Review: Forza Horizon 6 (Patreon)

What do Assassin’s Creed and Forza Horizon have in common? OK, fine, there are probably a few things. But I’m thinking that they’re both franchises that people have wanted to see set in Japan for quite a while. Assassin’s Creed finally took the plunge last year, and now it’s Forza’s turn. As someone who very much agreed that a Forza Horizon game set in Japan sounded like a great idea, I’m left with a bit of a realization here: The Forza Horizon festival is a soulless traveling force of destruction that leaves little room for “local flavor” or “culture.” The EDM nightmare just rolls into town, sets up a big circular road in the middle of the place, launches five or six radio stations that play the same style(s) of music you heard at last year’s festival, and invites drivers to descend upon the location and rip it the hell apart in an orgy of open-world tree murdering, fence crashing, and, sure, some racing, too. Forza Horizon 6 does not deviate much from this course, which is to say it’s quite good! But after all these years of yearning, I think I was expecting… more.

While you could certainly make the case that the scenario I’ve outlined above is a great in-world reason for why every one of these games looks, sounds, and feels the same, I do think this one, in particular, would have benefited from a more local approach. This could’ve been a game teeming with Japanese culture, both car culture and just regular ol’ culture. But the talk of Japan in Horizon 6 feels like it’s coming from a tourist’s guide. Instead of showing you why Japan is so cool, you get little tidbits of info squawking across your radio as the game goes on. During a “day trip” event you might get a quick, surface-level history of the Honda Civic. At one point a lady gets on the radio and complains about all the great ramen she’s eaten. It feels like you’re surrounded by assholes who just wish Japan would get out of the way so they can have their fancy race festival.

Even Forza Horizon 5’s trip to Mexico felt like it a did a better job of capturing something resembling local flavor. Here, Japan feels a little tacked on. You get touge racing. That’s about it. The raw density of Tokyo doesn’t come through, mostly because the roads need to be wide and empty, for racing. You can’t show crazy things like the packed pedestrian crossing in Shibuya in a game that simply doesn’t want to put you in a situation where you might run someone over. It’s sensible, it’s the way it is for video game reasons… but it just ends up feeling bland. It doesn’t feel like it’s leaning into the things that make Tokyo such a compelling city. It feels like a plane full of boorish Brits showed up to blast a bunch of drum & bass in the middle of a field for a few weeks and everyone else stayed home. I never thought a game would make me long for the quiet, jazzy cafe menu style of Gran Turismo 7, but here we are. Even the car selection seems goofy. I didn’t take this nine-hour flight to Tokyo just to look at a bunch of dipshits driving Fords and Chevys, you get me?

I mostly want to get that out of the way up front because it’s been my prevailing emotion about the game. In this specific way, Forza Horizon 6 feels like a missed opportunity. In most every other way, this is a successful sequel to the previous game that doesn’t change too much about the basic formula, but by making some handy tweaks here and there along with launching with the things that were patched onto the previous game, this is also one of the best Forza Horizon games they’ve made so far.

Some of the best changes are small ones, like the way the game does away with charging you for fast travel or putting “fast travel boards” all over the world that you need to find and demolish to get free fast travel. If you’ve been somewhere on the map, you can fast travel there again, no charge. The boards that give you experience points are, of course, still here, and they’ve been joined by 200 mascot statues for you to also smash up, so fans of the exploration and collection side of Horizon will still have plenty to do. Eliminating even this small barrier on fast travel makes the game friendlier, especially if you’re just trying to get a couple of race events in before bed or something. Since I’m also trying to hit all the boards and mascots, along with driving on every road in the game for that leaderboard, I tend to skip the fast travel most of the time anyway.

While the game paints you as a newcomer to the world of Forza Horizon who has to earn their way in and start at the bottom, the experience isn’t much different. You qualify for the festival (spoilers, whoops) and then go complete a variety of events to earn points. At specific point thresholds you open up a bigger showcase event. This, typically, is where the previous entries in the series would throw in wild races like “you vs. a train” or “you vs. jets.” The showcase events here aren’t always in that specific style, but the ones that are work and provide a level of spectacle that benefits the game. It’s great that there’s a variety here.

Unlike the previous game, hitting those point thresholds doesn’t send you off on an “adventure” mission, which provided good opportunities to create moments around locations that helped fill in gaps and bring something that at least resembled Mexican culture into the experience. While some of those adventures were a bit dull, the idea itself was sound, and it’s a little unfortunate that there isn’t really anything here that accomplishes the same task. You get a bunch of side events that pop up a “Discover Japan” banner, sort of as an alternative to the races and festival events. Street races and touge events also show up as being “outside” the core festival. But most of these are the day trips that don’t provide much in the way of challenge, or repetitive events like a food delivery job. Nothing’s been as fun or as heartfelt as Forza Horizon 4’s homage to classic driving games… though the race “Highway Circuit” takes a very traditional loop around Tokyo’s highway that will at least remind you a little bit of some designs out of Ridge Racer or Shutokou Highway Battle. The day trips start to mention iconic locations, like the Daikoku parking area, but instead of building any story around you hanging out at crazy car meets and running into a cast of characters, it merely fades out as you enter and fades back up on a race. I guess that shouldn’t be surprising—Horizon’s just never been that type of game. But dude what if it wassssssssss?

The core progression is built around you earning points to unlock the showcase events, which in turn unlocks a fresh set of events. The newer events sometimes come with upgraded car restrictions, which does create a situation where you race in faster and faster cars, though plenty of events will just match you up with CPU racers in cars similar to whatever you’d like to drive. Like past games, though, you can’t quickly upgradee your cars prior to a race. So if you roll into a race with requirements around a specific type of A class car, and you haven’t already purchased and upgraded a car that fits the requirements, you can’t easily bop over to a menu and slap the ideal parts on to get it to the top of the A rank. This also impacts multiplayer races, and seems like something they would have done something about by now.

I want to say explicitly here that the progression does not feel meaningfully different than the previous games. This is a notion I saw coming out of some recent hands-on previews, and I’m not really sure what those writers saw, but there’s nothing stopping you from just building an S2 car in your first hour of play. They aren’t holding off the “expensive” cars or anything like that. That said, the game does prevent some events from showing up on the map at all until you’ve cleared the showcase event. The non-festival, “Discover Japan” track also has a meter that fills, and every time it does more barn finds, street races, and other “side” content shows up. That feels somewhat different, since it’s broken out into two progression tracks, but it’s not like the previous games just dumped 100% of the events on you on first launch. The progression feels fine and it gets at a bit of the quandry that the developers probably find themselves every time out: A real progression here would be extremely restrictive, preventing you from accessing specific cars and classes until you’ve earned it. But that is no fun. People come to these games for a variety of reasons and don’t want to have to spend hours in “slow” cars to unlock the ones they care about. So while you’ll have your race events that limit you to specific types of cars (including ”hot hatches,” natch) and classes, for the most part Forza Horizon 6 is just as open as its predecessors are.

The multiplayer is broken up into separate matchmaking hoppers for different modes, so if you want to get into a touge race, you can queue up for that directly. Drift events, standard races, races that lock everyone to the same car, all of the stuff you’d expect to see. The game also still lets you form convoys and drive around online, complete with link skills that give you bonus points when multiple cars perform the same stunts (drifting, crashing) at the same time. The game will also occasionally pop a stunt event, highlighting a spot on the map where you’ll go, wait, and match into an open-world challenge where multiple races go to a certain point and do stunts like jumps or drifts. In my experience, online opponents always jerk around the track a little bit, like the steering data isn’t getting transmitted often enough to make the other cars look natural. That’s a minor point, though, the online works well and, naturally, gives you access to yet another bar to level up with its own set of unlocks, profile pictures, and more.

Visually, Forza Horizon 6 is fantastic. The PC version features most of the same options as its predecessor, but with more (and better) raytracing. It’s a game that looks great and runs well, in my experience. On a 5090 at 4K with everything turned all the way up, the game gave me 70-80 frames per second with DLSS set to Quality. With DLAA turned on, that number went to around 60 with some dips to 50 or so. But even on an Xbox Series X the game still looks very nice. Here you get a Quality/Performance toggle, with Quality locking you to 30 frames and Performance aiming for 60. The game still looks great at 60fps on a Series X. Even running at 1080p on a ROG Xbox Ally X the game still looks really nice. It seems to scale quite well, which makes it a joy to play on most any platform within reason.

The soundtrack is about what you’d expect. The festival is in town and it brought all the same radio stations, but some of them have a Japanese artist thrown in. There are two Babymetal tracks on the rock station, for example. There is also a new Japanese station called Gacha CIty Radio, and it’s… well, I think it sort of sums up my feelings on the whole game, really. Rather than dive into Japanese culture and provide multiple stations broken out by genre, they just kinda tossed in a generic JAPAN station. Yellow Music Orchestra sits on the same station as CY8ER. The game has a dedicated synthwave station, but maybe they should have just gone all the way and thrown a classic City Pop station in there instead? Maybe a dedicated j-rock station? Certainly a more dedicated destination for j-pop could have been crafted here, at least. It feels like another missed opportunity, I suppose… though knowing how difficult it can be to deal with JASRAC, the group responsible for handling most copyright stuff for Japanese acts, I can see at least one pretty good reason why there isn’t more.

It drives the way you think it should, the game offers the same sorts of assists and options as past games have, and most of the features are precisely what they have been in previous entries. That’s not a huge shocker, the Forza Horizon franchise has been largely great across its entire run. And it’s still great! The cars are a joy to drive, the world is fun to explore, there are a billion different things to do, and it looks absolutely fantastic the entire time. It’s hard to ask for more, especially at a time when great arcade racing is so hard to come by.

That said, around Horizon 3 I started feeling like they needed to make some changes to freshen it up. They did it! Forza Horizon 4 made smart changes to the formula and kept things moving. Forza Horizon 6 is really good on its own merits, but it’s also easy to feel like you’ve played this game before. Japan could have been more, but instead it feels like another casualty of the world’s most terrifying automotive festival. Maybe someone needs to brand the Horizon Festival organizers as eco-terrorists and give us a game where we’re trying to dismantle the whole thing from within. Then again… Horizon’s just never been that type of game.

But dude what if it wassssssssss?

4/5