Forza Horizon 6 Review

The Forza Horizon series has been around for a whopping 14 years. In that time we have gone from the roads of Colorado, through the outback of Australia, and to the beautiful landscapes of Mexico. In all that time, one thing has remained consistent – my lack of knowledge about cars. Still, that has never gotten in the way of my adoration of these games because this series has always managed to strike a balance between accurate detail and outrageous hyperbole. As the series has lived on, one of the most requested locations for a Forza Horizon game has always been Japan, a country whose car culture is deceptively prodigious given how proportionally small the country is. Forza Horizon 6 steps into frame and addresses those requests, seeing you drive across Japan and all the beautiful things it has to offer. While the game doesn’t reinvent the wheel in any capacity, it proves that Playground Games still has what it takes to deliver a fantastic experience.

Set in the country of Japan, Forza Horizon 6 sees the player to attend the Horizon Festival. There isn’t much more to say beyond this as the Forza Horizon games aren’t particularly known for story. Their narrative exists as set dressing to justify your place in the festival, and why the festival is happening in the first place. This isn’t to say that all the writing is something to wholly ignore, but that the game’s narrative is threadbare. However, where I was pleasantly surprised was when the game decided to take things down a notch in the form of the Day Drive activities.

In Day Drives, the game places you in a convoy of cars, with one of the game’s characters being a guide for the convoy. You drive at a reasonable pace through various environments, taking in the beautiful scenery and learning about some of the history behind the locales. In a game known for its high-octane absurdity, and chaos, this is a nice change of pace. It’s a gentle reminder that the environments are as important as the cars and races themselves. These games are a celebration of the cultures they set themselves in and something as small as these Day Drives goes a long way towards recognising that.

Enough about the threadbare writing, what you are here to know is whether you can dress up a Ford Transit like an Australia Post van but localise the labels to be in Kanji. The good news is that you most certainly can. I know this, because I have. Did I do this to test out the robust nature of Forza Horizon 6’s customisation and not to serve some weird tradition of recreating the Australia Post van in every Forza Horizon game I review? Yeah, sure. Let’s go with that. As always, the customisation options are fantastic. You can use basic paints, basic stickers, download custom paint jobs made by other people or make  your own. Making the Kanji for the Australia Post paint job with the stickers available did prove to be quite a challenge, but it does demonstrate how you can use the stickers and decals in interesting ways to create your own designs!

In terms of the available roster, there is a plethora of vehicles available that should please almost everyone. I’m sure there are people who will pick out that their favourite car isn’t in the game, but that would also be impossible to cater to every niche. Obviously, being someone who isn’t that well versed in cars, it is a bit hard for me to comment on the specifics, but I am at least aware enough to know that Forza Horizon 6 includes a number of cars that are important to the JDM (Japanese Dance Music Domestic Market) scene which would have been one of the world’s greatest fumbles had they not been included. My personal favourite, however, would have to be the funky little cars like the BMW Isetta or the Nissan S-Cargo. These little cars are my bread and butter as they are so fun to supe up and render uncontrollable.

One element that the Forza Horizon games have occasionally struggled with is the map topography. One of the best examples is with Forza Horizon 3, where the map was gorgeous, and it was cool to play in a truncated Australia, but the map was largely flat and as a result became quite boring (at least until the Hot Wheels DLC came around). Thankfully, Playground Games has made excellent use of Japan’s mountainous terrain to craft an interesting map. This is without mentioning the highways and roads that inherently feature more winding turns and vertical stacking. Truth be told, it was a little tough for me to navigate at first, but that is also what I found so interesting about it. It felt like the roads weren’t wholly catering to my desire to floor it, and instead were asking me to show a little restraint and control.

This conveniently, is a great time to talk about how the vehicles handle. If there is one thing that you would hope the teams at Playground Games and Turn 10 have thoroughly nailed down, it would be vehicle handling. Forza Horizon 6 feels so good to play. The cars, normally, feel so responsive and only ever feel like a tank or sluggish when they are supposed to be that way. On the inverse, if you tune your vehicle like a maniac (read: me) then you can also have cars that spin out the moment you even think about accelerating, it truly is a thing of beauty. It does give you an appreciation, as someone who knows next to nothing aside from the fact that cars go vroom, for the nuance and detail that goes into manufacturing a car. They may look the same under the hood to me, but they are all so very different.

The audio design of Forza Horizon 6 is also stellar, unsurprisingly. The engine’s roar with the ferocity that you would expect from them, the water splashes are crisp and lifelike, and the collisions are crunchy. Adding to that, like the games before it, there are situations where the game’s music would become diegetic, which is a use of music I always love. One of my favourites is how the game handles your engine sounds as you are going through tight channels and tunnels. The revs echo in a way that is truly satisfying and kind of chilling. Those brief moments where the measured chaos of an engine reverberates with the environment are some truly special times.

Given how important the vibes are to a Forza Horizon game, it should be a shock to no one that the soundtrack for this game is especially strong. I’m someone whose proclivity for music lies more in the heavier, more metal style of music and Forza has catered to me for quite a while with inclusions like Underoath, I Prevail, and Bring Me The Horizon, but this game takes the cake. Not only does the game feature music from more acts that I like, including Spiritbox and South Arcade, but also features local artists like the awesome BABYMETAL, BAND-MAID, and PassCode, the latter of which I came to discover thanks to this game and have been listening to regularly since. On top of that, there is an entire radio station dedicated to Japanese music, as well as a sprinkling of local acts in other stations. My only real criticism is that, there could have been more Japanese bands included on each station. Where was Crystal Lake when the soundtrack was being put together? It’s a tough cookie to crack, striking the balance between global and local acts, but if you are going to celebrate the culture then really celebrate it and show off what it has to offer!

The Forza Horizon games have a tendency to look especially beautiful, and Forza Horizon 6 is no exception. The Japanese landscapes look incredible. From the frigid mountains to the bustling cities and everything in between. It’s a wonderful way to experience the beauty of another country when you can’t see it for yourself. The materials for the cars and the roads look equally incredible. The bump mapping on the roads gives them depth and definition, the water beading on the car bodies during the rain, the puddles on the roads and dirt paths that reflect the light.

Now for the technical side of the game, as per the usual, Playground Games has nailed it. It isn’t quite perfect, mainly due to the reliance on Microsoft’s stupid “Gaming Services” that is provided by the Xbox app, making everything much more cumbersome than it needs to be. However, the game itself runs incredibly well. Granted, I had to swap over from my main operating system of EndeavourOS (Linux) to Windows to play the game reliably, as the NVIDIA drivers would crash after a few minutes of playing. That’s more an NVIDIA issue, however, as NVIDIA has a propensity for releasing garbage drivers. Aside from all that, at a mix of high and extreme settings, the game never dipped below 80fps.