Forza Horizon 6

Hoooo boy alright FH6. I am not exactly a "long time" Forza Horizon player but I'm close. My first Forza game was Motorsport 4 (my goat) and my first Horizon was 3. I was at one point very deep into the competitive scene for FH4 and I had a pretty enormous falling out with the series after FH5 was such a miserable setting, no shade towards Mexico intended. Like most others I was pretty interested when I heard FH6 would be coming to Japan, but I was skeptical about whether the game would be worth it given the quite fundamental problems I believe the core gameplay loop has. Starting with the single player experience, the game is fine. I personally use a standard of $1 per hour of enjoyable gameplay to determine if a singleplayer experience is worth it. For example in a $60 game I expect 60 hours of fun. FUN, not just hours played. By this metric Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of the best values I have ever gotten out of a single player experience, plus the multiplayer I have had with my partner. FH6 is roughly a 1:1 with I would say a score of around 80%. The single player progression is bad. Like always money means nothing and within a few hours you will be on track to drive literally any car your heart desires, unless it’s one of a handful the devs have arbitrarily decided are “valuable”. The single player difficulty is spotty, I’m no slouch when it comes to these games and I used to walk the Unbeatable AI in previous installments 98 times out of 100. In this game I play one step down because they were not kidding when they called this game's AI “Unbeatable”, and there have been some pretty hilarious clips online of the physics defying RAM TRX truck doing 400 MPH around highway corners. That said, I think that arrangement works ok. Lots of single player racing games suffer from having AI which is too tough or too weak, even with difficulty sliders. If you’re a competent player you can beat the Unbeatable using your meta knowledge. If you want to just have a good challenge with any old car, Extreme is the way to go. The gameplay loop itself is largely unchanged from previous titles. There are more restrictions on event entry requirements which helps force the player to engage with a wider variety of vehicles. This is a good change as I firmly believe one of the worst parts of Horizon is its insistence on maximizing player freedom to the point that the game loses all meaning or challenge. It’s also not enough. The game still feels too open ended for my liking, but it’s a step in the right direction. The story is nonexistent and the characters are terrible. As always there is nothing to say here. I would highly recommend installing a mod which allows the in-game dialogue to be Japanese audio while keeping the English text localization. This allows you to read the subs if you want to know what’s going on, but you are no longer driven mad by the ultra cringe that is the voice performances. Long story short, I believe that the game is HEAVILY carried by its setting. Were it not for the Touge mode alone I would likely have dropped this game shortly after completing it. However that Touge mode does exist, as does the Spec Racing series. Competitive Forza is an absolute nightmare and I would not recommend engaging in it unless you are prepared to be rammed constantly by small children. If you revel in chaos, however, have fun! My experience with the Touge mode has been largely positive because it’s a 1 on 1, and it seems like people are more respectful when they know they’re being watched the whole time. The Spec racing series is the best way to engage in grid racing, because the atrocious tuning and PI system are absent. Equal machinery also seems to lead to better behaviour in my experience but that may just be a placebo. This game is the bare minimum that I think you should expect for its price tag. If future installments are lower quality in any way I wouldn’t bother. I cannot say I’m optimistic that the series will get any better, but I think they might be able to stabilize around this level of quality.