Forza Horizon 6 (XSX) Review
Summary: The best simcade racing game I've played since the last one.
4.5
Searching for Tomorrow
The festival in Forza Horizon 6 feels like the kind of thing the Japanese government would try to ban.
This year-long Burning Man for petrolheads sees thousands of privileged, rich tossers swamping tourist attractions, being a nuisance on their roads, and annoying the locals.
If it were an actual festival, you couldn’t pay me to attend. Yet here I am doing doughnuts around a weirdly empty facsimile of Shibuya Crossing in a prototype Ferrari and grinning like an idiot.
Maybe, like a car salesman once told my friend who was thinking of buying a BMW, said, “Sometimes, it’s fun to be a wanker.” However, I would say it’s more fun to pretend to be Mr Bean once you track down a 1965 Mini Cooper S and find one of the numerous cliffs the game encourages you to drive straight off.
Causing absolute chaos is where Horizon 6 is at its most fun. Well, at least during your time in the overworld map, anyway. There is something about having the creepy sat nav that keeps referring to me by my name(I don’t like it, stop it!) set up the route for your next race or challenge, and then seeing how far you can travel during in the straightest line possible, regardless of whether that is zipping straight down a motorway or commiting mass acts of deforestation straight through a bamboo forest.
There is an almost overwhelming amount of stuff to do on your quest to get that prestigious gold wristband, including Road, Dirt, and Cross Country Races, as well as Time Attack Circuits, Drag Meets, PR Stunts like speed trips, jumps, drifting zones, and Bonus Boards.
On top of that, there are the Discover Japan events. This comprises tours, races, and events loosely based around Japanese car culture, while taking in some absolutely beautiful scenery and architecture.
There are also more than 600 cars to buy or unlock, from modern supercars, rally, street, to some stone-cold classics. If you have a thing for Japanese motors, there are plenty to choose from, including some rather special morsels hidden in barns throughout the map, as well as plenty of second-hand cars for sale.
If you’ve played any other Forza Horizon game, you’ll know exactly what to expect. You take part in events to earn enough Horizon points to unlock a special event that lets you earn your next wristband, which then spews out more events, and the cycle repeats.
It’s not a particularly inspired system, especially in the latter half of the game, since it becomes more about mopping up the races and stunts you missed than feeling like you’re working towards anything particularly worthwhile.
That being said, the setpiece Rush events that grant you your next wristband do feature some of the best moments in the game, but also peak early. Planes and fireworks are cool, but once you’ve raced a giant mech that smashes everything in sight as it flies and zips around you, everything else loses its luster.
Horizon 6’s duller moments are muted somewhat because the core experience, the very act of driving and racing cars, is so finely tuned, so perfectly pitched that it’s easy to overlook a lack of payoff at times.
You create your driver, which gets major bonus points for including additions like cochlear implants, and prosthetic legs and arms, but loses them for only having a handful of face and hair options, make your way to the festival with your best buddy Jordan ( who I still hate) and the rest of the obvious tech bros who speak to each other like they’re constantly trying to sell you a timeshare, and remind each other they’re really having fun. Really. I’m not dead inside, honest.
You are then let loose to explore these varied and beautiful biomes and tear up the highways and byways of Nihon in increasingly lavish automobiles. The Festival may suck, but participating in its events while taking in its clever approximation of Tokyo and rural Japan rocks in more ways than one.
Not only do each class of car feel authentic and perform as you would expect on and off the track, but each also feels unique when you get behind the wheel and handles very closely to its real-life counterpart.
Whether you prefer to lean into the simulation or arcade part of sim-arcade racing is also entirely up to you. Horizon 6 features a full suite of driving options that let you fine-tune how much assistance you receive with braking, steering, and traction control.
Coupled with aggressive competitor AI that really pushes your own driving skills to the limit, varied and challenging tracks and race types, and you have the perfect formula for some S-tier racing action.
This is accompanied by an absolutely phenomenal licensed soundtrack that has something for everyone, with the radio stations featuring a wide variety of genres from house and hip-hop to indie, metal, and rock. My own proclivities made me gravitate towards the rock station XS that features several dozen tracks, including Linkin Park, Coheed and Cambria, Baby Metal, and Biffy Clyro (whose frontman, Simon Neil, also acts as an awkward DJ, but it isn’t his fault; the script is just terrible)
The only downside is that you can’t curate the music at all. It’s all on a looping playlist, and there’s no easy way to skip tracks either. It makes no sense that there isn’t at least the option to axe songs you don’t like, or even better, create your own playlists with all the available tunes.
It is worth noting that the presentation of the game is absolutely top-notch on Series X. You have the choice of running it in Quality mode with a native 4k presentation at 30 frames per second with some ray tracing enabled, or Performance mode, which uses dynamic scaling to keep the game running at silky-smooth 60 frames.
Final Thoughts
Forza Horizon 6 may not reinvent the wheel, but I’m not sure it needed to. Playground Games has successfully honed the formula to such a fine point that you know exactly what you’re signing up for, and more importantly, you’re pretty much guaranteed a good time.
Japan is easily one of the best settings for the series thus far, and even though the characters and writing that wrap around Forza’s latest festival adventure is as groanworthy as it ever was, the racing, atmosphere, killer soundtrack, overwhelming amounts of things to do, and general sense of fun make for one of the best simcade racing games I’ve played since the last one.
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