Forza Horizon 5 Mexico Map Revealed in Full

As expected, the latest Forza Horizon 5 live stream has revealed the full map of the game ahead of its launch this November.

Though we already knew quite a bit about the game’s setting, including the 11 “biomes”, the map has been under wraps until now. Coming in at roughly 50% larger than the UK map featured in Forza Horizon 4, it was apparent that it wouldn’t be a direct 1:1 recreation of its location, but we can clearly see it’s something of a “Greatest Hits” of the country’s geography.

If you click on the image above you can see the map in full 4K resolution, but even at a slightly shrunken scale, the Gran Caldera volcano — the highest point ever featured in a Horizon game — rather dominates the map, which runs from the Gulf coast in the east to the Pacific in the west.

There’s two routes up to the crater at the top, with a winding tarmac road on one side and a dirt course on the other. Both are reminiscent of Pikes Peak, before and after it was paved! There’s a map marker for a radio telescope up there too.

We’ve previously seen the hub city of Guanajuato, and that’s located towards the center of the map but to the north. There are other smaller settlements too, with the largest being Mulege, an oasis town in Baja California, and Playa Azul on the Gulf coast.

Players will also quickly spot El Estadio Horizon just south of Guanajuato. This is the Horizon Stadium which we saw during the E3 reveal trailer, showing off the game’s all-new Event Labs. There also appears to be another pre-built racing facility over at Dunas Blancas in the west, where you can see an offroad course including an oval with a figure-eight layout.

For those interested in Mexico’s long history, there’s plenty to explore too. On this version of the map we can see markers for the Mayan settlements of Tulum (also seen in Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag) and Ek Balam, the Toltec statues at Tula, and the ancient Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan. The latter location seems to include a drag strip down the forebodingly named Avenue of the Dead…

As well as the various routes around the map, both on and off the road, there’s a long motorway that stretches from almost the south-west corner up to the north-east, providing a quick way of getting places. There’s also an airport in the south-west, called “Airfield in the Jungle” (it sounds better in Spanish), which likely hosts another drag strip.

In addition to all of that, we also got to see another one of the Horizon Festival hubs. This time it was the Horizon Wilds Festival which, as the name suggests is centered on off-road racing of all stripes. We’ll likely hear more about the various Festival types in future Let’s Go episodes.

There was also some discussion about the various seasons — you can see that the map is set in the Summer/Wet Season — and how they might affect your cars this time out. One item noted was that tire smoke will be directly related to the heat of the tires: the hotter the tire, the more smoke it will kick up. Seasons will also play a factor here as hotter seasons will heat the tires up faster, and colder seasons will require a bit more work.

If that wasn’t quite enough, Playground Games’ creative director Mike Brown started off the stream with a wholly unexpected reveal. Noting that there haven’t been any new reveals since the game’s initial announcement at E3, Brown took the opportunity to right that wrong and revealed the 2020 Toyota GR Supra. This will be in the game on day one, and all players will receive the car right at the beginning of the game. There’s also plenty of tuning options, as we saw.

There’s just three months standing in the way until Forza Horizon 5 lands on the Xbox Series consoles and Windows 10 PCs this November, and we’re sure to see and hear more about all the content coming our way soon.