Familiar but still fresh
Whichever camp you’re in, there is a magic to playing the intro of a Forza Horizon game that I don’t really get from other games. Regardless of whether it’s your first or sixth Horizon festival, there’s always something to make you say ‘ooh’ and ‘by george, they’ve done it again’. I’m not going to describe it fully because you should get to experience it fresh for yourself, but if you’ve played the other games, the intro to Forza Horizon 6 is exactly what you expect: you’re unleashed into a new world with a variety of fancy cars, while getting a taste of the best of what racing has to offer in the game.
It’s supposed to be an exhilarating window into what the next two to three years of gameplay is going to look like, but for me, six games in, it just felt like coming home. My favourite feature of the new game so far – and the part I’m most looking forward to – is that the story has set you back as a newcomer to Horizon. While I enjoyed the (somewhat) progression of going from a newbie in Horizon 2 to running the show in Horizon 4, and then whatever was going on in Horizon 5, there’s something about coming into a festival as a challenger that makes everything more exciting.
The stakes feel higher. It also gives the game an excuse to show you something new rather than having to contrive exposition making it sound like they’re explaining things you already know and presumably set up yourself. It adds a sense of wonder that’s harder to capture when your character is supposed to be a superhuman expert.
Capturing the spirit of Japan in Forza Horizon 6
The first time I played through the preview I was at home in Melbourne. The world of Japan the developers had created looked beautiful – though never having been to Japan I didn’t know how accurate it was. But exploring the empty streets devoid of traffic (both foot and car) felt a bit weird and empty, particularly in Tokyo. The developers have since assured everyone that they turned down the traffic deliberately for previews, which I think was a weird choice, and they’ve clearly received enough feedback to ensure there will be more than enough busyness when the game actually launches.
The second time I played, I was in a car park in Tokyo surrounded by all the trappings of the Forza Horizon festival. At this point, having more experience of what Tokyo is, the lack of traffic in the preview was even more baffling. But it also made visible a lot more of the smaller touches on the roads and environment that make the world of Forza Horizon 6 feel more alive, more genuinely Japanese. Elements like all the little unlocked bikes sitting around everywhere, which had looked a little out of place when I was playing in Australia suddenly made sense when I was seeing them all around actual Japan.
In the same way that Horizon 3 captured the vibe of Australia down to the Telstra phone boxes, Horizon 6 nails Japanese architecture. It’s obviously not a 1:1 recreation because that would take hours to drive through, but I’m frequently in awe of how well Playground Games captures the spirit of a location.
Riffs, revisions and new additions
One new change in Forza Horizon 6 is that in every region of the map, there are mascots to drive through to get currency, mixing up the bonus board system. (There are still bonus boards as well.) It gives each region of a the map its own unique personality, allows for a sense of whimsy, taps into Japan’s mascot culture and it’s really cute – but it also highlights the thing that made my experience with the game mixed. It’s not actually a new thing, it’s Malibu Stacy in a new hat.
It’s always been this way with a lot of the new Horizon features, giving minor or cosmetic tweaks to previous systems and calling it new, when you’re still doing basically the same thing in almost the same way to get the same result. Personally, I’m very happy to keep playing almost the same game in new settings, and will happily play any new version of Forza Horizon I get the opportunity to. But for some reason I went into this game expecting something genuinely new, rather than just riffs and revisions.
Granted, this feeling might also be partly because the biggest new thing wasn’t available to play in the (short) preview. The Estate is a customisable area of the map that looks absolutely massive. I’m told it builds on the previous track creation feature from Horizon 5 and is now a big chunk of land for you to customise as you wish, making epic jumps, the perfect drifting track, or whatever you can imagine that would be associated with driving. I haven’t clicked with the building tools in the past but it is a genuinely new feature, and the building aspects have supposedly been tweaked. Maybe it’ll be great and be the revolutionary new thing I crave (and finally convince me to play the game on PC).
Both times I played, there was one part that I just kept coming back to – and it was another new feature. The new local race circuit concept is a good one. It takes away a lot of the friction of jumping into a race by just driving into the circuit and then you’re doing the thing. The local race circuit available in the preview was a time attack one: you just keep driving in circles until you hit your goal time, and then you can keep driving in circles or go elsewhere. But it’s more like a PR stunt than a race, in that you don’t have to press any button to initiate it, you just do it.
I cannot count how many times I drove in that circle. It’s addictive, and I can totally see that once the game goes wide, people will spend heaps of time in there trying to best their friends before the scoreboard gets wiped for the next season.
Driving for the horizon
For what it’s worth, and what context it adds, I’ve been playing Forza games since Forza Motorsport 2 in 2007. I was at the event in San Fransisco when they announced the original Forza Horizon, and it ended up being the first game I ever awarded five stars to. It also ended up being one of my favourite game series of all time, and I have spent an embarrassing number of hours in the first five games. However, I still know basically nothing about cars. I don’t even own a car in real life.
What I love about Forza Horizon is the feeling of freedom. I like knowing that the cars are accurate, but to me they’re merely a way to fly, rather than to appreciate the inner workings of an engine or whatever. So while I have a deep love and knowledge for the series, I’m not a serious car nerd who knows serious car nerd things – I’m a serious Forza Horizon nerd.
From what I’ve seen so far, Forza Horizon 6 definitely falls into the ‘like the first five games, but more’ category. Initially, I was a bit disappointed by that, because I somehow wanted this game to revolutionise the way everyone thought about car games and turn expectations upside down to do something brilliant. But the longer I have thought about it, and the more I’ve played, the more I realise it is physically impossible for Forza Horizon to do that without introducing a Blur/Mario Kart-style mode (which I suddenly want more than anything and I really hope comes in DLC form).
Forza Horizon is already pretty much everything a car game can be without turning into something more narrative heavy like Driver San Francisco (and even then, there have been elements of that in previous games). The power of Horizon 6 isn’t in the carefully curated race tracks – and in the preview there were several impeccable tracks that are set to become fan favourites – but in the freedom. You can be a serious car lover, driving and tuning your serious, fancy, rare cars and trying to be the best there ever was. Or you can paint yourself a clown car and see how far you can drive off a cliff. Both actions are rewarded.
The game has hundreds of cars that have been painstakingly crafted with reproduction details, right down to the sound the engine makes, the way the dashboard looks and different body kits, and then you can slam that beautifully rendered car through a bamboo forest and a fence to get skill points and giggle the whole time you’re doing it. That’s the spirit of Horizon, and why I’m counting down the days until the full sixth game is released so I can just get lost in this new, bigger, more beautiful map.
