Forza Horizon 6 Review – Tuned For Perfection – WGB

The biggest thing we have to accept is that Forza Horizon 6 is not a general jump, or a bold sequel that makes big moves. Les Fast & Furious, very fast and furious. And yet like the games before it, this is a highly polished racing machine full of things to do. Playground Games remains one of the best developers in the arcade business, and this is probably the best Horizon game they’ve made to date. That’s also why I wish it was ambitious sometimes. But who can blame them for refusing to fix a car that isn’t broken?

This time we moved from Mexico to the beautiful Japan, where the Horizon festival will also set up its big tent, create huge detailed events all over the place and let loose a lot of petrolheads who willfully ignore anything like the speed limit which is not funny and aims to kill the wheels more. It’s the same way to clean up past games, sacrificing any sense of dangerous underground racing for fully licensed car-based entertainment that doesn’t even mention how you’re allowed to drive 250+MPH on public roads and crash into society without consequence. Video games are weird, man.

Japan is a big improvement over Mexico as far as settings go. The urban areas are dense, with winding highways above and solid roads below, creating a stark contrast to the hills, valleys and beautiful rice fields of the countryside. It’s not perfect, sure – the big city might be 5x bigger and denser, but the traffic isn’t there, probably because Playground Games didn’t want the traffic to be disrupted. But it’s a big leap from the previous cities we’ve had in the series.

There are tons and tons of events to take part in, a wealth of content boosted by changing seasons, ongoing events that reward you with more cars and money over time and stack up. There is always something to do, including great things like day trips, which aim to tell you a little about Japan and its rich culture. But more than all that, it’s always fun to jump in the car and go around the map, maybe join other players during a trial or climb a big hill just to see the view. Horizon 6 can be as powerful or as cold as you want it to be.

Walking gives you the opportunity to communicate well with cars, something that only focuses on getting wristbands and completing events does not. You’re constantly swapping cars, whether it’s because of class restrictions or because of a side mission that gives you a specific car – it’s hard to stick well to any of them. But roaming around gives you that opportunity, and that can lead to system upgrades and tuning so you can create a bigger monster, systems the game rarely encourages you to try otherwise.

It all comes down to two things: the change of scenery, and how satisfying and fun the race is. Playground has put more effort into making each car feel unique, with mixed success – there are 600+ cars, so it makes sense that you can’t give them all their features. But in general, there are strong variations in management during this time.

Simply put, this is still an arcade racer with little realism. Whether it’s a hypercar racing at 200MPH down the highway, racing through snow, throwing an off-road monster over a river jump or drifting through tight canyon curves, handling is always fun. It’s arcadey, but with enough sense of weight and momentum to make it feel…engaged. However, as it is supported as a sport where you power 300m from the ramp without quickly ending your suspension can be.

The soundtrack to your good works remains strong, although Horizon still feels incredibly reluctant to fully embrace Japanese car culture in its music selection. Still, we get Japanese vibes, including my personal favorite: Babymetal in full effect. Besides, the radio stations offer a good mix of songs for whatever you are doing.

One complaint that I and many others have had is that Forza Horizon tends to throw cars at you like an insecure prostitute throws gifts in the face of their victim. Horizon 6 actually slows down, smoothing its endless wheels every so often. Emphasis on the word “slightly”, though, because the game still gives you an insane amount of cars. It takes a little effort to start with something slow, but it takes about 30 minutes before you start to gain speedy equipment, and in a few hours you’ll have a bunch of expensive toys in your garage. Money is plentiful, you can buy new world rides at a discount, Wheelspin still rewards you with money and cars and more.

For some people, this generosity is good. For some, it makes the hypercar pointless because it’s a dime a dozen – it’s easily found, sometimes almost by accident. I think Horizon 6 still offers a lot, it’s very willing to buy things you like in engines and never let you put in the effort to find them. I still find myself looking for Horizon to challenge me a bit, to get me working on those fast paced events and missions.

The game is still a dopamine factory, designed to pump dopamine into your system at about a billion units per second. Cars are constantly thrown at you, the map is full of a million racing icons and crashable collectibles and XP boards, the screen is full of abilities for every little thing you do, there are tons of badges to be awarded, stamps to earn and so on. In many ways, it’s too bad for modern media. But I also can’t deny that it works very well, it’s always drilling down into the dopamine mines in my brain.

I think Playground Games is struggling to find new ways to do their big events, though. It’s not that the marquee races aren’t spectacular at times – there’s an event featuring a giant mech and another where a rocket launches into space – but that they keep following the same pattern, down to the jumps of many slow-mo each event.

On the other hand, I don’t want Arcade Games to abandon these big event races, because they are part of the series’ identity. And I don’t really know what they can do to help spice them up. All I know is that if we’re going to get Forza Horizon 7, which is almost guaranteed, they’re going to need to find a way to mix it up.

Bless their mechanical hearts, Playground is still trying to inject some kind of story into their racing, but they just haven’t been able to do it. The start is promising, at least, because the game brings back the wristband system and casts you as a guest who must start at the bottom and work your way up to Horizon Festival royalty. Rags fit for riches. Well, Honda Accord to McLaren.

Just like in real life, people drag you down. Horizon 6’s cast of forgetful humans have the same problem as previous games, namely, their dialogue sounds like someone gave an HR manual to an AI and told it to write a script based on it. Everything they say is so clean, so cute and so funny. A long time ago. It’s not the way people talk. And it feels even more appropriate for car culture.

It’s a shame because a compelling story is one of the few big things the Horizon franchise has left to do.

Look, it’s weird to say, and this might be a hot take, but I’m starting to think that the live-action story from Need For Speed ​​2015 was actually one of the few fun stories for a racing game. Cheese? Of course. Is it sometimes? Definitely. But at least it was trying, and it has some lovable characters. The cast of Horizon 6 talk so badly that I can’t remember anything they said. There is no single line. And that’s driven home when you get to the end of the campaign, and the story starts referencing characters from past games like I should know who they are. Horizon, I need you to understand I don’t even know WHO THE PEOPLE ARE IN THIS GAME!

Drivatars – opponents you compete against without ever going online – still need some work, though. It’s fun to fight real names, including those on your friends list, although their promise to drive you as your friends is still ringing, at least as far as I can tell. But the real problems are how they often find unnatural levels of grip when they go off road, thus leading to strange difficulty spikes, and not making enough mistakes. I’ve never seen Drivatars crash in any surprising or interesting ways, which makes them look robotic in their driving – not what you expect when you’re competing against something that’s supposed to mimic real people.

I admit, I was hoping for something more in the new housing feature. The idea is that you have a large home base that you can build with props, or create a large track or trick park. It sounds cool, but in reality, the building tools feel stiff and awkward, and it only seems worth the effort if you’re playing online as other players can explore your legacy, and you’ll earn money in return. For single player, though, Japanese roads are already fun enough, so I never found myself bothering to build. Also, the legacy is separated from the rest of the map by the loading screen, meaning if you leave it set as your home, each time you load into the game, you’ll end up sitting on a second loading screen to go.

In terms of performance, I played on a PC with an older Ryzen 5600 processor, 32GB of Ram and a GTX 5070. With that rig, I ran with high settings on an ultrawide monitor and generally saw good FPS. It fluctuated but stayed above 60FPS, although, as usual, turning on ray tracing can cut that in half. I was happy enough with the performance, but there were other people who had problems, so keep that in mind.

I have many criticisms of the game, and many things I wish were different. None of those things matter, though, because Forza Horizon 6 is so much fun. I know I’ve sounded crazy so far, but the simple truth of the matter is that I’ve played a lot of Horizon 6. How could I not? It’s very polished, it’s great for activating dopamine in my brain, it’s so much fun to run. But it makes me wonder what the future holds. While this is great, is another change of scenery and some small improvements enough to warrant another sequel after a few years?

Forza Horizon 6 doesn’t strip everything and completely redo it. Just polishing the bodywork, doing some tuning, a few pick ups here and there. It takes a bigger car and makes it better.

It’s a boring way. It doesn’t give me much to talk about. But it doesn’t change the fact that Forza Horizon 6 is amazing, and the only reason it’s not my favorite in the series is that Horizon 4 had Scotland in it.

If you were getting tired of Forza Horizon 5, don’t rush to grab this. Take your time. Hang on. Otherwise, Forza Horizon 6 is another sequel to the original Playground. Now, if they call Fable this year, they will be able to claim the throne as the King of Xbox Game Studios.