Forza Horizon 6 Review – Crusi’n JPN

Forza Horizon 6 continues Playground Games’ stellar streak of best-in-class racing games. The rich setting of Japan offers an abundance of biomes and areas to race through, while providing a unique car culture to highlight. While the racing itself is still excellent, some oddities in the way the game is constructed and a few uncompelling additions keep it from pure racing perfection.

While it does feel like the series formula has been perfected since Forza Horizon 4, each new entry continues to bring enough new content, along with the exquisite base, for me to never feel fatigued. Forza Horizon 6 delivers with a highly requested location, Japan, that feels perfectly suited for the Horizon Festival.

Luscious trees, rolling green hills, Tokyo streets, snowy mountains, sandy beaches — it’s hard to overstate just how gorgeous the open-world looks. It’s rare for me to completely ignore fast travel in an experience like this, but I was always happy to drive however many miles were asked of me to my next event, because there was always the chance of seeing something new.

That constant feeling of something new always being around the corner is amplified by how packed the world is with activities. While many of the events and challenges are dolled out as you advance through the festival wristband levels, the world is populated with bonus signs and mascots to discover, offering a reason to detour from your GPS constantly. Perhaps it’s just the way the physics of these look when you break one, but it was always satisfying to check another item off the list.

That same logic applies to the racing events and various challenges, like Danger Signs, where you fly off a ramp as far as possible, or Speed Traps, where you need to pass through at high speeds. There’s an abundance of them across the world, and the variety showcased keeps each race feeling fresh and unique. It’s not just the racing types, like street racing, dirt rallys, etc., but also the class and style of vehicles. Going between racing powerful track toys and Kei Trucks provides a nice change of pace, new racing dynamics to consider, and an excuse to get every car out of your garage.

It’s not just about variety, but also difficulty. While you have tons of control over difficulty in the settings, going into a new type of race, on a new track, potentially with a new car, makes every instance a learning experience. Sure, I could dominate the street with my Ferrari, but downhill cross-country driving isn’t its forte. Combine that with shifting weather conditions, different types of roads, and even the layout of the track itself, and each race event offers a small puzzle box for you to learn and understand, even if most of that time is spent just enjoying the smooth racing.

The challenges scattered across the open world operate similarly, though they require you to figure out the best vehicle and approach. A Speed Trap on a long stretch of highway is a perfect fit for a high-powered sports car, but one on a dirt track with sharp turns calls for a different vehicle altogether. Restarting a challenge is smooth, and running one a few times to achieve three stars is incredibly engaging. You can also instantly swap to any car in your garage without leaving whatever area you’re in, so you can quickly adapt to whichever vehicle you need. Buying a new car or upgrading the one you’re driving requires going to a house or festival site, but you earn new cars at such a rapid pace that I only had to seek out a specific car for a specific event a handful of times.

Of course, you don’t have three-star every challenge to see the extent of what Forza Horizon 6 has to offer. The progression system is tied to wristbands, with you earning your first one as entry into the festival. Completing races, challenges, and other miscellaneous tasks, like photographing every type of car in the game, all earn points, leading up to a showcase event. The showcases are a highlight of every Forza Horizon game, and while the best one comes halfway through the experience, they continue to find new and exciting ways to race cars.

The progression system does create a bit of a disconnect with some of the other activities. There is another meter you are filling with points to earn Stamps as a tourist in Japan. These points are tied to the mascots, along with discovering landmarks and completing the story missions. Story missions are found throughout the map. These typically include a brief story before presenting a challenge for you to complete. The story is far too bland to excite or upset anyone, and while completing challenges is always fun, putting something simple like driving to a destination while listening to some dialogue does take away from the experience.

Since these all feed into the Stamps, which do reveal hidden barn finds, there’s almost an incentive to ignore them until you’ve maxed out the Wristbands. Each Wristband tier unlocks even more races and challenges across the map, so there’s a direct incentive to focus on those activities and ignore the side stories. There’s no punishment or penalty for not engaging with them until late into Forza Horizon 6, but there’s also not much of a reason to unless you enjoy the dialogue — which I don’t.

The same sort of oddness applies to the Street Races, which are treated as almost second-rate compared to the regular racing events because they don’t award Wristband points. It creates a value system in which some activities in Forza Horizon 6 feel second-rate, as if they just aren’t important. Sure, some items at the buffet are clearly better, but I’m not sure I want a restaurant outright telling me that.

The point system also gets a little muddy in the later Wristband tiers, as the amount of points available to earn gets smaller and smaller. Races and activities with earnable points are marked on your map, but some of the other activities, like taking photos and completing time attack laps in the Rivals mode of each race, are only found if you dig into the collections book. Because you can hit a button to instantly collect rewards from there, I didn’t dig in until I was struggling to come up with points towards the end of the game, where I discovered whole categories I hadn’t touched.