Forza Horizon 6: The Definitive Review

In any given edition of Forza Horizon, there are two inevitable crunch points. An unexpected sense of gaping ennui after completing a long event and an unexpected sense of over-familiarity with the road you’re on. These are universal experiences for me across every iteration, and I was somewhat taken aback by how quickly they arrived in my early hours with Forza Horizon 6. This thoroughly incremental sequel feels just as vacuous as ever, just as shoddily aligned with second-hand embarrassment in its portrayal of a faux, facile and overly-online car culture, and just as cynical as its previous entries. And yet, I don’t hate it entirely - in fact, I’m really enjoying it. Well, I’m enjoying the driving and the point-to-points, just as much as I always have in Horizon, and I’m staying in spite of the frankly terrible content that surrounds it. As ever, Forza Horizon is great despite its regional ornamentations although in this case, the locale finds a generous harmony with the core gameplay concept.

There’s a much-vaunted set-piece moment, a dash to upgrade yourself to the next tier of events, where you’re tasked with racing a mecha through the Japanese countryside. It’s everything that’s bad about Forza Horizon - cringe-inducing cool-baiting, stupid race physics, showy bombast that falls short of being actually spectacular and ultimately, a frustratingly trite waste of time and resources. As you wobble your supremely capable sports car along the designated route, this fucking mech is dashing left and right, jumping in water, flying over bridges and generally being little more than a massive nuisance, ruining what could have been a very enjoyable timed run. At no point whatsoever did I feel any sense of being in a race; everything was so obviously scripted that it felt like I was set up to ‘win’ no matter what I actually did. It beautifully sums up the vacuity at the heart of the Forza Horizon brand proposition, its slavish devotion to its inane festival concept, its hollow flopping between the hard realities of motoring and soft fantasy as it sees fit, and its oddly misfiring demographic focuses. Who the fuck asked to race a pretend mech? Who failed to get the actual RX-78-2 Gundam license for it?1 Who actually enjoys this shit? As with so much of Forza Horizon’s mediocre attempts to be edgy or wacky or excitingly gnarly, it feels like extremely uncool people trying very hard to be cool, in much the same manner as the industry leaders in that arena, Rockstar Games.

There’s an argument to be made that what Forza Horizon needs is to just grow the fuck up. There are lessons still to be learned from its increasingly forgotten forebears in the wonderful Project Gotham Racing series, where exquisite taste in cars blended with the right balance of realism and fantasy to create racing game magic. Horizon instead languishes in the savage borderlands between Fast and Furious as a foundational text, Top Gear’s tiresome petrolhead orthodoxy and Instagram Reels’ most asinine supercar poshboy content. Horizon even forces you to be friends with a virtual Instagram Reels2 asinine supercar poshboy as a permanent companion that, much to my regret and despite repeated attempts, I have not been able to permakill by ramming them off the road. This utterly infuriating sociology undermines the core of Forza Horizon’s essential goodness. It feels like a strange sideways escalation from Horizon 5, somehow managing to calm its demented enthusiasm somewhat and yet being even more infuriatingly insulting by the same token. It was so, so painful to have to drive Larry fucking Chen around as he stiltedly read his scripted lines in a photography challenge that was unnecessarily padded with driving peril and time-attack urgency, all to take a single image that, to my photomode-obssessed eyes, looked like absolute shit yet the game - and the virtual Larry - seemed to be thrilled with. But this is all part of the general AAA appeasement of ego that Forza Horizon readily indulges in, almost as a brand value.

At the beginning of the game you’re forced into penury as, err, a homeless, carless tourist who can drive fast (or something), and reliant on the completely inexplicable charity of the game’s central cheerleader, Mei. She gives you not one but two cars at the start, both of which are fairly modest. Then, after the tutorial and upon detecting my profile had played previous Horizons, I suddenly have two multi-million hypercars. The game couldn’t give me something as useful as a bunch of credits, of course, but two fucking insane cars that my character, as explicitly shown in the game’s own narrative, could never hope to own. I did decry previous Horizons for “glitter-cannoning cars in your face on a regular basis” and while Forza Horizon 6 seems to have toned down that largesse, suddenly getting these two cars in particular - an Aston Martin Vulcan and a fucking Mercedes AMG One - is so astonishingly discordant with what the game is saying you are that it feels like some wild hallucination rather than a just reward for series loyalty. There’s a weird immaturity to it, a childishness in how it doesn’t just give you nice cars, but two of the most extreme cars in the entire game. Yet, it symbolises Forza Horizon’s arbitrary flip-flopping between realism and cartoonery. It’s a maddening kind of lovebombing or something, coercive in its absurd and unwelcome generosity. Forcing a pair of ludicrous white elephants on you chimes directly with that godawful extremebro festival and its special shade of cringeworthy Colin Hunt-adjacent wackiness. The worst part of it all, of course, is how this foul miasma of dayglo and billionaire excess occludes the honourable and noble romance of the Forza Horizon concept - the open road, the cars, the competition. Forza Horizon’s posturing and grandiosity is all an impediment to accessing that core, and as such remains baffling to me in the extreme. Again, who actually asks for this shit? Is there some vital demographic that finds even a single shred of this performative nonsense anything more than a pitiful distraction from what they actually want to do? It seems that Microsoft and Playground have walled themselves into presenting Forza Horizon as an eternal forever-festival of glib mediocrity, and I wonder what answers they’d get back from the actual playerbase if they could magically get everyone to honourably fill in an honest questionnaire.

Forza Horizon 5 offended me manyfold, but perhaps the most annoying aspect was the map. The setting lent itself to extreme boredom and a constant sense of deja-vu after a few hours of explorative play. Much like the self-similar fractal nature of Horizon 4’s playground of bucolic British roads, where it seemed like each junction, each b-road, was a copy of one you’d been down ten minutes ago, Horizon 5’s movement between three biomes of repetitive blandness wasn’t helped by how quickly it felt like you’d reached the edges. With that rubbing along the boundaries, I realised how tightly I was hemmed into a world that only shrunk the more I drove around it. Thankfully, the enlargement that Horizon 6 brings pushes that back somewhat, and a more faithful replica of Japanese driving environments is definitely a vast improvement - if only for the mood of the place. And yet, its mini-Tokyo feels startlingly compact once you’ve skirted its edges. Go to the bottom and set your GPS for the top to find it’s only 30 or so kilometres. Bear in mind that Test Drive Unlimited, a game which is nearly TWENTY FUCKING YEARS OLD has a map area of 1,500+ square kilometres where this latest pinnacle product for the modern AAA driving experience has just 250 or so. And, hilariously, I made exactly the same complaint nearly 3 years ago in my Forza Horizon 5 review. In that sense, plaudits that Horizon 6 has doubled the area of Horizon 5 only goes to show how badly the game is falling short of the concept pioneer, and consequently a larger map of Japan that’s still woefully short of the full O’ahu means the ennui problem hasn’t been solved, but merely deferred until later.

Despite all of this, the fundamental stasis, the tiny world, the pocket Tokyo, the repetitive car roster, the fucking awful lifestyle shit, it turns out that Forza Horizon 6 is a spectacular success. As I mentioned earlier, I am massively enjoying it. But then its core is still really fucking good! Although weirdly, I’m finding the cars to all meld into one if you get into tuning and upgrading, as if they all hone into a singular sweet spot within the game’s handling model. But not to worry, they still sound different and it’s still plenty of fun to bomb along roads to the various soundtracks the engines create. Point-to-point racing, it seems, will never get old. And it does underline what a huge difference the right kind of environment can make. I’m still begging Playground to consider a full-size Sicily for the seventh entry, which could contain such marvels as a magnificent coastal drive and both Targa Florio courses. But the Targa Florio is real down-and-dirty grandad shit - and really, that’s my point. What I really want to see is Forza Horizon split into two demographic modes - the arcadey dayglo piss for youngsters with an austere, simulation-heavy mode for old bores like me. I’m tired of seeing these car brands and environments squandered on cheap thrills where the thought of running costs are the last thing anyone could imagine. But I would love a Forza Horizon where you need to keep an eye on the fuel meter, and where damage is permanent unless you pay real-world prices to fix them. A survival mode for the open-world racer, right? Surely that’s vogueish enough to warrant some attention? Can we please at least acknowledge that the drivers are humans who can actually exit cars to walk around car meets? Could we possibly construct an RPG for those drivers? Or are we so hemmed in by Playground and Microsoft’ s expectations of its audience that we’ll only make meagre additions to foundations laid 14 years ago, effectively making the entire series just a run of expansion pack DLCs instead of brave and inventive evolutions of the original idea? More than anything else, Forza Horizon feels like the epitome of AAA stasis. It’s good enough for an eternal now, perhaps, so just bury your head and plough on through the same old hoops! Although we all know that if it sells millions when it’s broken there’s even less incentive to fix it, I can’t be the only one that hopes Forza’s horizons will eventually broaden.

[21]