Racing as a Celebration: Forza Horizon 6 Review

It's worth noting right away that there won't be a serious analysis or comparison with previous Horizon installments here. That's because I simply don't remember the fourth part, and I abandoned the fifth after a couple of hours – the setting wasn't for me at all. I don't like deserts, mountains, one-story provinces, and the perpetually scorching sun overhead.

But Forza Horizon 6 is a different story. There aren't many racing games set in Japan, from major studios, with multi-million dollar budgets. And this is despite the fact that Japan has its own car culture – drift, which originated in the Land of the Rising Sun. And this fact alone attracted me to the new Horizon installment.

The Game is Fun!

Playground Games' main achievement as a development studio is that they manage to bring joy from playing their game.

Don't get me wrong, but I still remember how much fun I had playing Need for Speed: Most Wanted and Carbon, Burnout 3: Takedown, and FlatOut. It was simply fun to drive around virtual worlds and tracks. And I haven't felt that kind of racing excitement since then, even in later Need for Speed installments, which either became simulators or tried to play "Fast and Furious."

And after driving the first demo race in Forza Horizon 6, where you get to drive various classes of cars through the most picturesque places in virtual Japan, I felt that I was having fun again controlling a pixelated car on the screen. My friends' Drivatars push each other on difficult turns, developer bots overtake me on the straight as if I'm standing still – and this is on "medium" difficulty!

And when you're released to explore the local beauty in your first starter car, you realize – this is where I'll spend the whole summer.

Atmosphere of Celebration

As mentioned above, in the Forza universe, there's the Horizon festival – a racing event where the best and worst racers from all over the planet gather, and spectators cheer them on in the stands and support them with applause at the end of each race. And this feeling is perfectly conveyed in the sixth installment.

Entire districts of Tokyo are literally redeveloped for the festival's needs, so that supercars can race through the streets of the metropolis. Or a track made of containers is built in the port, which must be completed in 4 minutes – otherwise, you won't get the coveted "three stars" for the race. And for dessert, the organizers put you in a race against two airplanes and a "Gundam" robot from the anime of the same name and offer you to defeat them!

I think my main point is clear – few racing games have tried, like Horizon, to create a sense of celebration.

The industry increasingly features "serious" stories about losing family and raising children, about saving the world or the universe. And even in the genre today, they often try to twist some unnecessary drama: your entire car fleet has been stolen, you must rise from the bottom and take revenge on your offenders; you've been framed, and you must beat a list of 15 racers, shaking off the cops as well; you owe a lot of money and must drive across the country in 24 hours, or you'll be killed. You get the gist.

And at Playground Games, there are clearly fans of Burnout 3: Takedown, which took you all over the world, created an atmosphere of festive madness, and in the background, a cheerful DJ announced new tournaments and championships. Unfortunately, today in games you can't destroy entire convoys of cars by crashing into a fuel truck in a brand new "Ferrari," but Forza Horizon 6 tries very hard to adopt everything else from Burnout.

We Choked These Drivatars

We, as players, once again have a goal and some kind of career. If the fifth part completely ignored any progression, giving out supercars from the very first second a player appeared in Mexico, then in the sixth, you'll have to fight for your place in the sun.

Every race in the sixth part brings us closer to the status of "Horizon Festival Legend," but we need to achieve it not for some reason, but despite everything. After all, what could be better than defeating the champions of past festivals, proving that only boiled eggs are cooler than you?

Armed with a collector's journal where all my achievements are recorded, I set off for the first race and... barely came in third, somehow catching up with the leaders. "I don't understand!" I exclaimed and restarted the race hoping to beat these insolent bots. I came in sixth. The game even offered me to lower the difficulty to "low" because I was losing often. This angered me even more – after all, I'm a veteran of the genre, I've been playing racing games since childhood!

I was amazed that the game's bots fought back. I had forgotten that feeling when you have to learn to play even against the computer – that was the only way to beat something like Most Wanted or FlatOut. At the same time, the Drivatar system, which reads my friends' driving styles, made it clear that I wasn't competing with some random bots, but with people I knew personally. More precisely, with their projection, but how accurate it was.

I see my friend Nikita's nickname, who takes every turn too perfectly – and I start playing dirty tricks on him, because he'll definitely overtake me at the finish line. My friend Oleg's Drivatar starts pushing me into the rear wheels when we get close – he really plays like that in his campaign and comes in first through aggressive driving. And these are just a couple of examples.

How I Stopped Fearing and Started Understanding Tuning

Another important achievement of Forza Horizon 6 is that for every race, if you want to raise the stakes and play at a higher difficulty level, you'll have to tune your cars and generally keep an eye on your car fleet.

There are over 550 cars in the game, but you're unlikely to collect them all in one playthrough. And even less likely to drive every car. However, finding 15-20 options that you like visually and in their behavior, and then reassembling them for your own needs, different types of races, or fine-tuning them right before the race – that's quite realistic.

That's what happened with my RX-7, which I tuned to the latest automotive fashion. It easily accelerated to 300 kilometers per hour on the straight, but it had one big drawback – with any turn of the steering wheel, it would go into a skid, often uncontrolled. No matter what rally parts I installed, no matter how I changed the tires – the problem persisted. "But I like this car!" I told myself, and for the first time in many, many years, I delved into "tuning."

In Forza Horizon 6, this concept extends not to a simple replacement of parts, but to a very fine-tuning of, it seems, every detail of the car. Tire pressure, shock absorbers, front and rear wheel alignment, gear shift timing, and torque adjustment – in short, you can get lost there. But I sat down and slowly began to read into each setting to save my "Ryksa."

After I got a completely different car, on which the skidding problem almost disappeared, but the high speed remained, I realized that this game is much deeper if you set yourself the task of digging into it in that direction.

Out of interest, I turned off driving assists, removed all guiding lines on the track, set up the camera for drifting and for normal driving, switched the difficulty to "Expert" – now I only drive around Japan like that. Virtual assistants on each wheel don't hold me back in high-speed races, drifting has become much more convenient, and each new car is a testing ground.

That long-forgotten feeling returned – when you win a race in Forza Horizon 6 through hard work and throw your hands up in joy, shouting something like: "Woohooooo! Eat that, metalheads!"

Rest After Work

But everything described above is only part of the experience of the new "Forza." You can even ignore all that and play with standard settings, superficially upgrading cars within their class, and thoroughly enjoy every race.

Because every race here is an attempt to deliver emotions not only from the sweat on your brow but also from the tracks themselves. Rally on dirt and mud, street races in nocturnal Tokyo, mountain descents on winding Japanese serpentines – I would simply get tired of listing all the available types of competitions. There's entertainment here for every type of gameplay: from "relax for a couple of hours in the evening" to "I want to set a record among friends."

And the local stories also help you relax – these are special races involving Forza Horizon characters. You can be driven through picturesque places in Japan in a convoy, and then given control of a supercar and allowed to race freely on local highways. The "Drift Club" tasks will teach you how to drift, tell the story of the origin of this culture in Japan, immerse you in the essence of the movement, and explain why it still attracts people.

And if you don't want staged journeys and races with Drivatars – go explore the available territory. There are plenty of hidden cars, collectibles, and challenges: speed zones, radars, dangerous jumps, drift zones, and the ability to find a path to another area through the forests. It's great when you're completely exhausted after a workday, just want to press buttons to good music, and not strain your brain.

Caution: Your Ears and Eyes Are Doomed to Enjoy

By the way, since we're talking about music – I'll allow myself a liberty!

As someone whose musical taste was largely shaped by racing games from my childhood and youth, I declare – Forza Horizon 6 has arguably the best soundtrack selection for racing in TWO DECADES! I have no other contender in the genre that could compete for this title with the sixth "Forza."

Here's mind-blowing electronic music that makes you dance in your chair or on the couch, Japanese pop that makes you groove, and rock accompaniment that pierces to the core. When I heard the new Linkin Park song - Up from the Bottom in a race, I thought I was dreaming. And when Rise Against, Baby Metal, Poppy, and Pendulum started playing – I was over the moon!

Choosing songs that inject a little adrenaline into your brain, match the roar of engines, maintain the race's dynamics, and provide aesthetic pleasure all at once – that's incredibly difficult work. And the people responsible for the Forza Horizon 6 soundtrack deserve a hefty award.

I also want to praise the designers and the people who worked on the graphics. Every car is meticulously reproduced both externally and internally. The details can be examined endlessly. And seeing this virtual Japan on my TV, at maximum settings, with ray tracing enabled, I sometimes whistle in awe. When the lighting in the race dynamically changes, the setting sun reflects in puddles against the mountains, and the car shows reflections from headlights and glowing roadside lamps – I lose my mind. It's that beautiful.

Of course, critics from the Internet have already said that "the sixth part is no different from the previous ones," after watching a few videos on YouTube. And if you've heard such nonsense – don't believe it. There simply isn't a more beautiful game in the genre.

Diagnosis

If we at IXBT Games gave ratings, I would give Forza Horizon all tens, fives, and stars without the slightest hesitation.

But since we're not about numbers, but about opinions and emotions, I'll just say: go and play the new "Forza." A sense of celebration, competition, speed, and audiovisual orgasm is guaranteed. After all, Playground Games has given us one of the best games in the genre for many, many years!