YMMV / Forza

• Aluminium Christmas Trees:
  • The Twin Mill added in Horizon 3's Hot Wheels pack isn't just a Hot Wheels car scaled up to full size. There are real, drivable Twin Mills that have been made and sanctioned by Mattel. The Hot Wheels Ford Mustang is also real (produced for the 2014 SEMA Show), although that is a fair bit more believable.
  • The Reliant three-wheeler and Peels can seem like silly joke characters but they were legitimate vehicles in their time. Bubble cars and three wheel cars date from an era when cars were relatively more expensive, when many only had motorbike licenses (the UK let three wheel cars count as motor-trikes) and safety restrictions were far less prescriptive on designs.
  • The futuristic looking Tamo Racemo was intended to be a real sports car, with real-life concepts existed and the car's presence in Forza is intended to promote it, although problems at Tata Motors prevented the company from releasing the car for real.
• Award Snub: Despite being one of the highest-rated games every year that it has released (including three games with a 90+ aggregate score), the Forza Horizon series has consistently been left out of the Game of the Year nominations in The Game Awards. This reached a boiling point in 2021, where Forza Horizon 5 was the highest-rated game of 2021 by a healthy margin and still wasn't nominated, leading many accusing bias against racing games^note a game genre usually regarded overall as a "love it or hate it" genre and Microsoft exclusives.
• Breather Level:
  • Bowling and Car Passing events in Motorsport 4.
  • The 1000 Club in Horizon, a free DLC that gives you two cars (a Ford F-100 and a RUF CTR 2) and over 1000 minigame-style challenges across every car in the game, some of which are just performing basic skills or destroying stuff on the side of the road! Sadly, it has been delisted along with all the other DLC for the game.
  • Forza Horizon 2 Presents Fast & Furious was a breather standalone expansion. Download it for ten dollars (it was available for free on its debut week), play it for a few hours, and get an easy one thousand gamerscore (two thousand if you play both Xbox One and Xbox 360 versions). Unfortunately, it too has been delisted since.
• Broken Base:
  • Horizon caused this, splitting the fanbase into two: a part supporting the spin-off and liking the open world mechanic, the other attacking the game because it's not the Forza they have been used to.
  • Also, Motorsport 5 has fewer cars and tracks than Motorsport 4. Was it a legit quality-over-quantity move or was it a way to milk more money through downloadable content? As time passed, however, many more fans think of the former than the latter.
  • Horizon 2 Presents Fast & Furious adding on nitrous has divided fans over whether nitrous is fine as long as it is confined to the expansion, or if nitrous should even be in a Forza game at all.
  • There is also the lack of body modifications for cars later on in the series. The early games had multiple options for a fair amount of cars, while in later games only a handful of cars have anything beyond the standardised racing bumper and spoiler. Whether this feature is missed or not depends on who you ask. Horizon 3 takes steps to address this, adding additional modifications for a range of cars, as well as widebody kits.
  • Any unicorn car or other exclusive car that cannot be normally purchased. One side believes that they cause too much separation in the community and that cars shouldn't be put out of reach for the majority of players, while the other side believes that they are a good addition and should be challenging to get.
  • Any joke car or Nazi car introduced tends to get this. Either they provide fun options for players to mess around with (as long as you don't put any Nazi imagery in them, especially the latter), or they are taking a slot away from a more deserving vehicle.
  • The Horizon 3: Hot Wheels expansion: some say this is a great direction to take for the less-than-serious Horizon series while others have objected that this has gone far too outside of reality for Willing Suspension of Disbelief to work (as Horizon, despite being less realism-focused as Motorsport, still tries to maintain a fairly straight-faced portrayal of cars), even if all the Hot Wheels cars in the game are real custom cars exhibited in various car shows. This only got worse when the Horizon 4: LEGO Speed Champions expansion dropped, and even further with the addition of The Eliminator and the TrackMania-esque Super7 mode and Blueprint Builder.
  • Horizon 4's seasonal change. Some like being able to play in different seasons and enjoying the various conditions, but others do not like being forced into free roaming during a specific season for each and every week, even in offline solo, especially seasons that they do not enjoy.
  • Given how different the first game is, there's a small divide between fans who think the first Horizon is the best in the series, versus those who think most new Horizon games are Even Better Sequels. This generally depends on what you want out of the games: Horizon fans appreciate its more carefully-crafted progression structure and its greater emphasis on creating a believable world for the festival to exist within, while fans of the Horizon sequels prefer its more open-ended "make your own fun" attitude.
  • Horizon 5 led to possibly the most significant splits in the fanbase yet, the negative side of which is summarised in this video. Horizon 5's difficulty level and progression scheme in particular has led to fierce debates online; part of the fan base believes that Horizon is an escapist arcade racer and as such is correct to act as wish-fulfilment, and that allowing you to drive the "best" cars upfront satisfies that desire. Others argue that the game's structure and AI encourages you to barge to first place in any race, with the other cars all then backing off to just let you sit there, and that the game has gone too far in the direction of lacking negativity or even meaningful failure without an equal opportunity for meaningful reward.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Forza Motorsport 3 often had multiplayer games composed entirely of Audi A5s and A4s. Other "Leaderboard" cars (cars that have the top times for each track) dominated the multiplayer, but none quite as hard as the Audis. Thankfully, the behavior died down quite a lot in Motorsport 4, as there were only a few game-breakingly good cars (and players usually get votekicked out of the lobby once they pull out the car).
  • 99% of the players of Horizon 2 are sure to use S2 or X-class cars, given the fact the game does not put car class limitations in offline races and automatically balances out the competition with your current car.
  • Prior to the Series 16 Update in Horizon 4, any ranked asphalt or dirt A-class lobby would very likely have at least one Hot Wheels Bone Shaker, due to its great acceleration, top speed and handling.
  • The Festival Playlists in Horizon 5 include measures to curb this trope, with seasonal objectives for PR stunts now imposing car type and PI restrictions, preventing players from just cheesing the stunts with cars like the Hoonigan Ford RS200, Ferrari 599XX Evoluzione, and the Rimac C2, for the purpose of ticking off the PR stunt for the Festival Playlist. However, as the 3-star objective is usually balanced around S2 or X class, any PR stunt where the car class restriction is S1 or below will see its seasonal objective be balanced accordingly and set lower than what is required for a 3-star.
• Contested Sequel: Every Motorsport entry after 4 to some extent. Forza Motorsport 5 was slammed by critics (it is the lowest-rated Forza game on both GameRankings and Metacritic by at least 6%), and met mixed reception from the fanbase, largely because it pushed microtransactions. And despite being an improvement over 5, some feel Forza Motorsport 6 isn't on same level of 4. Motorsport 7 has also been the target of similar criticism of 5, with a lootbox system replacing the wheelspins and VIP status becoming a consumable item instead of being permanent as particularly hot buttons (although Turn 10 is fixing the latter).
• Critical Dissonance: Motorsport 7 has an aggregate score of 88 on Metacritic, with praise given to the introduction of dynamic weather and the return of three venues from the old games. However, as described above, it was slammed by a good portion of the fandom for its pushing of microtransactions, as well as Toyota road cars being absent due to licensing issues.
• Disappointing Last Level: The final showcase event in Horizon 3, "Big Air", is seen as a very underwhelming final event to cap out the game, as it isn't as crazy as the game's other showcases. It consists of racing a Polaris against a blimp. To compare, the penultimate showcase was racing a Lamborghini Centenario against a VTOL fighter jet in the middle of Surfers Paradise.
• Even Better Sequel:
  • Somehow, Playground Games are masters of this trope with their Forza Horizon series:
    • The first Horizon, while suffering heavily from a way too shallow open world and not having much to do after completing the main campaign, was a great game in its own right. Horizon 2 addressed those issues and made the overall experience much better, with a three-times-larger open world without any invisible walls, a main campaign so extensive the game says you just completed 15% of the game after becoming the Horizon Champion, seamless multiplayer, the introduction of the much-acclaimed Drivatar technology in the Horizon series, an even larger licensed soundtrack, and vehicle fine-tuning.
    • While a great game in its own right, Horizon 2 had a rather repetitive career and an open world that was far too catered to higher-end supercars. Horizon 3 does away with these issues by creating a much more varied open world and the Blueprint option, which permits players to create their own events. This also helped with the game's overall reception: on Metacritic, compared to Horizon 2's 85, Horizon 3 has a whopping score of 91, beating out games like Dark Souls III and Doom (2016), and on par with games like The Witness and Overwatch. Horizon 3 even won Best Sports/Racing Game at The Game Awards 2016, and it was the only racing game nominated for the award!
    • Does Playground Games ever stop improving upon themselves? That answer is a big NO. With additions such as larger game world, more cars, more events to do, quality of life improvements (such as fast travel that gradually cheaper as you progress), and route creator in addition to the blueprint, Horizon 4 has managed to earn more praise than even Horizon 3 with a 92 on Metacritic, with some calling it a masterpiece and some calling it the greatest racing game of all time. Also, like with Horizon 3 in 2016, this game was also the only racing game nominated for Best Sports/Racing Game at The Game Awards 2018 and won the award.
    • Oh, you think the next game will be stuck in the shadow of Horizon 4? Nope. With additions such as Eventlab (which allows not only players to create their own routes, but also adding objects to the route the player created), even more character customization choices, increased accessibility and quality-of-life options on the players' side, a world more diverse in biomes, and of course, even more events, Playground is still improving upon themselves with Forza Horizon 5, which also scored a very solid 92^note for the Xbox Series X|S version; the PC version has a 91 on Metacritic, tying with Horizon 4 as the highest-rated game in the series, and, despite the GOTY snubbery, won all three of its jury-voted awards at The Game Awards,^note Best Audio Design, Innovation in Accessibility, and the Horizon games' perennial Best Sports/Racing Game, which actually saw two other racing games nominated that year tying with that year's GOTY winner It Takes Two for most wins at the ceremony. With the drop-dead gorgeous setting of Mexico, being the first proper ninth-generation Forza title to showcase the true capabilities of the Xbox Series, and a better emphasis on customization and self-expression… yeah, you're in for the long haul on this one.
  • Motorsport 5, while seen as a genuinely good launch title for the Xbox One and a good entrance to next-gen consoles for Turn 10, suffered from a smaller car list compared to the previous game and a terrible in-game economy plagued by microtransactions (at least, pre-update), and still did not feature neither weather conditions nor night racing. Motorsport 6 added the latter two features - which, despite not being dynamic like in Horizon 2, were still a very welcome addition, made its in-game economy as microtransaction-free and as rewarding as possible, made its car list more than double the size of 5, and added a broader list of career events, as well as a League online multiplayer system similar to the one seen in fellow critically acclaimed sim-racer iRacing.
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • With Gran Turismo, obviously, although it's pretty evident that Polyphony and Turn 10, as well as some Friendly Fandoms, Take a Third Option and go for the Friendly Rivalry route for this.
  • Also with racing game juggernaut Need for Speed alongside GT, especially since Forza games has car customization like in various entries in the NFS franchise, and the Horizon games provide some stiff competition to NFS in the open-world racing front. Even before, NFS provided Motorsport some stiff competition on the track racing front with ProStreet and Shift games.
  • In 2012, it was especially between the fans of Need for Speed: Most Wanted (2012) and of Forza Horizon. These two games are completely different, but they have existed around the same time (during Halloween and All Saints' Day), share a lot of the same cars (even in later DLC for both games), are open-world racers in gorgeous environments (Most Wanted's Fairhaven City and Horizon's rendition of Colorado) and, the straw that broke the camel's back, they both have a song in common: "The Power" by DJ Fresh and Dizzee Rascal. Both these games would win several racing game of the year awards, although they also received some significant hatedoms from their franchises' fans.
  • There is also a raging in-base feud between Motorsport fans and Horizon fans. Most fans, however, Take a Third Option and root for both games, which surprisingly isn't maligned among the other fans. In addition, there are fans who just prefer track racing and endurance racing and others who prefer offroad racing, and even for the latter, wished offroad racing to be available in the next Motorsport game, or endurance racing in the next Horizon game outside of user-generated races.
  • The 2014-15 biennium showed an even more heated rivalry between Horizon 2 fans and Driveclub fans. However, Driveclub eventually petered out while the Forza Horizon series continued to remain strong.
  • Horizon 2 and The Crew since the latter was the only other open-world racing game released in 2015, with a bigger world and more extensive aftermarket customization (though not in the vinyl department) than the Forza game. Considering the reception for both games, however, it's lop-sided towards Horizon 2.
  • Project CARS has become a new target of this for Forza fans, who bash over its lack of in-depth car customization and its Porting Disaster on the Xbox One. Project CARS fans, instead, are sure to aim on the lack of proper dynamic weather and day/night cycle in-game, and the excessively linear career mode.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Each Motorsport entry is simply referred to as Forza [number of Motorsport title], even though Horizon has now become on par with the Motorsport games as main titles; thus, the real "Forza 5" is the original Forza Horizon, Motorsport 5 is actually "Forza 6", and so on. Not helping matters is that Sony has since started their own video game series named Horizon.
  • The eighth Forza Motorsport, which does not have a number, is still being referred to as Forza Motorsport 8 by several fans and some journalists anyway, against the wishes of Turn 10 who deliberately removed the number to position it as a re-imagining of the series.
• First Instalment Wins: This is by no means a universal opinion, but the first Forza Horizon game still maintains a dedicated fanbase who consider it the best of the Horizon games thanks to its more focused visual and gameplay presentation.
  • Averted for the original game of the Motorsport series, but there is a certain subset of fans that consider Motorsport 2- the first of the sequels- to be their favourite for its early-HD aesthetic and art style, alongside its surprisingly tight career mode and vast amount of cars to choose from (especially with its Complete Collection release), many that have played both consider it a true Even Better Sequel to the first Motorsport.
• Friendly Fandoms: Despite Fandom Rivalry with Gran Turismo, some GT fans tend to cling towards Horizon part of the Forza franchise due to both Gran Turismo and Forza Horizon series, in spite of vastly different formats, feature off-road racing and rallycross events which Forza Motorsport still omitted.
• Game-Breaker: now it has its own page.
• Gateway Series: For the usually action-oriented Xbox (and later PC) gamer demographic into racing games.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
  • Popular in the U.S., but a Killer App for the Xbox brand in Europe.
  • Australians love Forza: The series has a surprisingly large following from the land down under, which might have probably contributed to Turn 10 getting the exclusive license to the V8 Supercars car roster for Forza Motorsport 6, as well as the large influx of Aussie muscle cars in some DLCs. It eventually led to a country version of Ascended Fanboy with Horizon 3 taking place in the Land Down Under.
  • Within Horizon 5, the Nissan Silvia CLUB K's is most popular among Mexican players on account of being the closest car in-game to the notoriously absent Nissan Sentra B13, which was one of the most widely sold cars in Mexico — for this reason, it also has lots of community-made Mexican taxi liveries. The car itself would finally be added in the Series 26 update in October 2023 (as the native Nissan Tsuru), nearly two years after Horizon 5's release.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • If you are about to crash in Horizon 2 while playing online, you can pause then unpause after the crash to prevent your skill chain from resetting.
  • This bug in Motorsport 6 permits to get any car in the game for free: it works simply by choosing the car you want to "buy" (as long as you can afford said car), and immediately reset the game upon "buying" the car. This causes the car to be in your garage, but your credit amount will be exactly the same as before.
  • In the Xbox One-era Horizon games, a photo mode bug allows you to take pictures of your car's interior outside your home and even create amazing slo-mo cinematics. More details here.
  • When the Toyota AE86 came back in Horizon 4, it had an... interesting shifting animation. Due to the game's rating, it was silently fixed a week later, though.
  • Electric vehicles in Horizon 4 are completely unaffected by power penalties applied to cars when carrying a flag in Flag Rush, the crown in King (as well as the much more severe penalty after carrying the crown for long enough), or being a Survivor in the Survival game mode. None of the three electric vehicles are considered game-breakers in these party game modes because the Rimac and the ID.R are unsuited to the terrain in any of the party game arenas, while the Jaguar I-Pace is held back with a low top speed and otherwise unimpressive performance.
• Harsher in Hindsight: There are two songs by Lostprophets in Horizon 1's soundtrack ("Bring 'Em Down" and "We Bring an Arsenal"). Cue a few months after the release of the game and Lostprophets frontman Ian Watkins has been charged with child sexual abuse. The music is still awesome, but you can't help feeling a little awkward or disgusted while you hear them.
  • In a lesser extent, the E3 trailer of Motorsport 4 featured "Power" by Kanye West. Just like the former above, due to Ye's Role-Ending Misdemeanor regarding his anti-Semitic views as of October 2022 (which also resulted his sponsors terminating contracts and collaborations with him) it's hard to rewatch it without cringing as the said track plays in the background.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • This commercial, from the Dead Island-grade sad piano, to the man's attempt for automotive thrills till he's stopped by police, and the icing on the cake is an oddly thoughtful narration by Jeremy Clarkson.
  • The "Horizon Origins" story in Horizon 5 giving players a rush of nostalgia as they recreate the opening scenes in all the Forza Horizon games so far. But the real moment comes after completing the final chapter, when Scott Tyler, who joined the Player throughout the story, says what the Horizon Festival really means to him.
    Player: So, time to answer the question. What does Horizon mean to you?
    Scott Tyler: (sighs) OK... I, um... I thought long and hard about this. Look, I know I'm kind of annoying. And, um... I'm not cool. And I'm easily distracted (nervous chuckle) and my jokes aren't always the best, but... Horizon gives me a home. They let me hang out with folks like you and do the best job in the world, every day. That means a lot to me.
    Player: It wouldn't be Horizon without you, Scotty.
    Scott Tyler: Thanks for taking a high-speed drive down memory lane with me, kid.
• High-Tier Scrappy: Motorsport 3 has lots of these, to the point where they were dubbed the "Leaderboard cars", so-called because they always get the best times on the leaderboards. Some examples include the Dodge Viper and most things made by Audi (but especially the A5).
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Everyone loves to hate M. Rossi, and the IndyCar expansions became a huge deal for the series. Cut to 2016, where a shellshocked Alexander Rossi wins the 100th Indianapolis 500... Even better, you can be called M. Rossi in Horizon 3, if you want to feel either like a Badass Driver or like hating yourself, depending on how you interpret her.
• Ho Yay: The two guys in "The Getaway" trailer have a distinct connection, while the sole female driver is just a racing adversary.
• Hype Backlash:
  • The Horizon series has received this from some arcade racing game fans because its highly-praised mixture of simulation and arcade open-world racing with licensed vehicles has prevented other arcade racers from taking a more traditional high-octane approach to arcade racing with licensed vehicles, which only Need for Speed still does decently (and even then, that series suffered during The Eighth Generation of Console Video Games and only got some of its respect back with Need for Speed Heat). It also caused a growing resentment against open-world racing games in general, since major publishers seem to have become unwilling to release non-Mascot Racer arcade racing games set on closed tracks.
  • Forza Horizon 4 is now being criticized for having an overabundance of content, with some saying that the cars in the game are now awarded so frequently (thanks to the Wheelspins and #Forzathon rewards) that the sense of progression and accomplishment in the game has been diluted. Additionally, a number of racing game players feel that the game itself is a lot blander than most other racing games, including its own predecessors, especially Horizon 3, with the less varied environment of Great Britain (which no amount of seasonal changes can ever alleviate) compared to Horizon 3's Australia and less impressive expansions being just some of the complaints on top of the aforementioned overabundance of content. Other fans on other hand criticized the game for the lack of real racing cars from various motorsports series such as NASCAR, Formula E, and even BTCC touring cars despite being a Massive Multiplayer Crossover series with even more crossover content.
  • Horizon 5 has been hit with this even sooner, as fans are feeling that the series is becoming stagnant as the series continues to be successful. Fans point out the series' increasing focus on attracting the largest audience possible by becoming more and more accessible has made it too easy for racing game veterans (the Hot Wheels expansion only partially alleviating this), its tone becoming so much Lighter and Softer to the point of driving out anything that can introduce a genuine feeling of danger, friction, negativity, or conflict has turned the game into an insincere and corporate-feeling experience with flat, forgettable characters that are too much alike one another, and despite the sheer size of the map, much of it is so bland—especially the huge amount of open grasslands and farmlands—that it becomes more of a slog to traverse instead of an experience.
• I Knew It!: The first half of the launch trailer for the Xbox Series X console, which was published in late 2019, showed off new weather rendering effects before being topped off with a Koenigsegg Regera tearing through a dusty desert road. Eagle-eyed viewers correlated the flora and terrain features in said half of said trailer with that of Mexico, leading to rumors that Horizon 5 would be set in that country, and thus competing head-to-head with long-standing rumors of this then-upcoming entry being instead set in Japan. The Mexico crowd were proven right when on June 13, 2021, during Microsoft and Bethesda's E3 livestream, Forza Horizon 5 had its worldwide reveal in which Mexico was confirmed as the setting.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: Some racing gamers are unhappy with Forza Horizon's increasing focus on accessibility, complaining that it's making the game too easy and thus boring to them. Not helping matters is that in Horizon 5, players are now locked into the "Highly Skilled" difficulty when playing seasonal championships, meaning that the Drivatar difficulty cannot be raised to "Expert", "Pro", or "Unbeatable" for seasonal championships like in Horizon 4.
• Memetic Badass:
  • M. Rossi in Motorsport 2 and Motorsport 3, though "Memetic Jerkass" might be a better way to put it. Who knew an otherwise imperceptible character could be so universally reviled?
  • Apparently, according to Dan Greenawalt (Creative Director of Turn 10), M. Rossi even scared the developers.
  Dan Greenawalt: One driver, M. Rossi (no relation to the great V. Rossi) is one of our fastest and most aggressive drivers. Late in development, he started learning things that we hadn't taught him. He started check braking (A very advanced racing technique, also sorta dirty). Anyway, this was a bit of a scary moment. He was learning faster than we were teaching.
• Memetic Mutation: "Built from the ground up." ^Explanation As spoken by Chris Esaki, Turn 10 Studios' creative director during the developer direct footage of Forza Motorsport (2023) mentioning that the upcoming game is made from scratch "to take advantage of the Xbox Series consoles". It's also used as a mockery aimed at Turn 10 themselves for constantly recycling outdated car models and parts from older titles (especially the first two games up to Horizon). Special mention goes to the infamous Nissan Silvia Spec-R (S15) that's been reused since the very first installment who's notorious for having hideous modelling proportions from its pinched nose to droopy rear quarter that sticks out like a sore thumb. Even its competitors Need for Speed and Gran Turismo have laser-scanned models with far more accurate proportions by comparison.
• Moment of Awesome: Horizon's "Showcase Events" are just plain nuts.
  • In the first Horizon, "Mustang vs. Mustang".
  • Early in 2 you race a Ferrari against fighter jets. Win and you keep the car.
  • All five of Horizon 3's showcases:
    • The first, "Off The Chain", puts you in a Penhall buggy, and has you race a Willys Jeep cross country through the city of Byron Bay and the forests around it. The Jeep, it should be noted, is hanging from the bottom of an Australian Defense Force Chinook, and only gets released about a quarter-mile from the finish line.
    • "Freight Expectations" features the player in a sixth-generation Chevrolet Camaro Z/28, against a freight train. Twice during the race, you have to jump over the train as it passes beneath you.
    • "River Run". A team of racing powerboats takes to the river from Yarra Valley to Surfers Paradise. You have to beat them there in a Baja-class trophy truck. Once, you jump over them to clear the river. Later on, they jump over you to clear a bridge.
    • "High Rise Rush". Probably the coolest of them all. A race through the streets of Surfers Paradise between you and your Lamborghini Centenario and a goddamn VTOL fighter jet! Once, the race goes into slow-mo as Lambo and jet take flight together.
    • It's a letdown after the awesomeness of "High Rise Rush", but the final showcase, "Big Air" deserves some credit. You, and your Polaris RZR1000, versus a blimp in a mad race through the jungle of Kiewa Valley. At several moments, you drive beneath this flying behemoth and feel the wind from its propellers shaking your buggy.
  • And 4 lives up to expectations with the first showcase being against the Behemoth, a giant hovercraft that is only too happy to shunt you off the road. The second has you racing The Flying Scotsman, where if you win it's by a bumper length photo finish. Make it to the Horizon roster and you get an emergency transmission from Cortana of all people, introducing the Halo Experience showcase that is nothing short of full-on fanservice.
    • Some seasons bring Showcase Remixes that change the season and/or the car you are driving. Examples include The Flying Scotsman vs a turquoise Ford Anglia, the motorbikes against the Ariel Nomad or the Deltawing against the Lamborghini Countach.
  • Horizon 5 has just four showcases instead of the usual five, but one of them is a real banger. You get to race a buggy against two monster trucks from the volcano summit to the Horizon Stadium and then drive one of the monster trucks for three minutes to celebrate your win!
• More Popular Spin-Off: While the Horizon series is just as popular as their Motorsport counterparts, Horizon 4 beats out Motorsport 7 in terms of sales and popularity. This was helped by the Steam release for Horizon 4, whereas Motorsport 7 was still Microsoft Store-exclusive until its delisting.
• Narm: Occasionally the voiceovers in Horizon 4's "Horizon Story" events can veer a little too close to sounding like actors reading a script, or in the case of "British Racing Green", like a car company's own promotional copy, rather than entirely authentic enthusiasts. The contrast with Chris Harris' engaging narration in the Top Gear segments only adds to the sense. Though in the case of 'LA Racer' the debate is whether she's meant to sound a little mannered because it's a subtle parody of nostalgic 'influencers' waxing lyrical about things from the past they are too young to properly remember.
• Newbie Boom: Horizon 4, thanks to being available in Steam in 2021 with (in certain regions) reduced price for the complete compilation.
• Nintendo Hard: Any event with a field of R1 Le Mans Prototype cars and no assists. These cars have 6-700 horsepower but only weigh 900kg at most, so the slightest twitch on the throttle is almost guaranteed to cause you to spin out and mash into a wall.
  • Forza Motorsport 4 can become just as hard as F-Zero GX or Midnight Club: Los Angeles, if you win loads and loads of races.
  • Forza Horizon games: Insane or Unbeatable difficulty.
  • Three stars on some events, but perhaps most especially the drift runs since these involve being able to drift without spinning or going off course, and being able to go forwards fast enough to beat the course timer - drift being the one challenge that cannot involve taking many cross country shortcuts.
• Older Than They Think: While Horizon 2 is often cited as the first Forza Horizon title where AI opponents will attempt to match the performance index, this is due to the ability to view the starting grid and thus check the cars and PI of the Drivatars. However, limited PI balancing existed in Horizon 1, where the AI will do so◊ but will drop their PI no lower than the minimum PI required to stay within the maximum PI class allowed by the event.
• Polished Port:
  • While the Windows 10 version of Horizon 3 does come with some pretty hefty system requirements and lacks HDR support, it does come with support for 60fps and 4K resolution (both firsts for the Forza Horizon series), alongside better textures, anti-aliasing and draw distance.
  • Forza Motorsport 6: Apex, while not a full-fledged game like the Xbox One version, is easily capable of running at 60fps on even budget graphics cards and also supports up to 4K resolutions.
  • Early reports of the Windows 10 version of Forza Motorsport 7 definitely shows this, with lower system requirements than Forza Horizon 3.
  • Forza Horizon 4 on Windows 10 also features lower system requirements, and more higher-end settings than Horizon 3, working great on both ends of the computer spectrum and it shows in the benchmarks.
• Porting Disaster:
  • The Xbox 360 version of Horizon 2. Not only are its graphics worse in comparison with Horizon 1, but there is way less content in comparison with the Xbox One version and many more bugs. Even Test Drive Unlimited 2, which was released three years ago had far larger map size and better visuals compared to the former.
  • While Horizon 3 has many options seen only in a Polished Port, the coding implementation is less than stellar. Even on extremely high systems, Reddit users report wildly inconsistent performance, framerate stuttering, and crashing. Analysis on the Horizon forums has led some to believe that it is because the game uses the system memory rather than video memory - probably so some lower-end PC and laptops can simply increase RAM instead of installing a new GPU. Most of the porting issues have since been rectified.
  • The PC port of Motorsport 7 suffers from this. A particularly notable issue with the game is that if you spend too long modifying your cars in the upgrades menu, the game can crash due to a memory leak.
  • Initial releases of the PC version of Horizon 4 and Horizon 5 were plagued by bugs and crashes, and in conditions like poor network connection or less than optimal PC specifications, it persists well into the current versions. Can be slightly mitigated by, respectively, avoid playing Horizon Life in poor connection conditions (in which the game warns), and lowering graphics settings.
• The Scrappy:
  • M. Rossi in Motorsport 3 and Motorsport 4, as well as Hailey Harper and Darius Flynt in Horizon 1. In the case of the latter game, this may have played a role as to why Playground Games decided to drop the concept of antagonists in the sequels.
  • Ben Miller, the Festival Manager of Horizon 2, is considered to be the franchise's most annoying character.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Horizon 2's automatic game clip captures, which were a bit too frequent. Thankfully, this is not found in later installments, and Xbox players can now prevent games from doing game captures by changing their settings under "Allow game captures" from "Captures by me or games" to either "Captures by me" or "Don't capture".^note This is under "Preferences > Capture & share" in the Xbox settings on Xbox One or Xbox Series X|S.
  • The Anti-Grinding of skill chains in Horizon 3. Once a player gets to 300,000 skill points, they have to come to a complete stop for at least five seconds (at least six after getting a certain skill unlocked) to get the maximum three skill points per chain, disrupting the player's momentum and unnecessarily punishing particularly skilled players (especially since they're not directly competing against anyone for skill chains). It gets worse when skill songs are involved. It's slightly alleviated in Horizon 4, but that's countered by the sheer number of skills to get for each and every car in the game.
  • Speaking of which, skill songs are unintentionally this in of themselves. Great idea at first, but then if you only feel like just driving to an event or a Horizon Festival (instead of using Fast Travel) or just casually cruising around, then skill songs can become a nuisance as you would have to drop everything to get those skill points. Sure, there was Groove Music (which doesn't support skill songs), but it has since been shut down entirely and removed from Horizon 3, with no replacements for user music in any of the Horizon games since.
  • Wheelspins have become this and a Creator's Pet in the Horizon series. At first, they were a neat little bonus added to Horizon 2 where players can earn extra credits and cars from leveling up. In Horizon 3, it started to get worse when they added the Horizon Edition (now Forza Edition) cars in them and they added the ability to pay for more Wheelspins with credits. But in Horizon 4 they've now become a major component of the game, not only by adding Super Wheelspins, but also adding clothes, emotes, and car horns as prizes. Not only that, for almost every article of clothing, emote, and car horn, Wheelspins are the only way to get more of each of them. (You want to dress as one of the bikers from that showcase event? You have to win each of their helmets, jerseys, trousers, boots, and gloves for each of the four colors, and they're all of Legendary rarity.) Sure, the game is generous with the Wheelspins, but they feel so much like loot boxes now that players would rather pare the Wheelspins back down to being bonus credits and cars while having the ability to buy their own damn clothes with in-game credits (and not with #Forzathon Points for only a couple clothes each week).
  • Since Horizon 4, the night-time in free-roam (and "rolling" time of the day setting in blueprinted events) is disproportionately short, clocking only around 5-10 minutes compared to the 1 hour and 40 minutes of daytime, which, despite being designed for the sake of accessibility (as Playground believes not everyone likes to play/drive/race in the dark), seriously ruin the atmosphere despite proper lighting and night-only effects such as lighting and glowing brake disc. It drew comparison with fellow publisher's State of Decay 2, where in that game daytime lasts half an hour compared to the 1 hour night time for the sake of challenge and atmosphere.
  • Freeroam Rush in Horizon 4, often seen as a Luck-Based Mission (the "luck", in this case, being the trees your car cannot take down and will likely not avoid due to lower grip when off-road, and the lakes that force your car to respawn), is mostly disliked for it being mandatory in public Team Adventures, even in Ranked Adventures. Even when you want to prove your racing skills, you have to partake in at worst two events with little actual racing involved. The skillset of being fast on a road race course being completely different to barrelling as straight as possible across the landscape - if anything the Freeroam Rush is a test of memory as much as skill, favouring drivers who are more familiar with the topography of the map. Freeroam Rush proved to be unpopular enough that it was later removed from Road Racing and Street Scene multiplayer setlists, restricting it to the two disciplines (Dirt and Cross Country) where the player is almost guaranteed to be in a car that can handle the terrain in the first place.
  • Festival Playlists in the Series 7 update of Horizon 4, which makes completing every Seasonal Event (including Trials and Playground Games) and Forzathon challenge throughout each week in addition to participating in the Monthly Rivals challenge and qualifying for Ranked Online Adventure mandatory to obtain new prize cars. Online is required to do Trials, Playground Games seasonal events, and Online Adventure, so players without Xbox Live Gold are locked out of 100% completion of the Playlist. The same thing also applies if a player misses out on a Forzathon daily challenge, possibly due to external factors such as being away from the Xbox on that day. It got worse for achievement hunters when a later update added an achievement that requires completing everything in all four Festival Playlists in any given series, requiring near-daily gameplay.
  • The Island Conqueror riddles in Horizon 4's Fortune Island expansion get you 1,000,000 credits for solving a groaningly obvious riddle and doing a bit of a search, which is great, except that you're likely as not to have to buy the specific car to solve the riddle, which can be up to 800,000 credits, seriously putting a dent into your "Fortune".
  • The Adventure Map in Horizon 5 has been the target of much ire, as it interrupts gameplay with no warning. To clarify, most of the time when you unlock something, be it a skill or a car, you get an on-screen notification but have the option to check it out later. But when you unlock a new Adventure point, the Adventure map pauses the game whether you want it or not, killing your vehicle's momentum in the process. The adventure map doesn't care what you're doing when it comes up means it can frequently interrupt skill chains, speed zones, cutscenes and even multiplayer arcade events. This also pushes the announcer into Annoying Video Game Helper territory.
  • Horizon 5 also volunteers you for group arcade rounds if you happen to be in the area without asking for permission, which suddenly changes your objective to the arcade game. Even if you reset your waypoint, the game constantly yells at you to go to the group objective, even if you don't want to play it.
  • The penalty system in the 2023 Forza Motorsport is something that isn't looked at favorably by anyone. Simply put, if the player goes offroad or bumps into other players, they'll get penalty time added on to your final race time (with the ruleset depending how severe the punishment for certain offenses is). For some reason, this also includes punishing players who get rammed off the road by people going at high speeds or get forcibly spun out by another player and not punishing the player who instigated it and makes starting the race below 6th place and trying to not get penalized a nightmare. The system also seems to give minor offenses more penalty time than major offenses. This also ties into the safety rating in online play, as players who will do their best to attempt a clean race will eventually get penalized for something not even their own fault and tanking their rating.
• Signature Scene: Horizon 4's intro showing what the player was in for with its seasonal change is extremely memorable to a lot of people. Sunrise playing over it also helps.
• Surprise Difficulty:
  • The Horizon games present a colourful arcade open world game bolted to a somewhat realistic physics model, complete with fully detailed car tuning options, much closer to simulation than many players are likely to be expecting given the genre. Thus one of the major sources of advice online is to practice braking and shifting properly because that's how to go quick, and learn what the tuning options do to even stand a chance at higher difficulty. Drifting in particular is often presented in other games as being merely requiring a tap of a key, whereas in Forza it is much more difficult, requiring delicate throttle balance and counter-steering, along with a suitable car and setup.
  • The LEGO Speed Champions DLC for Horizon 4, given that to access the finale, the player has to complete almost all the challenges, which become more ridiculously hard at the Last Lousy Point.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • A lot of the songs in the first game, as the songs are all remixed versions of actual rock and metal songs of The '70s, such as "La Grange" by ZZ Top.
  • The music heard in the opening cinematic of Horizon 2 shares some similarities to M83's "Another Wave from You". This may also be Hilarious in Hindsight, considering "Go!" appears in Horizon 3's soundtrack.
• Tear Jerker:
  • The Endangered Species trailer.
  • The opening cinematic of Horizon 2. The background music, the sights of young people having fun in cars, and that mysterious voiceover woman's narration will give you chills and make you weep Tears of Joy.
  • "Into the Horizon", the final Forzathon for Horizon 3 that went live in February 2019, can be considered this. The entire Forzathon is themed around the Horizon Festival in Australia finally coming to an end and closing up shop, as mentioned throughout the names of the challenges. In addition to this, the end date of this Forzathon goes all the way up to September 28, 2099, a whole 93 years after the Ultimate Edition release of the game.
• That One Achievement:
  • The Solid Gold achievement in Motorsport 3. Getting gold in all racing events in a very long process.
  • Motorsport 6 has "One for the History Books", which requires you to complete every Showcase, Series and Car Division in the base game, or 100% the Career mode. Much like above, it will be a long process and will likely take a month to complete with serious dedication.
• That One Level:
  • Silverstone. It seems to be the dev's pet level because it comes up constantly in the single-player events. One of the most boring tracks to look at, boring to drive on, and it's full of 90-degree corners, making it an absolute nightmare to drive on online.
  • All R1 events from Forza Motorsport 3, especially on the highest difficulty. All R1 class cars are endurance prototype cars that are very fast and very difficult to control. Also, they have little to no upgrades available, meaning you are going to rely on your skills only. And M.Rossi always drives the best car in the game, the Peugeot 908.
  • Forza Motorsport 4 has two Track Day events that earn the scorn of most players, thanks to the excellently driven AI cars:
    • The Fujimi Kaido event puts you on arguably the trickiest circuit in the game in an A-class car making your way around superminis and city cars. The combination of steep narrow roads and sharp, blind turns only make the AI even slower than usual, and if they swerve across the road there is no space for you to avoid them. And on the one stretch of relatively straight road, an AI car has usually come to a complete halt.
    • The Nürburgring event isn't much better. You are in an S-class supercar on the "Green Hell" passing small hatchbacks and a couple of SUVs. The width of the SUVs means they will back up many cars behind them that cannot get past. And yes, they are by far the slowest traffic cars on the circuit.
  • New York City in Motorsport 2 and Motorsport 3. It's basically two straightaways on Times Square, three 90 degree turns, and a roundabout, making it tiring to race on. It's even worse in Motorsport 3's "New Circuit" version, which adds a chicane on each straightaway - the chicanes will take out at least one person per lap, the chicanes are so narrow that if one car wrecks, all the cars wreck. And finally, the chicanes are placed at the perfect distance to make passing almost impossible unless your car is far, far faster than the person you're passing.
  • The Long Beach Circuit in Motorsport 5. There is a reason why it is considered to be "the Monaco of America" in Real Life; it is one of the narrowest tracks ever featured in the franchise, combine it with 16 cars on the track and you'll get a supply of Nightmare Fuel in the form of endless fender benders in the first three corners. Oh and it has returned in Motorsport 6, we dare you to do a 24 car race here. Or we would if the game wasn't made of spite, since the very first series of the very first part of the campaign does exactly that.
  • In Horizon 2, a lot of people tend to be tripped up by the cross country races. In addition to the loosely defined tracks making it easy to miss checkpoints, you also need to contend with the jumps that can flip your car up if you approach it even slightly wrong. Furthermore, not many cars are actually suited to driving off-road. This isn't too bad in single-player where cross country races don't appear in certain championships, but in multiplayer where you are unrestricted by car type it is a lot easier to end up with a terrible off-road car. Special mention goes to the Montellino Grande Cross Country, which combines all the worst aspects of cross country races: Several large jumps, sharp corners, uneven terrain, and a driving line that skirts dangerously close to obstacles.
  • The Titan race from Horizon 4 is probably the hardest of the ultimate races (including the Goliath Level 20 road race round the whole map). Since it's an off road race it is far easier for the AI to pass you with even the smallest loss of momentum than it is on road courses. Checkpoints aren't as clear as on road or dirt races. There are lots of solid obstacles such as houses and trees, and other obstructions that sap speed away like rivers and fences. And any damage sustained will be exacerbated by the big jump off the ridge that will cause some loss of speed, and is guaranteed to make your car a sitting duck before the finish if it gets too beaten up.
  • Some of the seasonal challenges bump up the difficulty enormously by swapping out a suitable car for an unsuitable one, and locking the tuning setup - causing severe frustration for players used to tuning in their car. "Forest Sprite" for example, replaces a rally car for a race against motocross bikes with a tiny Healey Sprite - a slow, incredibly twitchy and unstable 1950s roadster that can barely navigate the bumps let alone go fast.
• That One Sidequest:
  • In the Horizon series, attempting to get 3 stars on certain chapters in Horizon Stories can, at times, be unreasonably difficult.
    • The third chapter from Upgrade Heroes in Horizon 4, The Camino, has you drive a pimped-out Chevy El Camino. Getting 3 stars involves you getting the car from Point A to Point B within a single minute while staying above 100 mph, which can be easy if you know how to handle the car. This does not apply when playing the chapter during the winter season, as many players can attest that 3-starring this chapter during that season is impossible and should be played during any other season. The car's traction is nonexistent, which makes it impossible to drive the car in a straight line, likely because all of the road you drive on is covered in snow. Add the 100 mph restriction and your car that had no traction somehow has even less. Even the one person who did manage to 3-star this chapter during the winter admitted that it took them an hour to beat.
    • Horizon 5. Test Driver: Baja Horizon Story. Chapter 2. Actual nightmare. To do this, you need to amass 120,000 skill points within 3 minutes and 20 seconds. Considering that you're in the Bajas for this, your only reliable source of skill points would be to constantly drift, but that's not going to be enough as you need to maintain a high skill chain to multiply your score and reach the aforementioned number. To add the finishing touches of the cake that is very much made out of the sand you're driving on, you have to do this in the Porsche #65 Rothsport Racing 911 "Desert Flyer", almost being an Ironic Name considering the car can barely be controlled off-road in the middle of the desert.
  • Horizon 5:
    • Costa Rocosa's Fast Travel Board is located on top of a house. You need to jump off a hill from far away in a really fast car to break it. Too slow and you don't go far enough into the air, too fast and you miss it entirely.
    • At Palacio Azul Del Oceano, there is a single bonus board that is both deceptive and unreasonably difficult to get. It's located on a balcony above the pathway leading from the courtyard to the beach and is placed in front of a Danger Sign. You will never reach the board if you use the danger sign regardless of what car you use. Instead, you have to use a hill (specifically the one with a radio shack at the top of it, which has its own bonus board) and use that to give yourself enough speed to launch yourself off a ledge and to the balcony. Not only do you have to position yourself so you don't hit any bumps that cause you to lose speed when going down the hill, but unless you are a professional sharpshooter, you'll either crash into the building or go flying towards the beach 90% of the time you attempt this because you didn't aim yourself correctly as your car does a barrel roll going off the edge. And this is assuming you did get enough speed going down the hill in the first place.
    • Vado Del Rio's Speed Trap has a deceptively low 3-star requirement. The problem comes from building up speed, as the straight roads don't provide much distance and force you to rely on hills, and the water it's placed on, causing the car to greatly slow down right at the end. A great off-road car and strategy is mandatory.
    • The Horizon Promo accolades in Horizon 5 are backbreaking, asking you to photograph every car in the game, Forza Edition and DLC cars included. While Horizon 4 did this same exact thing, Horizon 5 takes the extra mile to have you to photograph every drivable car in the game... along with traffic cars and cars only seen in Horizon Stories and showcase events, which you might not realize until you view the collection of cars you've photographed and see those cars in the collection.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Horizon Arcade in Horizon 5 is widely regarded as being inferior to #Forzathon Live in Horizon 4. Although there is now more gameplay variety with Horizon Arcade events and they do appear more frequently, with two events happening simultaneously every 15 minutes, rather than #Forzathon Live's once an hour every hour, Horizon Arcade events now last for only ten minutes instead of fifteen (also now giving late arrivals two minutes to join instead of two-and-a-half) while still requiring the same amount of effort, if not more so, as #Forzathon Live events to complete the three rounds. These combined with a lack of motivating factors for other players to join, some serious online issues with Horizon Arcade that are preventing players from having any more than one or two other players from participating, if there are any others at all, and the fact that completing all three rounds of a Horizon Arcade event is a requirement for the Festival Playlist,^note it has to be all three rounds for any given single Horizon Arcade event, not three separate completed rounds from up to three separate events has led to players demanding Playground Games to fix the game mode or bring #Forzathon Live back. That said, Playground did rectify some of the issues in early updates and even adjusted the requirements for completion based on the number of participating players, but even then Horizon Arcade still fails to bring in many players at a time, defeating the point of them being a major cooperative multiplayer component in the game.
• Tough Act to Follow: Forza Horizon 3: Hot Wheels is often considered to be the best expansion in the Forza Horizon series. The following toyetic expansion, Forza Horizon 4: LEGO Speed Champions, has been seen overall as a disappointing follow-up, with a less exciting environment that feels like an odd mashup of realism and giant LEGO bricks, a lackluster and too open-ended campaign, and a surprisingly low amount of toy-based cars (just five LEGO Speed Champions cars, with the barn find car not being unlocked until a later update, and a much later one adding the LEGO Bugatti Chiron).
• Unconventional Learning Experience: Horizon 3 adds scenic vistas as collectibles, which trigger a real-life fact about the location in question. As an example, there is one that goes over the Aboriginal legend surrounding the Glass House Mountains.
• Visual Effects of Awesome:
  • The television spot for Forza Motorsport 6 features the game's cover car, the 2017 Ford GT, driving through well-realised 3D renditions of several classic racing games. What pushes it into a case study in visual effect perfection however is that the fact that the Ford GT featured in the ad is actually real; a rig was built that could lift up and tilt the car as needed, with the car being seamlessly inserted into the CG world afterwards. The fact that the effect is so seamless and invisible is just impressive.
  • While the games have always been pretty to look at, nothing can match how spectacular Forza Motorsport 7, Forza Horizon 3, and Forza Horizon 4 look in native 4K with HDR.
  • Horizon 5 does all that and gives players breathtaking vistas with long draw distances, incredible lighting, impressive smoke effects, and meticulously-detailed-to-the-needle cacti in a large, varied environment.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • Aside from the game explicitly taking place in 2012, there are a few things in Forza Horizon 1 that tie it to that year. The most obvious being the presence of Lostprophets songs on the soundtrack, something that would be unthinkable just a few months later.
  • The sequels, despite dropping the year from the in-game's setting, also fall victim to this: Horizon 3 lets you use Groove as a radio station, and Horizon 4 has prominent Mixer product placement. As of 2020, both services were discontinued by Microsoft, although Horizon 3 did remove all mentions of Groove after that service was discontinued entirely (even removing the OneDrive streaming), retroactively making it less this trope. Horizon 4, however, can't do such a thing as Mixer was much more integrated to the point of having the service mentioned on in-game LED banners and having in-game Mixer-branded clothes for avatars.
  • The icons and some text in the menus and skill pop-ups in Horizon 4 made extensive use of icons with long flat shadows that go to the lower-right, an aspect of material design that was popular in the mid-2010s. When Horizon 4 launched, that trend of iconography design was just starting to fall out of favor. Tellingly, Horizon 5 uses more text-heavy menus and has removed the long flat shadows altogether.
  • Jeremy Clarkson's Autovista pieces in Forza Motorsport 4 became this after a few years. Most obviously the references to Top Gear became instantly dated, and treating boutique hypercars that could top 1000 bhp or have a max speed above 200 mph as something outstanding became ever more an artifact of the 2000s.

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