Forza Horizon 6 Review: Is it truly worth the hype?

I wanna wanna wake up where you are~

Forza Horizon 6 has been a title long awaited by fans, and certainly not without reason. Leaks had been swirling for months: It would be set in Japan, featuring improvements in the driving experience across the board, and much much more.

Here in this review, I will detail everything related to this game, and whether or not it has lived up to expectations.

Full disclosure: I'm very much a casual player.

Handling and physics

Handling, one of the core components defining a driving game. Get it wrong, and you’ve killed the experience before the player even starts the game.

Forza Horizon’s previous titles, such as Forza Horizon 4, had cars with a driving experience that could be described as hellish, and with a larger learning curve. Flooring any RWD car even a little too much in a corner would send your car spiraling to both ends of the track and back.

In FH6, the handling is realistic enough for you to think twice about weight transfer, yet still being forgiving when you make an aggressive play. Oversteer and understeer are less prevalent in stock cars, but when they do happen, its actually predictable and doesn’t spell a death sentence for your race.

Map design and setting

Set smack dab in the middle of Japan (JAPAN!!!!!!!). You’ve got Tokyo city, the Rainbow bridge, Hokkaido-esque snow filled cities. Its the wet dream of many, myself included. Each building is meticulously detailed with small tidbits that give the game soul. The four seasons are also back!! Spring, summer, fall, and winter, each with its own atmosphere, vibes and handling.

The map in Forza Horizon 6 is also larger by miles and miles compared to its predecessors. And even so, the detail has not been compromised, each corner feels deliberate with intention.

Visuals and performance

Do tame your expectations. The graphics of the game are less of an upgrade and more of a sidegrade, but to be fair, Forza Horizon games have been good looking from the start.

That being said, it doesn’t mean that the graphic fidelity of FH6 is bad in any way. In fact, it is still one of the BEST looking racing games out there. The lighting in particular has seen a more noticable glow-up, especially overall atmosphere at night or during cloudy and rainy days.

https://support.forza.net/hc/en-us/articles/50088215399827-Forza-Horizon-6-PC-Specs

Even on medium-high settings, Forza Horizon 6 never fails to make me stop in my tracks to enter photo mode and just stare in awe.

As the saying goes, “With great graphics comes horrible performance (?)", or something along the lines of that.

Well, Playground Games have absolutely nailed the optimizations here. It runs really solid on a RTX 2050 mobile, pushing low 50s and high 40s on medium-high settings, with the noticable bottleneck being the 4GB VRAM.

There’s a wiiiiide selection of resolution scaling technologies and plenty of graphic options to cherry pick from. You can balance performance and visuals to your personal tastes.

Having said that, one thing I‘ve noticed is how impressive the range of options they give. You can go from true realism all the way down to PS2’s poly-like graphics for low end hardware. It honestly makes the game playable on anything, probably even on your fridge.

Gameplay

The wristband system

The player starts off as a tourist exploring Japan, and unlike the previous titles where you were already a superstar or rookie. The whole game is largely built around the wristbands.

Some stuff you can do to earn Horizon points

You begin with the lowest rank and you have to work your way up by completing challenges and completing qualifiers before earning the higher tiered wristbands, eventually earning the Golden wristband where you will unlock exclusive access to Legend Island.

Honestly, I’m a huge fan of this wristband system. The game slowly feeds you bite sized challenges and races. And this makes the gameplay feel progressive instead of overwhelming you right from the start.

Stamps

“Discover Japan” stamps are basically Forza Horizon 6’s take on achievements. You have to complete certain tasks to earn stamps, in which you could unlock cars, wheelspins and other stuff.

You have to take photographs of cars to unlock them.

Horizon Play

Horizon Play is Forza Horizon 6’s online multiplayer hub, with Spec Racing as the standout game mode. In Spec Racing, everyone gets same car, same tune, and same tyres. All that’s different are the players’ skills on the track. It really lets you see where you stand as a driver without anyone leaning into a meta tune.

From my experience, players have been largely respectful, and I say largely because there have been times where I've been rammed out of spite. But honestly, it’s still miles better than most online racing games I’ve played.

Quality of Life

"What's Next" is one of the best things to come out of this game. When you don't know what to do next, it helps a ton by surfacing aaallll recommended events you should tackle.

Along with Auto Drive, these two features are additions you won't find in any previous title. Auto Drive lets you, well, drive automatically, hands-free. It's a pretty neat feature for just sitting back and enjoying the view from the passenger seat (and farming credits by auto-driving The Goliath >:))

Miscellaneous

Sound design

One of my pet peeves of Forza Horizon 4 was the metallic tinny exhaust sounds. If i were to describe it, all the cars sound the same. But it is different for Forza horizon 6, each car has its distinct roar, and grumble.

Car Meets

Car meets are one of the few things that feel a little underwhelming. When you think of a car meet, you picture something packed with people and chaos, but oh no that's not the case here.

More often than not, car meets are just empty lots. Not a single living soul in sight. And honestly, I don't blame anyone for it.

As of writing, there's zero incentive to show up.

No one wants to hang around an empty lot for hours on the off chance someone might drop by, and the small server caps really aren't helping either.

Verdict

At the time of writing, Forza Horizon 6 is priced at an eye-watering RM299 ($70) JUST for the standard edition. That's a steep ask, no doubt, but the sheer volume of improvements goes a long way towards justifying the cost.

The handling alone is a night-and-day leap from the twitchy, punishing mess of FH4. Add in the MASSIVE, meticulously crafted Japan map and the QoL features, and that's when you see where aallll the hype came from.

Sure, car meets are a ghost town and the server caps are limiting, but those are small gripes in an otherwise stellar experience. If you're still hesitant to fork out that wad of cold hard cash, I'd wholeheartedly recommend grabbing a month’s worth of Xbox Game Pass and giving this game a shot before pulling the trigger.

Once you get a taste, I’d guarantee you it'll be hard to go back.