Forza Horizon 6's poor vibes hamper a great game
Pros
- Stunning recreation of Japan and countless cars
- Driving model and gameplay that has been honed and refined to within an inch of its life
- There is pretty much no other racing game this polished being made right now
Cons
- Underwhelming soundtrack
- Very slow progression
- Street racing takes a backseat to off-road courses
When I review Forza Horizon 6, what am I actually reviewing? The game you are getting bundled with Game Pass for somewhere between $9.99 and $22.99 a month? Or the game that goes on sale May 19th for $70? Or, the version available 96 hours earlier for a cool 120 bucks? Am I reviewing a commercial consumer product still under an active boycott by BDS due to Microsoft’s role in the ongoing genocide in Palestine? Or a piece of art created over hundreds of thousands of man-hours by thousands of humans? Hell, is this just a new coat of paint on a well-worn format, or is it the most feature-complete version of something that has been good for a long time now?
I think ultimately, the only fair way to approach Forza Horizon 6 is with all of these things in mind. That contrast between value and aggressive commerce, art and reality, grind and beauty, and the lumpy, often conflicting intersections between all those things is where Forza Horizon lies. It is, for better and worse, an iterative work of engineering. It teeters on the edge between being a stunning recreation of real-world places and vehicles, and a treadmill-like conveyor belt of drip-fed rewards designed to be just inoffensive enough that you might never realize they are wearing you down.
Forza Horizon 6 is the best looking racing game out there right now.
Those wheels are really round
I’m not sure if you’ve noticed this, but video games look really good now. Like, seriously, I have been looking at digital Subaru Imprezas for about as long as I’ve been alive, and while the returns have certainly become diminished on how many polygons we can fit into a single tire, it is hard to understate just how good Forza Horizon 6 looks. Some of this might be down to going back to the original Forza Horizon for a bit in the lead up to this review, but driving down a Tokyo street in the rain, with neon lights bouncing off every puddle and headlight, there is a really basic part of my brain that just wants to point at the screen and say, “look at how pretty these cars are.”
Forza Horizon 6’s rendition of Tokyo and the surrounding regions is by far the most diverse and striking setting the series has visited in some time.
Only talking about the beauty of Forza Horizon 6 in the context of the cars does feel like you’d be missing the point of this game somewhat. The Forza Horizon games, since their inception, have been more defined by where you drove than what you drove, and it’s hard to argue that this latest installment might just be the high-water mark for locales in the series. This is no slight against the Australian Outback or the myriad regions of Mexico (and it’s only a minor slight against quaint English villages), but Forza Horizon 6’s rendition of Tokyo and the surrounding regions is by far the most diverse and striking setting the series has visited in some time.
Be it the handful of iconic crosswalks of Tokyo that have been recreated or the snow walls in the mountains to the north, the map in Forza Horizon 6 has the strongest sense of identity in the series. While the seasons of Forza Horizon 4 changed things up periodically, and 5 wasn’t short on unique biomes, 6’s real strength isn’t that different parts of the map look different; it’s that they feel different. The tight corners of Tokyo feel worlds apart from the winding roads seemingly carved into the hills just for Touge battles to the point that after 30-ish hours with the game, I can roughly point to what kind of races and challenges you’ll find where on the map.
(1 of 2) Japan is recreated in beautiful detail.
Japan is recreated in beautiful detail. (left), There’s a great variety in the locales that you drive. (right)
Best in class
It almost feels like table stakes at this point, but it really has to be highlighted in a review: driving in Forza Horizon 6 feels excellent. While I have always preferred how rally racing feels in slightly more sim-y games like Sega Rally and DiRT, and how street racing has felt in arcade racers like Need For Speed and Ridge Racer, it is impossible to deny that the Forza Horizon series manages to combine disciplines and styles together better than any other racing game.
Everything from hypercars to the Warthog, and rally classics to the Peel P50 feels unique. More importantly, though, these cars all feel tunable in such a way that it gives the impression that you have control over what sort of machine you’re sitting behind the wheel of.
Forza Horizon 6 also excels when it lets you take the wheel and opens up the sandbox. The returning meet-ups and battle royale modes are still just as fun to bop between with other players (especially when you can find time to coordinate with friends). What I remain less convinced by is the expanded EventLab and Estate features. If Forza Horizon 5’s near-endless player-created races are anything to go by, there are sure to be plenty of worthwhile tracks and weird UGC nightmares to come out of these modes. With that said, though, my usual experience with these tools sees me futz about for an hour or two making the worst racetrack you have ever seen and then just filtering the playlists by most popular a few weeks after release and going “Huh, that’s neat.” It is good these features are here, and their expansions seem logical and smart, but it’s just not a part of the game that I want to engage with too much.
Driving in Forza Horizon 6 has never felt better.
A 10V strapped to a Prius
If Forza Horizon 6’s setting is the engine that powers the whole experience, then the game’s structure and plethora of challenges are the chassis that holds it together, and, sadly, those two things don’t quite seem to gel. While simply existing in this beautifully realized Japan is novel for a fair while, the game’s pacing, division of disciplines, and marquee “Horizon events” range in quality from somewhat baffling to literal wheelspinning.
There are a few elements to Forza Horizon 6’s odd feel, but a lot of it comes back to event spread. Despite the game being set in Japan, maybe the country most associated with street racing in car culture, street races seem strangely secondary to the game’s main focus, off-roading. Don’t get me wrong. I love rally events. Hell, I have put 20 or so hours into DiRT 3 this very year, but it is not what I come to Forza Horizon for, and it’s not exactly what I’d most associate with Japan’s car scene. So, I really can’t figure out why there seem to be more buggy, rally, and jeep races in this game than there are street events where I am racing against unhinged and overtuned Nissan Skylines that look like they have been Ship of Theseus-ed into being supercars.
…street races seem strangely secondary to the game’s main focus, off-roading.
This problem wouldn’t be too noticeable in isolation if you could clear the campaign by ping-ponging between specially designed races. However, Forza Horizon 6’s back third of gameplay becomes something of a glacial crawl through the final two wristbands. You will find yourself running out of races designed by Playground Games and Turn 10 before you finish the main story. This means that the only real way to get to the end of the game is to either matchmake into online races or make do with my solution during the review period and systematically clear basically every mini drift event and speed trap, as well as collect countless XP billboards. It’s a shame, too, because some of the best races and challenges are locked behind getting the final wristband.
Another noteworthy point of tension in this game is that, after all these years, Playground hasn’t really figured out exciting one-off events to cap off your progress between chapters. A race between you and a literal 50ft tall Gundam is the high point, but ultimately, even that is just as scripted as one of the three (yes, three) races against some form of plane that you will just about win, almost no matter what. The reliance on these scripted set pieces is strange, as some of the game’s most interesting races come in the form of challenging one-on-one Touge races that could have made for much more dynamic showstoppers.
(1 of 2) There are two campaigns to progress through, but expect a heavy grind in the back half of both.
There are two campaigns to progress through, but expect a heavy grind in the back half of both. (left), The one-off events to cap off your progress could be better. (right)
Your Forza Horizon 6 experience will almost certainly be more varied than mine, as you’ll actually be able to find online matches and hangouts to break up pacing. However, the whole time I was playing, I couldn’t stop thinking about just how much slower this progress would have felt if Microsoft hadn’t sent the $120 deluxe edition that adds a 15% bonus to all of your XP.
Rule of cool
A lot of these issues will be mitigated if you are playing post-release. In fact, you may even view the game’s leisurely progression to fit in with not having to beat the game on a time crunch, and that’s awesome. However, while I know a lot of my gripes with the game may seem minor or fleeting, there is one cardinal sin I simply cannot forgive. The soundtrack is mostly kinda lame.
There are good songs on here, and I fully acknowledge that any licensed soundtrack will pretty much always be a dice roll when it comes to taste, but that doesn’t change the fact that the radio stations in Forza Horizon 6 aren’t great. Be it a pretty rough remix of a Passion Pit song or overplayed generic pop, the English-language stations are just rather uninspired. More disappointingly, though, is how criminally underserved the two Japanese stations are in-game. For a game set in Japan, there is relatively little Japanese music to listen to, which is a real problem when so much of the game feels like a virtual tourism advert.
…if I weren’t reviewing the game, the radio station would be constantly off…
At some point, I could just sit here and talk about how good the Ridge Racer soundtracks were all day, and I know the days of in-house bands at the studio could not be more over. However, I would be lying if I didn’t say that if I weren’t reviewing the game, the radio station would be constantly off, and I’d have a Spotify playlist going instead.
Forza Horizon nails that feeling of driving through Japan.
Complimenting with strong criticism
I don’t want you to come away from this review thinking that I didn’t particularly enjoy Forza Horizon 6. This review is basically the inverse of “damning with faint praise”: the fact that my criticisms are so acute speaks to how much of the game does work. You almost never find yourself having a bad time playing; in fact, the major drawbacks you’ll come up against will usually be (at least partially) remedied by just enjoying throwing a Nissan GTR around corners sideways.
Forza Horizon 6, much like the wider Windows platform, is couched in and shaped by choices made years ago in previous versions of the software. However, unlike Windows, the video game that Microsoft is selling here is really good, and it works, and somehow tries to get me to sign up to Game Pass less often than a clean Windows install does. And while that actually is damning with faint praise, Forza Horizon 6 is more than a respectable iteration on the long-running series. It’s just a shame that the handful of scratches on the paint look all the more noticeable on a turbocharged racer than they would have on a scrappy hatchback.
Trading Paint
Forza Horizon 6 certainly doesn’t feel like a missed opportunity, but it also isn’t a game that I find myself enthusiastically recommending in the way I wish I could. It’s robust and varied, and even best in class in many areas, but there are noticeable foibles and missteps that hold it back from being the definitive entry in the series.
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