Forza Horizon 6 Review

Or if you play like me, Bush Basher Tokyo Edition.

I am not a car person – I drive a 1999 Mitsubishi Lancer that carries less resale value than the laptop I am writing this review on. Yet, the Forza Horizon series has been an immense source of joy for me since I first gave the Australia-set Forza Horizon 3 a bash several years ago.

Now it’s Japan’s turn to experience the Horizon Festival with Forza Horizon 6, and I am deeply pleased but entirely unsurprised that the series’ standard for being the most vibrant, ever-rewarding summer vacation-ass motoring experience still cannot be beat.

Do you like cars? Do you like virtual photography? Do you like collectathons? Do you like the kind of arcadey racing that sits somewhere between very serious and entirely goofy? Do you like digital tourism? Even more so than prior entries, Forza Horizon 6 feels experientially sandboxy. There’s a core progression path to follow, sure, but you can have a deeply satisfying time by largely ignoring it; exploring the world and pursuing side quests and flights of fancy.

Your journey begins in the amateur wristband pool with a largely more common collection of cars that top-out at lower speeds. Just about everything you do earns you experience points towards unlocking the qualifying challenge for the next pool, and while successfully completing that qualifier will drop a great heap of points of interest onto the map, you’re never actually prevented from just roaming around and finding most of those things yourself as no part of the map is gated.

The satellite navigation assistant can now readily suggest to you the next and nearest core progression-making events, as well as automatically driving you there should you wish it to do so. You can also fast travel instantly of course, but hitting autodrive and switching to the cinematic camera is just so darn pleasant.

You can untether the camera and fly it around in drone mode at any time to swiftly scout around a pretty wide distance from your car. It’s incredibly helpful for hunting down hidden Barn Find cars but the inability to drop map pins on the ground from it is frustrating. The inability to fly any higher than that of a particularly tall truck is a disappointing limitation also, especially for how greatly getting real verticality would expand the possibilities for virtual photography.

House and garage collecting has been expanded with the addition of a large mountain estate that is acquired fairly early in the core path. You can customise it extensively though doing so is a credit sink. The fact that it exists behind a loading screen leaves it feeling disappointingly disconnected from an otherwise seamless world.

Disappointingly, it wouldn’t let me name mine ‘Fort Kickass’, though it did deem ‘Chateau du Trans Rights’ acceptable, which is good. While ‘Jam’ still isn’t available as a preset character name, ‘Rockefeller’ is, and being verbally referred to as such by the almost mockingly monotone Horizon virtual assistant only grew funnier as my property empire expanded.

Japan’s famous regional mascots are a star feature with 200 to be found across the map. Rather upsettingly though you have to drive into them at speed in order for them to be collected, and doing so invariably changes their cheery facial expressions to one of horror and woe upon impact. My wife reacted so viscerally upon my showing her that I still feel like a monster days later (though I remain committed to hunting the last 80 or so down after I file this review. Sorry darling!).

As outright joyous as I find Forza Horizon 6 to be on the whole, I do have gripes. I can’t help but find the gacha spins repulsive, though they do feel a wee bit downplayed this time out compared to prior series entries.

There’s a whole food delivery diversion that’s new, and while it’s a bit more Crazy Taxi than Uber Eats in execution, it still lands as uncomfortably dystopian nevertheless. Where Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth used the same idea to reinforce the protagonist’s financial plight, Forza Horizon 6 positions it flatly as a good way to make money. While I don’t really expect cultural commentary as such from a game like this, the whole thing struck me as irritatingly tone-deaf.

The quality of the new setting itself cannot be undersold though. The compressed, fantasy version of Tokyo and its surroundings that Playground Games has realised is impeccably beautiful as well as being spectacularly fun to hoon around in. I’m an east-coast Australian but have been lucky enough to have lived in small-town England and spent some time in Tokyo too, and what impresses me more than anything with the Forza Horizon series continues to be just how flawlessly Playground manages to nail the feel of its locales, even when not truly portraying them with precision accuracy. From the texture of the concrete to the density of signage and foliage, the sense of place just feels so utterly correct in vibe even if it is all extraordinarily compressed geographically.

For those interested in handheld play, Forza Horizon 6 benchmarks at a rock solid 30FPS on low settings on the Steam Deck OLED. While it freely allows you to increase the frame cap, it’s pretty dicey at anything higher. Playing at 45FPS is mostly okay and does feel smoother, but things will dip pretty regularly back down to the 30s anyway. It’s incredibly cool that the game is able to run at all on the Deck, but the presentational compromise is so severe that it really does harm the experience.

Despite my handful of quibbles, I still find Forza Horizon 6 to be an utter joy. Drifting down lush mountainous woodlands to a stunningly radiant coastal fishing village while Rydeen plays is an absolutely singular experience. Inadvertently finding myself behind the wheel of the same model of car as my own and being in awe of how precisely the interior was translated from reality is just quietly cool as hell. The absurd attention to detail married with boundless outright fun is just unparalleled. A curse upon Playground for removing my La Cucaracha novelty horn though!

Forza Horizon 6 is available from 19 May on Windows PC, Xbox Series S, and Xbox Series X, or 15 May if you wish to purchase its pricier Premium Edition. A release on PS5 is planned for later in the year.

Forza Horizon 6 was reviewed using a promotional code on Windows PC via Steam, as provided by the publisher. Click here to learn more about Stevivor’s scoring scale.