Forza Horizon 5

Forza Horizon 5 could still make a top 10 list entirely on its own merits, and I kept it here on purpose even with Horizon 6 sitting at rank one. Mexico's biomes, the volcano, the jungle, the desert, still look and drive beautifully years after launch, and the sheer amount of content means you could play nothing else for months. I put well over a hundred hours into this before Horizon 6 existed and never felt like I'd seen it all. It misses the top 10 purely because the newer game does almost everything it does, just better and fresher. If you already own Horizon 5, there's no urgent reason to abandon it.

Forza Horizon 6 is already out, and it's a great game in its own right, but Horizon 5 hasn't earned a downgrade from me yet. Mexico is still one of the best-looking open worlds on Xbox, volcanoes, jungle, and coastline stitched into one seamless map. Multiplayer here isn't a separate mode bolted onto the campaign. It's baked into free roam itself. Other players' cars are on the road with you, convoy events fire as you pass, and Horizon Arcade turns strangers into a team without touching a menu. I grew up on Need for Speed and Gran Turismo, and this is the friendliest, least sweaty racing game I've put real hours into. The catalogue of cars can feel bloated if all you want is a quick race.

I went back and forth on whether a racing game belongs on an open-world list at all, and Forza Horizon 5 is the one that convinced me it should. I've put plenty of hours into Forza on Xbox over the years, and Horizon's take on Mexico is still the best free-roam driving sandbox I've driven through, volcanoes, jungle, desert, all connected without a loading screen in between. It looks fantastic on PS5. The platform only got it in 2025. This isn't really open-world in the exploration-and-discovery sense the rest of this list is built around, it's open-world in service of driving fast and looking good doing it. That's a narrower pitch, which is exactly why it sits outside the top 10 rather than in it.

Horizon 6 isn't out on PS5 yet, so Forza Horizon 5 keeps the open-world crown here, and it earns that spot on its own merits. Mexico's map mixes volcanoes, jungle, desert, and colonial towns, and the rotating seasonal events keep the festival from feeling static. I've lost entire evenings just driving between events without picking one. That's not something I say about many open-world games. The handling sits closer to arcade than GT7, forgiving enough for anyone to hop in, with real tuning depth underneath for players who want it. The one knock is age. It launched in 2021, and even with constant content drops, the freshest paint has worn a little thin.

Forza Horizon 5 is the obvious racing pick for a list like this and the reason it sits in honorable mentions rather than the top ten is purely about two-player focus. Convoys and head-to-head races work well, but the game is designed around a broader world that does not really narrow down to exactly two people the way the ranked picks do. That said, for a duo that loves cars and wants something low-pressure to share between sessions, the open-world loop in Mexico is hard to beat. Gran Turismo fans on PS5 will recognise the sandbox energy immediately. On Xbox, this is the equivalent.

Gran Turismo 7 is what I play when I want a serious racing experience on PS5. Forza Horizon 5 is what I would put on when friends are over and I want everyone in the room to have fun immediately. The difference is the tone. Horizon does not care if you take a corner badly or drive into a field. Convoys let you cruise through Mexico with a group while optional events pop up around you, and the mix of structured races and chaotic open-world moments keeps things moving. It is the most generous racing game on Xbox in terms of how quickly it rewards mixed-skill groups, and nothing else on the platform comes close to that.

Racing on a handheld always feels right to me, and Forza Horizon 5 is where that instinct leads on Steam Deck. The convoy system lets you cruise Mexico with friends without anyone needing to commit to a race structure, and the competitive events are there when you want them. I have spent hours just driving around in convoy doing nothing in particular, which sounds like a criticism but really is not. Performance on Deck sits around medium settings, which for a game this visually dense is respectable. It is not the most effortless Deck experience on this list, but for a game that gives you online racing, co-op events, and open-world social play in one package, it earns its spot.

I have spent more hours in Gran Turismo 7 than I care to admit, but Forza Horizon 5 does something GT does not: it lets you just drive. No license tests, no grinding for credits, just an enormous open map of Mexico and the freedom to go anywhere. On Deck this is practically perfect. Events take five minutes. Free-roam asks nothing of you. The suspend-and-resume is instant. I would put this above a few higher-ranked games for pure handheld friendliness, but the open world itself is shallower than what Skyrim or Witcher 3 offer, which is why it sits at four. For short sessions and the most pick-up-and-play energy on this list, nothing else comes close.

Forza Horizon 5 was an Xbox game I assumed PS5 owners would never get. Then it arrived in 2025 and immediately became one of the more discussed racing releases on the platform. The Mexico map is enormous and genuinely varied, the car roster dwarfs almost everything else on this list, and the Playlist system keeps weekly goals rotating so there is always a reason to log back in. It sits just behind GT7 because the handling trades some precision for accessibility, which is the right call for a festival racer. For anyone who wants breadth over depth, this is the one.