Forza Horizon 5 is a lot like your local used car dealership in that both dominate your TV screen for hours at night with the siren song of “500 cars!!!” So the question isn’t if you’re going to buy a new car. Rather, it’s what you’re going to buy.
Playground Games’ celebrated open-world racer, which is out now for Xbox and PC (via Game Pass for both), isn’t just impressive for featuring more than 500 cars. What’s impressive is that every car is tuned bespoke, handling with palpable difference from the other 499. The result is a dizzying possibility of choice. Some cars are great. Some, not so much. And a select few are truly best-in-class, part of an exclusive red-rope club you’d only expect to find on a parkway off the Ligurian. That’s to say nothing about how, at the start of every race, you can fine-tune specs yourself, including tire pressure, spring stiffness, caster angle, braking pressure, and so on.
Full stop: I don’t care about that stuff. I can’t even honestly say I understand it. If you’re looking for a list of the best cars in Forza Horizon 5 based on math and physics and all that, you’re probably better off looking elsewhere. (Credit where it’s due, the good folks at Eurogamer have an impressive rundown.)
My go-to metric for choosing which cars are best in Forza Horizon 5 is, quite simply: “Car go fast make vroom.” That’s not just a measure of how physically fast a vehicle can go on a straightaway, but also a benchmark determinative of a completely subjective equation that factors in how well it handles, how much it costs, and, sure, how pretty it looks in screenshots. Forza Horizon 5, at the end of the day, is about getting behind the wheel of cool rides that are a blast to drive. By that standard, these are the cream of the crop.