The highs are so high in this game, but the lows are so frustrating that they put a massive blemish on the overall experience. Regardless, this game will go down in history as the one racing game that actually got me to appreciate the genre.

GOOD

• Looks amazing
• Driving feels so good
• The Japan setting really delivers
• Love smashing Mascots

MIXED

• The game feels so sterile in so many ways, but what felt off-putting at first actually started to feel pretty comforting the more I engaged with it. There are no wars, no world hunger, and no politics, there are only cars.
• 10% of the cars = I want to drive them all the time; 70% of the cars = Feel pretty middling; 20% of the cars = I’d rather die than have to use them for a race
• The aspect of base building is cool, but the controls aren’t very player friendly, especially when using a controller
• Drone is useful for scouting out areas, but it’s really lame how you can only go a few feet off the ground
• The showcase races are pretty cool, but they’re very few and far between and the courses largely consist of a series of super tight turns that really slows down these races where all I want to do is go fast
• While the final race is a super satisfying literal a victory lap, the “campaign” comes to an otherwise very anticlimactic ending

BAD

• Not being able to swap cars after restarting a race seems like a big oversight
• All the people in this game look terrible and the customization options for the player character are severely lacking
• Licensed music selection is mostly a bust for me. I spend most of my time skipping through stations to either stop a song I don’t want to listen to or run away from the super annoying radio hosts. While I do appreciate the inclusion of Creepy Nuts’ song that’s used in the Mashle Season 2 opening, it’s not enough to carry the rest of the library.
• Bland narrative that’s lacking any kind of character
• Clunky menus
• Poor tutorialization; can someone tell me what any of the things in this tuning menu means??
• Unskippable cutscenes
• Seasonal Championships are the bane of my existence in this game. You’ll get to a point where the only thing the game recommends you do are these races and I was so confused why they wanted me to do them over and over again. The fact that you need to complete 3 of these races back to back to actually complete the challenge really sucks as well. With this format, you would reasonably think that the game would suggest the next race in the series to keep you on track for finishing the championship, but it never does. So you better remember where those other race icons popped up on the map when you first started, because otherwise you’ll be searching through a sea of 1,000 icons just to figure out where you go next. This whole format is so poorly designed and implemented, it blows my mind how it made its way into the full game in its current state.
• Brutal final push to the last rank. Despite having 40,000 different icons crowding the overlap once you get to the final stretch of the campaign, I ran out of ways to get points through reliable means with about 4k to go. My options were to engage with the drift challenges which I had been avoiding all game because they’re zero fun to actually play through, repeat the same seasonal championship races over and over again, or smash through the bonus boards which I had largely been ignoring for the most part. I chose option three and, while I did like exploring areas that I wouldn’t have otherwise if I wasn’t on a mission to destroy all of these boards, what felt like natural progression through the game at this point screeched to a halt and turned into an absolute grind that felt so out of place compared to the rest of my journey through the ranks.

Ultimately Forza Horizon 6 is a good game weighed down by a variety of design decisions that you wouldn’t think would make it into the game 6 iterations in, yet here we are. This game works best when you’re just popping in to drive around and do a race or 2 in 20-30 minute sections, but it really falls apart when you’re forced to engage with the live service mechanics and grind.

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