Racing fans were delighted this past May with the release of Forza Horizon 6, the latest instalment in the critically acclaimed series. Unlike the more realistic Forza Motorsport series, Horizon is all about fun and celebrating the automotive world in the broadest sense — you can race just about anything, and that’s what won over so many players. Having played pretty much every game in the series (except for most of the DLC), I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to play Forza Horizon 6 as soon as it was released.
The online hype is incredible, especially after the mixed reception of the fifth instalment: Japan, which fans have been clamouring for over the past 10 years. There are also various changes to elements that haven’t changed since the fourth instalment, as well as a return to the roots in terms of the bracelets and the festival’s progression.
Did things turn out as expected? Well, let’s find out.
The first thing that catches your eye is undoubtedly the price tag.
$70 or €70 for the standard edition on Steam—and that’s not even including the Premium Edition, which costs around $120 or €120. That seems a bit much. Is the situation much different on key reseller sites? No — while I was able to pre-order Resident Evil: Requiem for as little as $45–$50 (£35–£40) at launch, there’s absolutely no price difference with Forza.
FIRST LAUNCH: GRAPHICS AND OPTIMIZATION
When you launch the game, you’re greeted by a deafening, unskippable intro at full volume, part of which is the Turn 10 logo sequence that hasn’t changed in at least 10 years. Interestingly, the quality and resolution are still the same, there are still black bars, and it still runs at 30 fps.
Once you have adjusted the settings and launched the game, the standard shader compilation and resource optimisation process begins. Thankfully, this happens much faster than in the fifth instalment, so you no longer have to wait 10–20 minutes.
Optimisation? At the very least, the game has improved mechanically. By that I mean there are no memory leaks after 20 minutes of play and I haven’t experienced any stuttering or crashing related to that issue during 15 hours of gameplay. The frame rate did drop slightly when I enabled Extreme RTX, but only at certain points.
All kinds of downloads, uploads and other processes that slow down the computer have become much faster, which is definitely a plus.
As for the visuals and graphics in general, this is now my favourite part of the series, even though lower-quality screenshots can’t fully capture all this splendour.
The colour filters are significantly more vibrant and capture the atmosphere of a particular time of day or weather much better. There are also far more small details, such as dirt, dust and water, and yet the FPS doesn’t drop much as a result. Perhaps the graphics have simply been tweaked to make them more noticeable. There’s also no slowdown due to the abundance of particles. Compared to previous versions, there are far more particles, so this is a great thing.
Visually, it’s a stunning game, and few would argue with that. However, when it comes to gameplay, there are far more points of contention.
PROBLEM #1: ATMOSPHERE
It’s clear that no effort has been made to improve the atmosphere and ‘vibrancy’ of the game. They just swapped the map and the local vehicles – that’s it.
Contrast this with the opening sequence of Forza Horizon 4, which is a masterpiece that captures the essence of the game. The music, “Sunrise” by Fred V & Grafix, is perfectly suited to the action and is divided into four sections, one for each season.
This is by far the best introduction to a racing game that anyone could have come up with. It’s an explosive mix of fun, excitement, joy, hope, melancholy and sadness — even though it’s just a racing game — and it’s quite a thrilling experience.
The festival atmosphere? It’s definitely present, with lively and energetic DJs and hosts who make you feel like you’re at a major festival. The characters who accompany you during the races also interact with you in a lively manner.
So, what can we expect in Part 5?
At first glance, it’s a pretty decent intro—one that showcases some new features, but lacks all the magic that was present in the fourth installment. The sparseness of the map immediately catches the eye; half of the cars we get to test drive handle extremely poorly, there are no bots or other racers to create even a semblance of the festival’s lively atmosphere, and as for the music—it’s as generic and unremarkable as possible, with just one exception, and that track was recorded exclusively for the game.
To digress slightly from the main topic of this review: this is what the entire game will be like. The “Reskin” of the fourth installment has lost its former glory; practically nothing has been fixed, and what has been fixed amounts to little more than a major update.
Even if you’re a Forza fan, just try to mentally remove the fifth installment from the franchise. What would change? Nothing? That’s exactly what I mean.
Getting back to the review itself, let’s take a look at the intro to Part 6:
You won’t believe it. It’s gotten even worse.
Not only is this intro nearly two minutes shorter, it also makes absolutely no sense. The only new content we see is a map, and the only new audio we hear is a Japanese radio broadcast. That’s it — that’s really all there is.
The cars available for a test drive are all ones we’ve already driven in previous instalments, with the exception of the one on the cover. As for the gameplay mechanics, there’s nothing new on display. What about the voice acting and audio design in general? It’s better to experience it once than read about it 100 times.
The characters are completely wooden, and the voice acting has been criticised since the late updates to the fourth instalment. Players complained that the new characters sounded as if they were being forced to deliver their lines at gunpoint.
You wouldn’t even consider using a gun here; it’s as if the actors are simply reading their lines to familiarise themselves with the script. There are no inflections, no emotion and no direction from the sound team — they’re just lifeless shells, and it’s like this throughout the entire game.
There are only about five story cutscenes, and instead of trying to make them memorable, it feels like they were made by one person who simply copied and pasted them everywhere.
For example, there’s an animation where a rare car is found in a barn, followed by a cutscene showing people discussing the car before finally opening it up. There are 15 such ‘events’ in the game and the same cutscene plays in each one, complete with enthusiastic voice acting. The most interesting thing is that this same cutscene is used to receive gifts from other players. They simply cut out the sound, leaving the animation intact, so it looks as if the characters are just staring at the door before opening it. It’s a small indie studio.
What about the script and dialogue in general? As always, it’s cringeworthy – no sane person in real life would talk the way the characters do in this game.
Let me remind you that they are supposed to represent the drivers. But they come across as if they were plucked off the street and forced into the role.
Have you noticed what the main character looks like, by the way? Yes, it’s another step towards ‘down-to-earth’ aesthetics. However, the developers went so overboard that every playable character template looks the same. I could talk about this all day, but many others have already done so. I’ll never understand why they made the characters so deliberately shabby.
Storyline? Just like in the first Forza Horizon, earn bracelets to unlock races and climb the ranks.
When they saw the trailer, the players thought, “Hooray, back to our roots!” But no…
As expected, there’s no story and the bracelets are just a reimagining of the same progression system from the fourth and fifth instalments. You complete races, unlock a bracelet race, unlock new races, and so on until you finally reach Legends Island, which gives you absolutely nothing.
The whole point of the game is to reach Legends Island, but there are no rewards there — just one time-attack track and a couple of ‘final’ races across the entire region.
Will there be arrogant rivals and bosses like in the first game?
‘No way! How could that be? There’s nothing but friendly rivalry here. Don’t ruin the vibe.”
PROBLEM #2: GAME PLAY AND PROGRESSION
Cars are handed out left, right and centre. Whereas in the fourth instalment, we were given only one car to start with, here we get three straight away — and this isn’t a one-off; you’ll be receiving vehicles for practically everything in this game.
After 13 hours of play, I still hadn’t unlocked everything included in the collector’s edition, even though I hadn’t tried to stray from the main storyline at first. However, just by playing through the story up to the final race, I had unlocked 90 out of 671 cars.
That was the case in version 5, and rightly so. Things improved slightly in version 6, but the catch is that the developers refined the autopilot system, which was designed for accessibility or perhaps for farming, without taking into account that other players could exploit it.
This means you can start a race, activate the autopilot, sleep for 10 hours, then return to collect 10 million credits, which you won’t even be able to spend properly in this game.
PROBLEM #3: CONTENT
QOL updates? Yes and no.
There’s a great new update: the game no longer instantly respawns you when the roof touches the ground. Also, 90% of the trees are now destructible, so they won’t get in the way of exploration.
Unfortunately, half the problems carry over from one game to the next. If you mess up your ‘daring stunt’ the first time, you can’t rewind time to try again.
Sorry, mate. Hold on until the game shows you all the stats from your failed attempt: You’ll see how many points you earned, how many points your friends earned, how many stunts you’ve done in total, and what your global ranking is in percentage terms. Only then can you try again.
Did you complete a 3-star event but hit ‘Restart’ instead of ‘Exit’? Try exiting again. You’ll see that the challenge didn’t count because the game doesn’t support ‘instant best score synchronisation’. You’ll have to do it all over again, wasting another 10 minutes.
Want to add an extra sticker to the design? ‘No, this design belongs to someone else — either delete it or live with it.’ What do you say? Could we allow people to edit the design while blocking both the vinyl file itself and any way to share it, to prevent people from stealing others’ work? Nah, why bother? It’s far too complicated, and it doesn’t work that way anyway. Go and study the maths section.
Should we carry over the designs from Part 5, just as we did with Part 4? No, just the vinyl groups. Here’s why: You might also be wondering about car culture and customisation.
Well, look… Japan is the birthplace of:
- JDM
- iconic street and race cars
- the car tuning revolution
- drifting
- Togu and almost
- tofu
- Anime and manga
- its own music genres
I’m only listing the most mainstream examples of how this country has influenced global culture as a whole. Take the average person, for example. They might like Japanese cars like the Nissan Skyline, racing movies like The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, anime like Initial D, and plenty of other things as well.
If we take a look at the Supra, there are plenty of options: around 10 different bumpers and even a separate licensed body kit! Admittedly, this has been carried over from previous games, as have around 80% of the parts.
It’s just one bumper, which barely changes the appearance of the car, and one body kit based on the same principle. Seriously?
However, it’s worth noting that the level of detail in the cars themselves and their interiors has improved compared to previous instalments. Some models have even been rescanned rather than reused from games released a decade ago. Most of them have also been converted to right-hand drive.
But there’s a catch: even the content didn’t make the cut. Certain car brands are missing. It would be one thing if we were talking about no-name or rebranded cars like Morgans or Hot Wheels, but Bugatti and Hoonigan cars are gone too. In some cases, even standard cars from brands that are still in the game are missing.
Here’s another example: the Koenigsegg Gemera, which can only be seen while playing The Crew 2 or The Crew. Motorfest, Asphalt and Need for Speed: No Limits.
Is it in Forza Horizon 6? It’s locked behind paid DLC. The same goes for the other cool cars and their modifications. Not only is there a 70% chance that these cars won’t be competitive, but you also have to wait two months just to test drive a car that has caught your eye.
You can probably guess how long it will take to break the speed record and dominate 70% of the races in its class as soon as this car appears. Pay-to-win? Nah, never heard of that.
I still don’t understand why the ‘drip-feed’ system hasn’t been updated yet. What’s the point in paying $30 just to receive a useless gadget two months later?
That would make sense in GTA Online, where the game has practically become free to play, and they’ve been milking it for 13 years straight. But here? In a game set in 2026? Seriously?
I won’t even get into the Viper GTS ACR FE: they included the boost in the VIP pass ($20 extra) right from launch. What a brilliant move!
Are there any references to movies? There aren’t any in the current release, though you might be able to find Sean’s Mustang from The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift in the Forza Edition car category. Perhaps they’ll add more later; I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a paid update.
What about new game modes like Togu? It’s just a standard street race with one opponent and a narrower track. Don’t expect any new mechanics.
Oh, and I almost forgot: Japan — the birthplace of drifting and car tuning, and the setting for drifting down winding mountain roads at night in Tokyo. Is that where it all happens?
Technically, there are 20 drift zones in the game, half of which are on gravel. On gravel, Carl! In a game set in Japan, we’re supposed to drift on gravel! Okay, I can understand that the developers wanted to balance the game and add some variety. I’m sure not everyone likes drifting on the motorway – fair enough. But why do the drift zones themselves feel more like a joke? This applies to both the length and layout of the locations.
There are just two sections along a winding mountain road. There isn’t a single one in the city — not even at that very intersection in central Tokyo, nor on the technical roads through the villages or the long curves of the highways — but instead it’s off-road terrain and a path in Tokyo’s central park. Most of the trails are gravel runs.
The drift club campaign also feels like a joke, with the same six shameful chapters. That might be enough for the ‘five’ and Mexico, but for Japan, it comes across as an insult. Once again, all the stories are presented as an insight into the country and its culture. How can you possibly tell the story of drift culture in just six races, with your teammates’ pointless chatter filling the time in between?
Forza Horizon 6 also introduces a new feature: Time Attack mode. This offers players a fresh challenge. Along with this mode came special cars that turned out to be practically ‘broken’: they have incredible traction and hardly ever slide. This is very different from the game’s usual physics, making races in this mode unique and unusual. What’s more, most of these cars can be used in regular online races. ‘Fun’ doesn’t even begin to cover it.
The main complaint is that there could be more NPCs, particularly in the Tokyo area. While I understand this is for performance reasons, seeing so few people on the streets and pavements in the heart of Tokyo feels unrealistic and breaks the immersion.
SHORT STORIES AND TALES?
Just mind-numbingly monotonous “road trips” from point A to point B to point C, accompanied by dreary “fun facts about Japan” from an equally dreary character, and working as a courier. And I’m not even joking.
As for the road trips, I’ll study Japanese culture on my own sometime because this kind of storytelling is useless and doesn’t hold the listener’s interest at all.
As for the courier job, it’s even worse. You just hop into a standard delivery truck and drive back and forth between points A, B and C. On the last delivery, no matter how many times you try, you can’t seem to get a 3-star rating. To get all the available rewards, you need to earn about 1.5 million credits in a job where you’re paid a maximum of 60–70k. The developers really went all out to make this job fun. Since we’ll have to complete this job many times, they’ve given us the following options:
- Delivery on time
- Speed Delivery
- Drifting delivery
- Delivery race: beat other delivery vehicles
- Damage-free delivery
- Delivery to multiple locations
For each of these deliveries, you only have two options for a single vehicle, which forces you to drive around Tokyo more than 60 times delivering boxes filled with goodness knows what. Needless to say, this feels like a half-hearted attempt.
Couldn’t they have just added one of our local fleet cars to begin with, or at least four cars for different levels and off-road driving, as well as trips to neighbouring villages? Or maybe a random premium delivery? This is just super boring grind work — not profitable, not interesting and nothing but a total drag.
Whenever I brought up the topic of gameplay variety in conversations with Forza fans, the response was always the same: ‘What do you expect from a racing game?’
Let me answer:
I don’t want to spend 20 minutes driving around an empty map in a limo, listening to meaningless chatter in the background like in Horizon 4.
I was absolutely certain that I’d expect more from a mode called TOGU in a game about Japan. To conclude, I’d just like the stories to be grounded in reality rather than consisting of random facts about food.
The story isn’t the main focus of Forza, nor is it its “biggest selling point”, but at least the first game had charismatic characters and a coherent narrative. Here, however, everything feels artificial, even though it’s supposed to be a “return to its roots”, and all the stories rely entirely on the player’s imagination, especially the ones involving deliveries.
Even if you say here that ‘it’s just a sandbox game’, I’ll respond by saying that even Minecraft has lore and some semblance of a plot. In Forza, though, you deliver food that you can’t see, walk up to a car that’s been sitting behind a petrol station for years, call over a friend with a bucket, wash it, and it’s all yours. Logic is definitely not the game’s strong point!
Even setting that aside, Japan has enormous potential for casual references and cameos, as well as full-scale collaborations with the Japanese and Asian media industries.
What about Smoky Nagata? Akira Nakai (RWB)? What about other, more widely recognised figures like Song Kang (Han from The Fast and the Furious), or at least Morohoshi-san from NFS: 2015?
HIGHLIGHTS
However, I would like to highlight the positive aspects of this game that I noticed.
Firstly, exploring the map and just cruising around is a very relaxing experience. I’m not sure why — maybe it’s the destructible trees or the new graphics.
Perhaps Forza offers a breath of fresh air amidst all the ‘completes’ and ‘100% clears’, because while other games might take just two or three evenings to complete a single region, Forza is the opposite: you can clear anywhere from 1.5 to 3 regions in a single evening.
I liked the new exploration mechanics just as much, particularly the extremely convenient division into regions.
- unique ‘mascots’ (one-of-a-kind collectibles for each region);
- Used cars that you might stumble upon and purchase at a great discount — they’re even tuned up!
- and a nicely updated journal for research.
We’ve also added support for a 500-degree steering wheel rotation range. We could have increased it to 720 or even 900 degrees, but this is still an improvement on the simple 180-degree rotation seen in previous versions.
They’ve also improved the tyre system, but it’s practically useless — in online races, other players will ram you into a wall and just drive off in a meta car!
What about the music? It’s hit and miss, but it’s still better than in Horizon 5 — though this was the first Forza game where I turned the DJs off.
I was particularly impressed by the lively ‘Gacha Radio’, which is broadcast entirely in Japanese and features an energetic host, as well as ‘Sub Pop Radio’, which is packed with a wide variety of chilled-out music — perfect for relaxing while exploring the map.
A couple of tracks from Block Party/XS were a treat for the ears, too.
CONCLUSION
The sixth instalment actually leaves a very strange aftertaste. It seems to have everything I was hoping for, yet it doesn’t bring me any joy. I can’t figure out why. The game feels lifeless, and I’m certain it could have been much better. It wouldn’t have taken much effort — just listening to what the players had to say.
Perhaps some parts of this review came across as if I wanted the developers to “pander more to the mainstream by adding a quote from *The Fast and the Furious* to every line and playing nothing but Eurobeat on the radio,” but if you think about it: isn’t the fact that 70% of the community unanimously asked for Japan purely because of herd mentality (i.e., only Japan promotes car culture and tuning so strongly), and that the developers did indeed focus on it in the new installment… doesn’t that automatically make the game, at least halfway, “mainstream”?
And honestly, I’ve never really understood people who defend Forza so fiercely in its current state. Maybe it’s because the racing genre is truly dead, and there’s literally nothing else to play in it besides the infamous *The Crew: Motorfest*, but… is that really a reason to reject any criticism, treat innovations as impossible, and say that “it will ruin the game/setting” instead of collectively trying to improve the situation? Are you saying the game isn’t already ruined compared to what it was in the fourth installment and earlier?
Players aren’t developers, so they aren’t in a position to speak to the concept of “development complexity.” They are simply consumers: their role, therefore, is to consume and offer criticism, while developers are perfectly capable of establishing a connection with this very community of consumers and answering questions like “what’s possible and what isn’t.” Why isn’t any of this happening?
Players aren’t developers, so they can’t speak to the concept of ‘development complexity’. Their role is simply to consume and offer criticism. Developers, on the other hand, are perfectly capable of establishing a connection with the consumer community and answering questions such as ‘What is and isn’t possible?’ So why isn’t any of this happening?
Gamers aren’t “tolerant” either. For some reason, NFS and The Crew are absolutely slammed with hate, yet the same people who bash other racing series fiercely defend Forza. In much the same way, there’s nothing left to do in Forza after just 30 hours, and essentially, nothing ever changes.
I really hope that, in the future, the developers will change course and start listening to players instead of random people off the street. They’ve already ruined Motorsport beyond repair, and Horizon only survives because of a lack of competition and a stronger legacy than Motorsport.
IN THE END
set in Japan. It excels at providing simple pleasures: choosing a car, turning on the radio, driving out into the night-time rain, and realising an hour later that the race was just an excuse, not the goal.
For new players, this is probably one of the best places to start in the series. The map is impressive, there are plenty of vehicles, the graphics are excellent, the controls are intuitive and there is enough content to keep you busy for a long time. Those who missed the fifth instalment may feel that the sixth is a true return to the Horizon series.
Things are getting tougher for veterans, though. The formula hasn’t changed, the festival-like presentation has deteriorated, progression remains the same and Japanese culture sometimes feels more like window dressing than the game’s foundation. If you were expecting a revolution, Forza Horizon 6 will disappoint.
