Recent reviews by Radzieoon

Democracy prevailed

Scam award for most innovative gameplay deserves a review bombing.

2023: Account creation required. Tutorials are designed for offline play but heists even solo are apparently only online.
Wasn't able to launch single heist.
Will update review when it works but for now it deservers to be buried to the ground. Worst game release this year.

You can launch it casually for half an hour or you can sink in for long hours because there is always something new you want to try.

As on EA release date it's a buggy (and btw. if you don't know how something works due to lack of info and it's complicated then it's probably a bug), unintuitive mess, super poor UI (not reactive, not scalable, no informative tooltips on hover, popups, neither tips about mechanics beside few popup instructions about the simplest controls).
No hotkeys.
Weird and slow camera movement (lol they require Shift to speed it up).
Big problems with music audio adjustment (although the slider is ok, the results are completely crazy).
Many basic game/UI mechanics are painful like e.g. moving gold, moving something in/out or even dividing your troops between tiles, you almost never know what object is active, what is the target and what is the type of the target.
No vs. AI custom scenario mode, only campaign (looks like 1 of 2 campaigns still not available). It would not be a problem for this state of the game but in campaign you can't access castles, technology, more advanced unit producing before magic 2h mark before the refund option (because all 3 available from the beginning missions are starting with troops walking around without any surrounding castle). So basically I can't even assess one of the core functionalities of Clash 1 before 2h game time.
I If you didn't play Clash 1 you won't even have a clue how to play this one. If you did play 1 it's still difficult to get to know mechanics.

The graphics are nice and atmospheric, although the sudden change of daylight/weather after every turn end is unpleasent for an eye. The combat animations are ok.
The combat itself is similar to this of Clash 1, but greatly enhanced. It doesn't matter though because as I said it's super unintuitive with this UX/UI.

The best part of the game is definitely the audio. Great music which covers some of the Clash 1 music but refined. Unit sounds are top-notch.

The game is very climatic what also was the biggest advantage of Clash 1 but unfortunately Clash 2 is a half product for now, worth around 5-10$. It can really be the great continuation of Clash 1 if much effort is put into UX/UI and base mechanics improvement. Until then I suggest to refrain. I was a big fan of Clash 1 and I hope for a good future of Clash 2 and will consider not to refund to support the devs.

The introduction to the game could be much improved and there is almost no backstory. The driving model is bad. The camera work could be much better, like for e.g. in Foxhole instead of static (or unintuitive dynamic camera option is settings). The map and minimap is cluttered. The environment is chaos what means that AI is far from ideal. The navigation through the menus is not polished.

I will focus more on the issues, because most of the people who want to buy this game already know what is good in this game to be expected.

Pros

• Nice graphics, good optimization
  
• HUGE amount of content
  
• Fun gameplay once you get familiar with issues
  
• Interesting events and game modes

Cons

• Crashes on startup on many (hardware)/software configurations. Took me about 3-4 hours to get it working. To minimalize the chance that you encounter the crash make sure that:
  * you have your Windows updated (I had problems with updating Windows and the game requires the version from 2019)
  * you have the latest graphics card drivers
  * you add ForzaHorizon5.exe as an exception in all functions of your antivirus. I have Bitdefender and I turned about 10 functions off and it still didn't work, because I didn't notice 1 hidden function of Advanced Threat Defense. The fact that Bitdefender wasn't notifying me of any threats didn't help. So I found on reddit that there is such function and after I turned it off the game magically started to work.
  
• In-game crashes. There isn't ultimate solution for this (still had 2 crashes for ~10h of the gameplay), but definitely set Run as Administrator in the properties of ForzaHorizon5.exe as it helps with most of the crash reasons
  
• For steering wheel users: the client doesn't remember what button config you had chosen (I created my custom one) so every time I launch the game I need to choose my custom config
  
• The client has issues with saving some settings for another play sessions. Don't be surprised if you launch the game to find out that your settings are back to previous state. After some time it works ok and your settings should be saved correctly for the long run.
  
• Many disconnect issues. It starts to become less annoying once you get an idea how the in-game connection process works. There is also some problem with joining the events - sometimes the UI dissapears and you may think something is broken, but that's just the state of connecting and creating the session with other players. It may take a while, but don't Alt + F4 :D
  
• There are in-game events that don't save correctly. E.g. you buy a house, you set it as your home and after another client launch it turns out that you don't own the house and your home place is reset. After some time played it magically reloads and suddenly you own the house again (but need to set as your home). Supper annoying.
  
• Some memory leaks or something, because when Alt-Tabbing and using browser after some time the game drops to 30-60fps and is not smooth at all and sometimes stutters. This state is not reversible (closing the browser doesn't help). Only restarting the game helps. The issue doesn't occur when I don't use the browser while playing.
  
• Lighting issues when in cockpit / mask camera views. The problem occurs mostly at sunrises / sunsets and in most cases the road / environment is too dark and not pleasant to drive at these camera views. There is also issue of headlights not giving enough vision when it's evening/night.
  
• No function to manually turn headlights on/off
  
• This one is really bad for me. In cockpit there is animation of driver turning steering wheel only 180deg (90 to the left and right). This is horrible for a racing game of 2021. Fortunately there is another cockpit view without a steering wheel, but it's positioned differently.
  
• This one is also annoying. The buttons to look left/right work like instant switch. It could be more polished - offer a smooth transition.
  
• The sequential gear changing doesn't have neutral gear... Moreover when switching to h-shifter it has neutral gear, but something is bugged, because pushing the throttle very very slowly but surely accelerates the car.
  
• No permanent handbrake while standing still. Wanna stand still on slope without pushing the brakes? Nope, can't do that... I guess pausing the game could work for this but maybe I don't want to pause the freakin game?
  
• On all assists off and simulation mode there are cars which on high speed after very small turns just spin and you can't countersteer any of this bs. Nothing of reallife is in this car behaviour. I'm an experienced simracer and believe me, cars don't work like this. Probably I could tune most of the car's setup to correct this but default settings should work quite fine.
  
• Tiles in UI. Windows 8 had it and you know how it was reviewed. After a while you get used to it, but such a huge content being accessed through the big tiles is imo definitely worse than the one through a lists.
  
• No guide through what icon means what + no tooltips. You have to learn all by yourself. Moreover you often get flooded with notifications because of huge game content so that doesn't help. :D
  
• Hard to understand event car requirements and find a car which suits. You have to learn this by yourself too. Once you get it it's not a problem anymore, but there was whole fuss about accessibility in FH5 and this is complete opposite.
  
• Some controls are not possible on steering wheel. E.g. showcase rooms, steering camera in photo mode, etc. You have to do this by the mouse and sometimes the controls bug and keep switching very frequently although there is only 1 control input at the time.
  
• Some in-game functions can not work and you may wonder why and what's broken (e.g. Forza Link). Just need to advance the carreer and some functions oddly unlock quite late.
  
• Rare road traffic and even if there is some it sometimes disappears
  
• Sometimes you can't say if you're racing real players or AI Drivatars (there are no icons indicating this and Drivatars names are based on real players but only have lvl 1 I believe)
  
• Lack of car class progress. You can get the fastest cars early in the game and there are also not that many much slower cars and most of them can be upgraded to be cosmic quick anyway. For me TDU2 is the role model for the car class progression system. Though I understand the reasons behind this approach in FH5:
  * if there was a car class progression system it could be somewhat difficult to manage over 500 cars existing in the game and restrict some car upgrades
  * the game is targeted to the wider (younger) audience

I will recommend when the game is more polished. For now if you keep attention to details you have to prepare for some obstacles to truly enjoy the game in first hours of gameplay. Otherwise it can be the most fun racing game you will play.

Tired of all these lies and waiting for the real game fixes and by that I mean game mechanics fixes and not quests fixes because that's the only thing they've been fixing since the beginning.

1. Really make this minimap work while driving
2. Fix in car cockpit view position that I could actually see the road while driving
3. Fix in car cockpit view super duper intensive glare that I could actually see anything during the day
These 3 are the minimum requirements to make me(and many people I guess) come back to play the game and they should be really easy to implement.

Ofc I know that driving mechanics, ridiculous races and traffic AI(I guess it's the same thing, also including lack of police chases, because there is no driving AI) and pedestrian AI will never be reworked(or should I say created) so next in line to fix are useless skills in skill tree, stupid economy and broken hacking(if you dig deeper into netrunning you'll see how many bugs there are in basic scanning/hacking).

This review was supposed to be much more organized and rather positive, but I'm just tired of waiting and watching every ridiculous patch/hotfix notes.

Such a huge potential wasted and I bet they're already focusing more on releasing DLCs and getting another pile of cash asap(their actions weren't really punished so they don't feel any remorses), while publishing lies about how the game is becoming super fixed. Basically their estimation what will bring more benefits is easy and the outcome is simple: sell dlcs = money and people will forget about the past or will be deceived by lies.

+Very fun and satisfying gameplay
+Diversified decks
+Appealing design
-Poor balance
-Pay2Win
-Same very few soundtrack songs playing over and over again

This game is madness. It's like Sic Mundus Creatus Est in 'Dark' Season 3 on steroids.