I was flown out of the cargo plane on AMG One and arrived at the festival site to fanfare and fireworks. The organizers were delighted that their "superstar" had finally arrived and offered me a choice of starting cars for the celebration. I left the venue and headed off to my first race in a Corvette Stingray Coupe. The racing game doesn't start like this. I was supposed to be fighting for the win in an aging hatchback and dreaming of the day when I would be behind the steering wheel of a sleek, fast machine. Instead, I would be handed a 500-horsepower supercar to tear through the streets of Mexico.

But it makes sense; "Forza Horizon 5" doesn't have to do what other racing games do. It just needs to be a "Forza Horizon" game, and there are no serious competitors to the "Horizon" brand of car games.

Sim racing is a competitive field, but on the more arcade-like side it is not so healthy. Burnout Paradise showed the potential of open-world racing in 2008, but for whatever reason, EA never followed suit; the Need for Speed series bounced back and forth between arcade and simulation for years, never establishing its own identity. It never developed its own identity. Dirt is similarly confused, and the strength of the Dirt Rally spin-off has left the parent series blind to what it should be; Forza Horizon, rather than taking the lead, has already finished racing and is free to have fun.

"Forza Horizon 5" knows this. It feels unchallenged. It's not forced to reinvent the wheel, it's content to just keep refining and being the best "Forza Horizon" it can be.

If you've played any of the previous "Forza Horizon" games, you already know what this means: maps filled with more icons than Ubisoft's open world, each with its own race event, PR stunt, vintage car rumors, a series of challenges, and a few storylines. Winning races unlocks more events, new cars, and funds. As you drive, you earn skill points for everything from drifting to crashing in destructible landscapes.

The garage fills up ridiculously fast. I played for about 20 hours, which was enough time to unlock all of the festival outposts and their various upgrades, and I collected 93 of the 526 cars available at launch. Winning races and completing events is a storm of rewards: earning Accolades, a mini-achievement that serves as a career advancement system in Forza Horizon 5, earns you a new car and a new phrase to use in chat. Earning Wheel Spins drops cars, cash, and clothes. And as you fill out the new collection page, which displays all the cars as collector's cards, you can earn additional bonuses by completing each manufacturer.

Collecting new cars is more about expanding your options than upgrading to newer and better cars. Within the first few hours, you will have the best and fastest S2 class cars. However, thanks to the limitations of the season playlist, they will be encouraged to pursue a variety of makes and models.

The Season Playlist is the heart of Forza Horizon 5's live service. Each week there is a new season, with a variety of events and challenges, usually with restrictions on class, type, and difficulty. Right now it is summer in the game, which means it is the rainy season in Horizon's Mexico. In one seasonal championship, I battled the pouring rain in a Class B classic muscle car to win the Ford Hoonicorn V2, the mainstay of the Drift Zone challenge. In another race, he battled the mud in a Class A modern sports car to win the "Steamboat" Carhorn.

Elsewhere, you can freely choose your class and the game pits you against relevant opponents. Seasonal playlists succeed by forcing you out of your comfort zone and making you think of ways to overcome limitations. It gives me a reason to think about what fits my garage and my next goal. For example, I would not have bothered to tune my car if it were not for seasonal restrictions. With so many of these cars, there is little need to tinker with any one in particular. However, the playlist instructed me to complete a specific jump with an S1 class retro sports car. I then chose a car in my lower class. Sure enough, there existed a custom tune that upgraded it to the requirement.

Naturally, the playlist offered further rewards. As one completed the events, one could obtain limited-edition or hard-to-find cars prepared for each season or series.

Those who played "Forza Horizon 4" a few months after its release will recognize this system, as will many of the online events in "Forza Horizon 5," such as the "Eliminator" battle royale mode in "Forza Horizon 4" and the "Super 7" community challenge. The community challenge "Super 7" was also added to "Forza Horizon 4" after its launch, but is available in "Forza Horizon 5" from the start.

At this point, you may have noticed that I have said nothing about anything brand new in "Forza Horizon 5," and for good reason.

There is a new event type, "Expeditions," to unlock outposts that include Horizon's various racing disciplines. As you go to new areas and complete optional goals, the map fills up with new road, street, dirt, and cross-country races. Still, calling this a new feature may be an overstatement. There are already so many different event types that even the slightest variation is hardly noticeable.

The most exciting new feature, the Event Lab, will take time to make its presence known. It is a new custom race creation feature that allows players to create their own routes and share them with the community. But it's not just a course maker, it also comes bundled with a rules editor that allows players to create a series of if/then statements to create new challenges and, theoretically, entirely new modes. Some examples currently being created and shared by the Playground Games team certainly demonstrate the flexibility of the system, such as turning a late-game endurance race into a piñata-hopping mini-game. Beyond that, it remains to be seen, but the entire community looks forward to understanding what is possible.

So what is the big new feature of "Forza Horizon 5"? Mexico is more varied and vibrant than the UK in "Forza Horizon 4". There are rainforests, towns, deserts, and plenty of cacti to bump into. The weather is also more interesting, with sandstorms adding an atmospheric twist to events.

Throughout, the game's characters reference Mexican culture and history, but it is all filtered through the series' relentless positivity. It is difficult to think of its world as a real place, not because it is cut out of a real place, but because it exists in a universe where bad things do not happen. Festivals are a constant party, destruction means a chain of skills, and a strict atmosphere does not exist. What about the other racers who cannot compete in the big showcase events? Do they resent you, the superstar? No, they are other players in the game, existing as ghosts in the open world, teaming up in collaborative events. They are also in the game world where they are the main players. Here, everyone wins.

This is what Horizon is all about, and while you may roll your eyes at the dialogue, you can't pretend not to be swept up in the atmosphere. Indeed, the side story, which could easily be summarized as "rich people have feelings, too," seemed especially tone-deaf in a game where you are handed a house and a Pagani Zonda for free. But it is very difficult to think of this fiction as anything close to reality, and it seems trite to do so. Obviously this is nonsense, but it is great fun. It is impossible not to be drawn to this work of art.

Inevitably, I laugh a lot when I play it. It's that kind of game. Likewise, I can't criticize "Forza Horizon 5" for not making any major changes to make it look more different. It's easy to forget because everything feels so effortless, but the level of detail in the environment and the level of technology in each of the 500-plus cars is astounding. Each car has its own personality and can be a real challenge with the optional assist turned off. The modeling is detailed and realistic enough to give each car its own personality.

This is what happens when a series can exist without serious competition. They can focus on what interests them most and complete it. We can take the improvements that have been made over the course of the previous games and plan to build a new game around them. We can't refine the driving model and improve the graphics significantly, but we can do it noticeably. I would love to know what "Forza Horizon" would have looked like if it had a stronger competitor that forced it to innovate further, but I'll be content to play the most polished and confident "Forza Horizon" game ever made."