After some time playing through the game I realized it would never get better.

FH5 is the final GaaSification of the Horizon formula. Just an endless tangle of player retention mechanics crawling over each other in the form of weekly, daily and seasonal tasks, missable cars, an ever present roulette spin for every time you level up, car-specific XP rewards, forzathon points grind, and probably more I'm just missing. Everything fits together and creates a system to keep the player paying for Gamepass, and just goes to show how much harm this business model could do to the quality of AAA launches.

The story is genuinely one of the most embarrassing things I've ever put up with, and a lot of it is non-skippable at that. T10 really went all out to show what it thinks about the player with its cringe, corporate, safe, lifeless dialog, filled with non-characters that are borderline racist caricatures and just won't shut up (Trust me, I tried. The character voice volume slider doesn't even work).

Story events are a huge pain to go through and what's worse is they aren't even fun on their own. Exhibition events got way too big and they're just lifeless and goofy scripted 5 minute stretches at this point. There was a moment of realization when I played the monster truck event where you have to knock some giant bowling pins where it struck me, there's no more denying to it, the target audience's age for the game went down at least 10 years since FH1.

The game perfected the physics and the driving sensations, now enhanced by the vibrating triggers on the Series S/X. That's a big plus and something really solid in the game. There's a big amount of cars (even if the DLC is prohibitely expensive) and despite the absence of a few big brands, it's generally a good job even if some of the models are now generations old. That said, there's a lot of customization options on each car and seeing a lot of them have special body kits now is quite good and allows for a lot of player expression.

However as it comes to the racing itself, it's a game where nothing matters anymore. Railings, trees, stone walls, doesn't matter, the car will just destroy it and carry on. There isn't even almost any traffic at all unless you select a specific offline mode. It is a frustration free package, races are extremely short and rarely ever go past the 3 laps. No thought required, no learning curve of any sort while offline. Online is just rolling the meta car with the meta tune and trying not to get punted out of the track.

Visually the game looks really, really good. Really blows me away at times, it also makes a great use of the console's SSD, making fast travel almost instant.

There are also a lot of bugs in the game. I remember playing it a month or two after release and being unable to fast travel and then drive. The controller would stop responding in game requiring a restart. The text-to-speech would also activate on the main menu screen and the option to turn it off wouldn't work. This still happens.

There are a lot of legacy issues coming straight from FH4 and FH3 even. Namely the auction house still being broken. The controller remap menu still being pretty much useless and even some cars being listed as barn finds (but actually aren't) because apparently they forgot changing that from one of the previous games where they actually were barn finds.

The music choices were interesting. Overall I'm not a fan of it but I took a couple songs for my personal playlists. Listening to the radio stations absolutely butcher already tame songs to fit that E for Everyone rating was some sort of salt on the wound when you pair it with the literal Fortnite dances, the goofy character costumes and the hypercars doing off road, cartoonish stunts to an announcer calling your avatar a superstar in spanglish.

Overall I'm just really unimpressed with the game. I consider it one of the most disgusting things I've ever played and a biopsy of the cancer that eats away the AAA sector. The actual one with the 10/10s, not the latest EA flop people will bash anyways.

Everyone knows the good parts. The gameplay is great and the cars feel just right, the graphics are a technical achievement and the map and car selection are awesome (even if lancia and alfa are missing this time around).
However this game represents what I was afraid the franchise would turn into after 4. It starts with emotes and clothes and ends up with an embarrassing attempt at a story and characters. It just won't give up on reminding you the current audience for Horizon.
I'm going straight to the point and say that i find this game to be downright racist with its depictions of Mexicans. Listening to those never ending dialogs with two or three Spanish words sprinkled in every line is embarrassing, I'm done with Alejandra talking about her familia and her tio's vocho. Just let me collect the damn cars. What's worse is the exhibition events aren't even hype nor fun unlike the previous games, having these really annoying cartoons of a character talk on top of them is the icing on the cake, having some of them be locked on AT transmission is downright criminal.
A big part of the game saw no evolution since FH4. Same old issues, a real copy+paste in some things, still can't preview liveries, rebinding buttons is still a pain in the ass, auction house is still hot garbage since FH3, even the cars that were barn finds in the previous game are still tagged as such, really how does something like that get past QA?
Feels like the formula was polished at 3 (but not perfected) and everything after that was just building bullshit around it to retain players and maximize gamepass subs by finding an even younger public. Maybe I'm just getting older.
Overall I'm pretty disappointed in the game and will probably just stick around for the core gameplay, I wish i could just skip the bullshit. All i wanted was to collect virtual cars, man.