Forza Horizon 5’s Hot Wheels expansion is pure unadulterated fun

The joy of speeding around Mexico in Forza Horizon 5 never goes away. The open-world spinoff of Microsoft’s Forza Motorsport, the Forza Horizon series captures the fun of just going for a drive and seeing where the road takes you. It fulfills a fantasy of racing fast cars recklessly and doing sick jumps off cliffs, but the new Hot Wheels DLC goes one step further and lets players loose on larger-than-life tracks full of gravity-defying loop-de-loops. Get ready to unleash your inner child.

Speed Racer — The expansion adds a new game map called Hot Wheels Park that sits in the clouds above Mexico, holding new biomes and tracks. Each biome is a beautiful background that becomes laced in bright orange and blue tracks twisting and turning through the air, looking like a giant homemade Hot Wheels track that you get to test out.

Driving feels so good in Forza Horizon 5. These long stretches of track are the perfect place to push your favorite car to the limits and just spend a couple of minutes to several hours looping through the tracks with childlike giddiness. But these tracks deserve a car with bonified cool factor. As you play through the new challenges, a journey through Hot Wheels history, you unlock new cars that are faithful replicas of iconic Hot Wheels from over the years. If I rummaged through my old toys in my parent's home, I feel like I would find a handful of cars that I can now drive in Forza Horizon 5.

The Horizon series has always been on the more arcade side of racing games than simulation, and the Hot Wheels DLC dials this up to eleven. In many ways, it is a better look and better feeling version of Grand Theft Auto 5’s Cunning Stunts update.

Toy Box — But driving is only half the fun, the true star is when you make your own tracks. Forza Horizon 5 has a feature called Event Lab, which allows players to design their own races. Thanks to the new DLC this now features over 80 Hot Wheels track and stunt pieces to choose from.

Building a track gives such a dopamine rush, especially when you start snapping together track pieces. Suddenly I was transported to weekends as a kid spent with my Hot Wheels tracks, trying to design the most ludicrous loops in my house. Using the furniture around me to hold up track pieces so that my vision could become reality. Maybe I will send a Hot Wheels down the stairs into a series of four loops, and if the car can make it through that then I will add another loop.

In Forza Horizon 5, all these possibilities can become reality. Spending hours designing tracks and then testing them out just to start it all over again is one of the most addictive game loops I have fallen into in recent memory. One that I’m not likely to climb out of any time soon.

Forza Horizon 5 and the Hot Wheels DLC are available on Xbox One, Series consoles, and PC.