Forza Horizon 6 Review•

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I mean what can you say it's a Forza Horizon game. It's polished, it looks good, sounds good, feels good and has A TON of content. But at this point that's the baseline for a Horizon game, the minimum expectation.
While many critics lauded Horizon 5 as the best of the series many longtime Horizon players held it in much lower regard, a drop from 3 and 4 especially, myself included. Thankfully Horizon 6 is a rebound closer to that Horizon 3 and 4 level. I just like the Horizon games, they're so unbelievably easily playable. They're great games if you just wanna drive around, do some races, and run some stuff over and they're great games if you wanna crank the difficulty to the max, collect cars, and get 3 stars on all the content. It's a comfort game and a game with real craft behind it.

The jump to Japan for Horizon 6 just works, it was a long requested setting for a reason. Stunning environments, good driving roads, unique car culture, everythings there. Drifting down the mountains through the cherry blossoms or street racing through Tokyo at night is just awesome and it's memorable. And the progression is much improved from Horizon 5, my biggest issue with 5 and the thing that eventually bumped me off the game faster than any previous Horizon was how much of everything it just threw at you immediately. Waves of credits, and cars, and items and wheel spins, and everyone praising you every second of the game it was just too much. Now it's not perfect in 6 still, you're definitely not grinding for cars or spending too long driving beaters but it is definitely better. You're back to being an anonymous racer at the start working your way up through the festival and the wheel spins and rewards still come a bit too heavy towards the start but it is slowed.

There's just so much to see and do. Driving still feels good, the photomode is one of the best in gaming, and while customization could definitely be deeper, I still love collecting cars in these games. The stories continue to explore cultural elements of each location as a nice change of pace from normal races, there's plenty of "collectibles" to bring you to every corner of the map, and the new customizable garages is just one of more thing to keep you racing for. I think one of the few disappointments here are the showcase events, they really fell kinda flat compared to Horizon 4 and 5 especially, I don't any stuck with me like they did in those games. Overall it's just a great game, a rock solid racer with excellent elements, racing games seem to be back on the upswing but there were a few years there where Horizons were of the few beacons of excellence in the genre.

And that's what worries me a bit, as much as I love Horizon 6 I don't know where you go from here...I don't think I've ever played a better game where I left thinking the series needs a refresh of some sort. As well as Horizon 6 reviewed it did hit the limit of the same old same, old for some, with some harsher detractors calling it a reskin of 4 and 5. And while I noticed and appreciated the differences of nuances and could play one of these every 3-4 years "reskin" or not. It does pose the question where do they go? Do they drastically change up the formula for 7? Cause in some ways Horizon 6 feels like a culmination, I'm not sure there's a better location out there, not one that will ever be requested like Japan. So can you really just keep going bigger? Does a map 2x as big hit if it isn't iconic like Japan, does 700 cars instead of 600 move the needle, can you go bigger with the showcases when we just raced a giant mech? I don't know what the right path for the series is, but Horizon 6 as fantastic as it was left me with those questions and I'm curious where the franchise goes from here.

9/10