Forza Horizon 5 is sandbox-style racing at its finest. It has excellent community tracks, great visuals, and a polished driving experience. Yet, I never find myself getting into it as much as other gamers. Maybe it’s because of the unrewarding progression, or the fact that I much prefer games where there’s a challenge or motivation to get to the end.
See, Forza has one big problem: it caters to everyone. Once you start doing that, you naturally run into an identity crisis. By no means are the Horizon games bad; it just feels like they lack a bit of soul.
On the other hand, Need for Speed: Pro Street, a game that’s 18 years old, is the complete opposite. It’s a game that’s not talked about much these days, and that’s deeply sad once you start to realize how many things it got right. After revisiting the game recently, I was surprised by just how many parallels it draws with Forza, and how it does what Forza does, but better. Here are a few things I think Forza can learn from this nearly two-decade-old game.
A Refresher On Need For Speed Pro Street
It would be very easy to say that Pro Street is a perfect game that everyone loves, but that would be a lie. By switching to a track-focused setting, ditching the usual over-the-top narrative, and changing the handling, this game alienated a lot of Need For Speed fans. It was more grounded, handled like a “sim-cade”, and featured a tournament-style progression system.
The premise is that instead of a sandbox setting or structured story, you compete in multiple event types throughout structured race days in a racing festival. Sound familiar?
Pro Street is methodical, forcing you to build the right car setups to succeed in each event. There are four events here: Grip, Drift, Drag, and Speed challenges. It rarely happens that all of the modes on offer are fun in a racing game, but this one manages to achieve success. The handling for all car types feels great, damage modeling actually feels impactful, and requires actual strategy if you want to succeed on race day.
At the time, it was divisive because people were very used to the more chaotic, arcade racing. But I appreciate Pro Street’s bold decision to switch things up. If you give it a chance today, you’ll be surprised by how quickly you’ll get addicted to conquering each race day.
Expansive Open-World Vs Focused Tracks
Forza Horizon 4 is the game that people will remember as going big on spectacle. It’s hard to forget about the gigantic hovercraft, the Halo Experience showcase, and even simpler moments like driving through Edinburgh in the water. Both Forza Horizon 4 and 5 are beautiful games, and the visual spectacle helps a lot in keeping you engaged.
Pro Street uses a different approach. It’s a game that creates memories with its simple moment-to-moment gameplay. The contained atmosphere of the race days was alive — charismatic announcer, loud crowds, and a named roster of rivals that genuinely posed a threat. It trades the freedom of a sandbox for a more intensive, track-based structure. Each race day was its own contained location, making you feel like you’re competing at a curated venue.
Why is this better? Well, it makes you feel like you’re actually working towards something rather than just completing another task on the map. This sort of structured progression makes victories feel more meaningful and hard-earned. I understand that Forza thrives on its freedom and more laid-back approach, but that doesn’t mean it should ignore a rewarding progression system.
The solution is to blend the best of both worlds. Something like a dedicated tour across the map could work very well. Horizon Adventure is supposed to be that, but it seems so detached that it doesn’t quite have the impact it should have on the Festival. Turn it into an active tour that guides players through a series of curated events that they have to complete to progress, and you already have a more interesting setting. You can still keep the open world for multiplayer racing, side quests, and exploration.
Unlocking Cars And Tuning
In Forza, there is an abundance of cars to collect. You’re showered with cars from Wheelspins, the Festival Playlist, Barn Finds, and more. I only played Horizon 5 for 15-20 hours, and accumulated over 150 cars. The funny thing is that I was never even aiming to collect most of them. Once I did get a cool car, I’d try it out in a few races for an hour, then return to whatever car’s handling I liked most at the time.
This is something that’s simply not possible in Pro Street. Try entering a drift-focused car into a speed or grip event, and you’ll understand why. You have to build, tune, and maintain separate cars for each event type, and this means you end up caring more about your garage than you would with Forza.
Both games have different approaches to car collecting, and Forza’s freedom does work in its favor. However, it takes things too far. It devalues the rewards by constantly bombarding you with them, kills motivation because you feel like a “superstar” in the first few hours, and discourages deep engagement.
But whether they should change this system or not is the multi-million-dollar question. The system might be flawed, but it works. It’s a major success in attracting a gigantic casual audience. Long-term retention is a major weakness here, but it doesn’t matter when you have a player count of over 50 million.
Again, they could go the route of separating the Career mode from the sandbox. Maybe an optional “Pro Tour” that operates within its own economy and real stakes, separate from your garage and progression in the open-world sandbox. But even that might sound too risky to Playground Games.
A Real Story
I’m not going to sit here and pretend that Pro Street has a cohesive story that is as good as its predecessors (Carbon, Most Wanted, etc), but the narrative was certainly more engaging than modern Forza. Even a decade after I played Pro Street for the first time, I can still name you characters from the game: Ryan Cooper, Ryo Watanabe, and even Sofia.
On the other hand, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, Haley is the only real character I remember from Forza Horizon 5. That’s because the characters don’t matter. Their jokes often fall flat, you don’t care for their quests apart from the rewards, and no conflict makes you care about them. You can decide to pursue the Horizon Adventure like the game wants you to, or you can just drive around and do as you please.
That idea of “doing nothing” is perfectly fine, and that’s what a lot of players are actually looking for. However, the main quest should at least have sort of draw to lure you in. That could be interesting characters, rewards that you truly can’t get anywhere else, or compelling antagonists that give you a fair challenge.
Change Is Difficult
I realize that even with some of these valid criticisms, changing a formula that generates so much revenue is a very challenging decision. Forza may not be for hardcore fans of street racing or for those who like a challenge, but the numbers prove that it draws the casual audience in droves. But you can always learn lessons from games that had a successful formula in the past. Forza can still be as accessible as it is, while also having a bit of soul. Whether it’s worth putting in the work for that idea is a question only the developers themselves can answer.
