Forza Horizon 4 vs Forza Horizon 5 | Which one should you buy in 2024?

Gardening vs Fish and Chips

Forza Horizon 4 (released in October of 2018) is getting delisted at the end of the year, which brings many who want to buy a Horizon game asking which one they want. Currently, there are two Forza Horizon games on store shelves to buy, FH5 (released in 2021), and FH4 (released in 2018). Which one to buy?

Forza Horizon 4 is getting delisted, so should you buy that? You won't be able to after December (digitally without shadier methods). Or should you buy the newer game Forza Horizon 5, even if some of its aspects are worse than the previous game? So, let's find out which is better: Forza Horizon 4 vs. Forza Horizon 5.

Categories of comparison:

Maps: The main map that the game shipped with (20pts)
Cars: The quality and amount of the cars (10pts)
Expansions: The two expansions both games got post-launch (10pts)
Handling and Physics: The way the cars feel and drive (15pts)
Audio: Engine sounds, car sounds, music, etc. (10pts)
Graphics: Graphical Quality and Aesthetic (5pts)
Customization: Car Customization and Player Customization (5pts)
Career/Story: Single-player non-sandbox content (5pts)
Event Lab: Track Editor/Builder mode alongside dev support (10pts)
Multiplayer: Multi-player non-sandbox content and modes (5pts)
Quality of Life: UI/UX, small features, the small stuff that matters (5pts)

FH5's Mexico vs FH4's Britain

The map, by far the biggest difference between games and the biggest reason people say FH4 is better. They are correct, Britain has more diverse roads, landscapes, cities, points of interest, and the map changes the most through the seasons, as it was one of FH4's headlining features. However, the weather in FH4 extremely affects your driving experience. Do you want to do some cruising in anything RWD with more than 5hp? Sorry, it's raining.

Mexico is a much more bland, empty landscape that feels like it was primarily designed with the game's Battle Royale mode in mind. It has like 2 points of interest and 1 city with two small villages on either side of the map and not much else. The roads themselves are actually great to drive on though, it's not necessarily a bad map, just a forgettable one.

Nonetheless, it's still a clear victory in FH4's favor.

The Cars.

When it comes to the sheer amount of cars, FH4 has an extremely impressive 752 cars after all DLCs and updates. However, FH5 has it beat with 886 cars and counting (with all DLCs and updates)

The cars look great in both games but are obviously higher in quality in FH5 (more so on the interiors). The engine sounds and customization are also major points, so I will talk about them separately later.

The Expansions.

Since Forza Horizon 2, every Forza Horizon game has had two major expansions that include a few new cars, a brand new separate map, and a separate career mode with unique mechanics.

Forza Horizon 4's Fortune Island expansion catered to a more rally-esc style of racing with extreme weather effects like thunderstorms with lightning strikes, semi-constant rain, aurora borealis, etc.

It's a good mixup of the original gameplay and added rally and off-road gameplay like previous expansions like FH2's rally expansion and FH3's Blizzard Mountain.

The second expansion 'Lego Speed Champions' (in my opinion) was the real star here with a map straight out of a 100,000-piece Lego set that you get to run around in with destructible Lego cars (based on real cars). You complete challenges to earn bricks which you use to build your own house.

Besides the fact it's a Lego map it would be a genuinely great map even if it wasn't Lego. It has its own race track, mountain back-roads, a desert with dunes to jump around in like FH3, multiple cities, playground levels, and a themed pirate beach.

Forza Horizon 5 on the other hand has two Expansions: The Hot Wheels expansion and the Rally Adventure expansion. I'd say both are executed well but they don't really have anything interesting or unique to them, we've had a Hot Wheels Expansion in the past with FH3 Hot Wheels.

Its career mode is nice and it's a ton of fun to blast around a giant Hot Wheels playset. The map is split into 4 distinct areas, the middle which is floating in the air with all the main hub areas and connecting roads, and the jungle area with waterfalls with wet areas on the track acting as a slip and slide. The desert acts as the main dry area to race around with some sandy off-road areas to drive through, a deeper underground area with a mini city and a dinosaur, and lastly a snow area with frozen lakes, snowy off-roading, and high heights with crazy Mario Kart 8-like anti-gravity roads.

The second and final expansion for FH5 is the "Rally Adventure" expansion, the new mechanic here being rally courses set on a slightly different part of Mexico with twisty roads (fun for drifting and rally of course), with spoken and shown pace notes. Yeah, that's basically it, there's a career mode but it's basically just the Hot Wheels one that's re-themed. I'd tell you what it was re-themed to buy I genuinely don't remember, something about blue ranch vs nacho cheese?

The Car Handling and Physics

A big point in FH5's favor is the much superior car handling, which in a racing/cruising game like this, is a big deal. Don't get me wrong, if you've only played FH4 you might think I'm crazy. FH4 has good car handling, however coming back to play FH4 all these years later, the whole game just feels a bit off.

I just can't quite keep the car under control as well as I can in FH5, FH4 is very under-steer heavy. I also can never quite brake as much or as little as I want to, it's just not calibrated correctly. Also, handling customization has very little effect on the actual way the car moves, unlike FH5 (again customization will be talked about in great detail later). You may say all this is a skill issue, but frankly, I'm not alone in saying that coming back to FH4 feels like driving around on constantly cold-ass tires. I get it's Britain but like cmon man, I'm barely going 80 around a 15-degree turn in a race car and can't keep the car from flying off into the fully destructible 4k rocks.

Lastly, while I don't use wheel much on any of the Forza Horizon games, The wheel support is abysmal, and no matter what I do it always just feels like shit. FH5 isn't perfect, but it's light-years ahead and I actually quite enjoy using a wheel, even if I'm objectively worse on a wheel than a controller. (I literally thought drifting was broken until I used a controller again).

Needless to say, Forza Horizon 5 is very clearly the winner here.

The Audio:

In Forza Horizon 4 the engine sounds are pretty bad, which is one major thing FH5 was made to fix. It's hard to really explain this, so I compared some sounds from FH4 and FH5. Listen for yourself:

Cars like the GT350 and the Civic Type R don't even sound like their real counterparts at all, the Civic sounds like a Hyundai shitbox and the GT350 sounds like a 5.0 GT. This is because for Forza Horizon 5 they actually rerecorded all the real car sounds to be as accurate as possible compared to Forza Horizon 4 having a lot of carry-overs and reused sounds from the older Forza Horizon and motorsport games, dating back to the mid-2000s.

The music is also a big point of contention, if you ask me both soundtracks are great, if a bit generic. The community doesn't seem to agree though as it seems people like FH4's soundtrack more. The other car sounds in FH5 are also much better (tire noise, interior buttons, paddle shifters, gear changes, transmission whine, etc. FH4 simply doesn't have some of these sounds or they're just a bit worse in FH4's case (tire noise). Audio is overall better in FH5, as even though you could argue the soundtrack is better in FH4, the engine sounds are more important cause it's really hard to understand and appreciate the soul of a car without them being accurate.

The Graphics:

As expected, it's a blowout in favor of FH5. Kind of expected since it's the sequel in a franchise known for being frontrunners in graphic tech. FH5 was the front-running Forza game on next-gen/gen 9 and with that, it brings all the upscaling and RTx features that come with that. Even without any upscaling or RT, FH5 is still one of the best-looking games of all time. It runs quite well too, giving me 100+ fps on high at 1080p on a Ryzen 7 4800h, RTX 2060 laptop.

Don't get me wrong FH4 still looks amazing and while I do like the "vibe" in FH4 a bit better, it's not enough for me to say that over-rules FH5's increase in graphical fidelity. You might call me crazy but as a 3D artist, I really do appreciate all the little details and the increased polish and superior lighting.

Customization:

Another very clear victory in FH5's favor, it has more parts but also a ton more engine swaps, body kits, body pieces, transmissions, anti-lag, tires, suspension options, wheels, yada yada. It has more parts in every area and more custom liveries alongside a more robust livery editor. Here are some of my builds in FH5:

1200hp C8 Corvette E-Ray with a custom bodykit.

600hp Nissan Stagea Wagon with a GTR front bumper (these were on the same chassis underneath and shared the same engine)

800hp Toyota GR Yaris that I've created 4 different presets: Drag, Track, Rally, Drift

1800hp Lamborghini Diablo GTR that's one of the fastest drag cars in the game

1400hp Pro Stock Drag Camaro thats the second fastest drag car in the game with a parachute on the back

These cars simply couldn't reach the crazy heights they have, in FH5 I can turn a classic car from 1969 into a supercar-beating monster with a twin-turbo v12 and a multitude of other race body kits, suspension setups, brakes, engines, roll-cages, etc. In FH5 you can pull up to any car and not know if it's slow as shit or will gap your ass to kingdom come.

In FH4 you're much more tied to the original setup of the car, you can't make it into a new car as much as you can upgrade it to maybe a class or two above its original. There is very few bodykits and engine swaps alongside limited drivetrain swapping support.

Career/Story:

It's hard to say which game has the better story since they're both quite an ass, it's frankly not why you play these games. If I'd have to give it to FH5 even though I don't really like the career progression, FH4 just throws a bunch of shit at you and then leaves, at least in FH5 it's organized.

Some of the missions are cool, and the showcases are neat but honestly were better in FH4:

Still, there isn't enough of them in either game to make a big difference.

The most fun of doing these career missions is driving them through the sandbox.

Event Lab:

The event lab was added at the end of FH4's life span, which was a cool, albeit basic track editor. In FH5, they've made it a major focus of the game's continual content output by showcasing multiple eventlab creations weekly and constantly adding new pieces and features to the eventlab. It's genuinely one of the game's major selling points as it has some of the craziest custom maps. (obviously in favor of FH5)

Instead of just racing on the boring base map let's drift through a japan touge:

...or lets race in a retrowave cyberpunk city:

...or lets race through a busy FH3 surfers paradise-like city:

Multiplayer:

It's FH4, not only with the amount of modes but the amount of engagement from the community. People actually go an do the Forzathon Lives, instead of just getting mildly annoyed when one spawns where you are. Of course followed by promptly relocating literally anywhere else because I ain't doin an event with 3 afk people who forgot to move.

In FH4 I also find more people wanting to just go up to random people and start cruising with them, within about 20 minutes of going back to FH4 I found a dude who wanted to cruise and compare BMWs with me. It's not unusual to have that happen but frankly, the only major sandbox multiplayer experience I find in FH5 is drag racing at the main festival (which is a ton of fun).

This is also without mentioning the ranked team modes that were removed in FH5, which (while a bit BS sometimes) were a ton of fun. I never played them much, but when I did I enjoyed my time with them. FH5 did add a hide-and-seek mode that I've been playing a ton of recently, another benefit of FH5 not being EOL yet.

Quality of Life:

A minor thing that annoys me in FH4 is not being able to rev your engine in the garage, I can't tell what a new engine swap sounds like or what each exhaust sounds like. It's a major quality of life added in FH5 that seemed so obvious in retrospect.

The UI in FH5, while less pretty as they no longer showcase your car in the background, is much more usable with a much better layout alongside it just being snappier to get around. FH4's UI feels like the Windows 8 start menu, and thats NOT a good thing.

Some cars in FH5 allow you to change drive modes or engage or disable convertible tops. For example the Mazda Miata ND RF with the automatic convertible top is fully animated and allows you to activate it in real time. The Hyundai Ioniq 5n allows you to change between a grippy track setting and a drift rear-biased setting. The Mercedes AMG One has a "Race" mode that drops the car's ride height and increases its downforce.

Just because of the nature of it being the sequel to FH4, FH5 wins this category.

Conclusion:

Well, it's kinda obvious which game wins here. While I still think FH4 is a great game and the map and expansions alone are a reason to pick up the game. I wouldn't recommend it over FH5, as if you're seriously looking for which is the better game overall, it's not close. But let's tally up the scores:

Forza Horizon 4:

• Maps (20pts)
• Multiplayer (5pts)
• Expansions (10pts)
  Total: 35/100

Forza Horizon 5:

• Cars (10pts)
• Handling and Physics (15pts)
• Graphics (5pts)
• Customization (5pts)
• Career/Story (5pts)
• Event Lab (10pts)
• Quality of Life (5pts)
  Total: 55/100

If you can I'd still pick up both, but that's not a reality for most people.

Forza Horizon 5 is the better pick.