, accolades and other tasks to complete. If you are generally interested check out our general review about FH5 or some stickers we made for your cars.

Things I like

The Rally Adventure expansion brought a new experience to FH5. Especially for me as I mostly avoided doing offroad-racing before. Unexpectedly the cars given to you handle quite well and I had close to no problems driving offroad with a steering wheel controller. If you drive with really powerful cars sand and dirt tends to be a problem but with just normal C to A class cars this was really enjoyable.

The rally stages are well put together and the environment feels different on each one of them. There are 3 different types: dirt, road and night rally races. My favorite one at the beginning where the street rally races as there wasn’t much of a difference to what I was used to. Throughout my playthrough this changed as I really got to like the classic dirt, offroad rally stages. Playing with a low powered front wheel drive car was really nice and learning how to drive on dirt was a lot of fun. The night rally races are a mixture off both but just in the dark as the name suggests. I sometimes found myself braking too late unable to see the barriers.

Content-wise there are around 8 races to complete for each type and I would guess around 15-20 open-world activities (like speed traps, danger signs, etc) to do. I played for around 7-8h to get all teams to level 9 (not including exploring the map). This is enough to unlock the very own Goliath rally race. This also was the first race I struggled to keep up with the AI-drivers. After team-level 9 you still have to complete small tasks to reach the final level.

There are also lots of task to complete to rank up the different teams. Just driving around I found some nice places and also some collectables similar to the base game. The map feels big although I would guess it’s only 1/4 of the base game map.

Talking about the ranking system: I really enjoyed ranking up as it happens mostly unnoticed just by playing through the different races. This removes the “grindy” feeling and just opens the opportunity to go to rank 10 for those who want to grind through tasks. This expansion also added around 30 new steam achievements and more than 10 ingame accolades. I’ll talk about the problem with these later.

Check out the official map here:

Things I don’t like

The expansion feels a lot like starting out in FH5 again. The humor and accents is still the same and it still gets annoying after some time. Story-wise there isn’t much to talk about or at least I can’t remember anything else than going to a new place as a superstar to learn about rallying. But in my opinion the story never played an important role in the Forza Horizon franchise.

“Story races” themself are fun to play through although you are basically getting a gifted win (I talked about this in my FH5 review in depth) and they also include the typical unrealistic jumps. But you can earn new cars through completing them so I’m not complaining. A exception to this rule is the last race you unlock by reaching level 9 in all teams.

There are also similar bugs to the base game: You receive steam achievements and somehow complete task you never completed or started. Xbox achievements and steam achievements don’t match and the counter for collectables isn’t working as well. Sure this is only a minor bug but as someone who likes earning achievements themself, getting a “Drive on all roads” achievement 30 minutes into playing just doesn’t feel good.

Gameplay-wise there are also some things I want to mention: when racing with higher class cars with more speed some pace notes are played too late and you find yourself crashing into the barrier or sliding off the track. Another annoying thing is the helicopter flying above as its way too loud for my taste and I can’t hear my car properly.

As in the base game the 3 stars requirements on danger signs or speed traps are irregular and multiple tries are needed to complete one while other are completed just by driving normally. Again not a big problem just a small inconvenience.

Conclusion

If you want a simpler games and you like drifting check out our articles about drift games.

Get the FH5 rally expansion here