Forza Horizon 6

Forza Horizon 6 was provided by Xbox Game Studios for review. Thank you!

After an excruciating 5-year wait, the Forza Horizon series is back, and Playground Games has chosen the most anticipated location yet for this adventure: Japan.

With the bright lights of Tokyo, the narrow streets of sleepy villages, twisting mountain roads, and beautiful forests, the world of Forza Horizon 6 is the most varied environment in a Forza Horizon game to date. Slap a massive festival site in the middle of it all, and we're back to racing!

Forza Horizon 6 plays it safe with its gameplay formula. If you've played any of the Forza Horizon games, this will be a familiar format. You have your various race events, such as dirt, road, and cross-country. Then you have your speed traps, drift zones, and danger signs to keep you busy while you explore the map, as well as the ever-popular collectibles, in the form of boards and mascots.

This is all unchanged, aside from a couple of additions and returning features, such as Car Meets, which reappear for the first time since Forza Horizon 3, where you can gather with your lobby and check out other people's rides, and Touge racing, where you'll race on tight mountain roads in a 1V1. Just don't expect anything too new and surprising with what Forza Horizon 6 offers. There is also a neat feature where you can find cars for sale around the map, allowing you to pick up rare bargains, in addition to Barn Finds and "Treasure Cars", which are hidden in the world.

Car physics are likewise unchanged; it embraces the same "simcade" style of previous games, offering a degree of realism while also allowing you to drive through pretty much everything that isn't a building. This is exaggerated even more in Forza Horizon 6, as even trees can now be driven through, which is a good thing, as I'll point out later. Fun is the order of the day here, and the game delivers on that as well as the previous iterations have done.

The "story" is pretty identical to previous entries. You'll gain progress in the form of Wristbands through completing events and challenges. To earn a Wristband, you'll need to unlock and then beat a special event, either a Horizon Rush event, which is a time trial on specially-made tracks, or a "Showcase" event, where you'll race against another type of vehicle, much the same as previous Horizon games, such as a Gundam or, I presume, a C-130 cargo plane.

Exploration is still fun and rewarding, and it's perfect when you just want to drive around in your favorite car without the hassle of racing. The world map I found to be more interesting than the previous foray into Mexico, which never really grabbed me.

Visually, Forza Horizon 6 impresses in its environment. The density of flora is striking, with plenty of forests and dense undergrowth foliage present; it really helps to bring the depiction of Japan to life. And as I said, it's a good thing we can now drive through any tree, given the sheer volume of them.

The depiction of Tokyo city itself I found to be less enticing. I was looking forward to blasting through a big city, with bright, vibrant neon lights shining on rain-soaked streets, but, to be honest, it all ended up looking a little... flat. Whether it's the cooler temperature grade applied to the screen compared to Forza Horizon 5's Mexico, or the fact that there's often no sunshine in Horizon 6 due to the frequently overcast Japan, the world does sometimes feel a little... bland.

The game excels when you're out in the rural areas, enjoying the forests and quaint villages that line the twisting country and mountain roads, and then up to the ski slopes in the far north for some rallying. The city ends up feeling cold and ironically lifeless by comparison. The neon signs are there, but they don't really "pop", one of the biggest draws of Tokyo, and it feels like they missed a beat depicting it here. Shibuya Crossing is present also, but with low traffic and pedestrian density, it feels... off.

You also have your "estate" in the game, which gives you a big, open space where you can create and design your own custom playground, whether that's a race track, a parkour challenge, or anything else you can think of. You're also able to invite friends over so you can try out what you've made together.

As far as the cars go, there's some improvement, but it is fairly similar to the detail found in Forza Horizon 5, which isn't a bad thing; they still look great. I do wish rain effects were improved in the interior camera, though. They've been the same since Forza Horizon 4, and with Drive Club way back in 2014 showing us how good they can look, it's a shame to see such a basic implementation still.

I also encountered some visual disappointments, such as shadows on distant cars not being visible, certain objects not loading in until you were too close, and grass visibly becoming denser just a few meters in front of your vehicle, even on the highest settings. Attention to detail on the interiors of cars was a tad disappointing too, with things like the clocks on vehicles not matching the in-game or real-life clock, something past Forza games have done.

Overall, while there are visual improvements in Forza Horizon 6, it isn't quite up to the standard I was hoping for, especially with last-generation consoles now being ditched entirely. The addition of ray-traced reflections and global illumination is nice, but other areas of the game seem to have been, dare I say, neglected.

The sounds in the game are fantastic; not only is the soundtrack blood-pumping, but the cars sound more refined than Forza Horizon 5's, with plenty of throaty (and occasionally whiny) JDM engine noises awaiting you. It sounds less artificial than before, especially the car idling noises at the starting line. The audio mixing was slightly off for me by default, and I would definitely lower the music volume a fair bit to fully enjoy the sound of your car.

Forza Horizon 6 also likes to give out cars (and money) like candy. It's been a bugbear of mine in the Forza series for a while, but Forza Horizon 6 continues the tradition of your car collection not really being something to be worked for. Within the first hour, you're plied with free cars. By the time I had over 90 cars, fewer than 10 were purchased. It's one area where the Gran Turismo games excel, and one that Forza has increasingly disregarded. Wheelspins return, and while I do get a thrill out of them, it is one of the main ways you'll be receiving your cars and money, which is a shame in a racing game.

Speaking of cars, while Forza Horizon 6 doesn't really expand the car roster in terms of size, you have around 550 to choose from, it does have a great selection to choose from, especially Japanese cars, where the team has made a special effort to make sure all your favorites are in there. Mitsubishi Eclipse, Toyota SERA, Subaru Legacy, Nissan Silvia, and all the big names like Impreza, Skyline, Lancer, the chances are your dream Japanese car is in the game.

Forza Horizon 6 - Steam Deck Performance (By Mikhail Madnani)

Forza Horizon 6 has been confirmed to run on the Steam Deck since it specifically appeared on the spec sheet for the game, and it's good to see it actually does perform well. However, there are a few changes to make that enhance the experience.

The first is setting the in-game FPS cap to 45fps and using the Steam Deck Quick Access Menu to cap it to 30fps. This is a better cap, though there will be a bit more input lag as you'd expect. The other change is setting the game to 1280x800 resolution if you want to play with the full 16:10 display, but frame times can get a bit worse in the city area.

I noticed the GPU usage wasn't too high, and forcing the Manual GPU Clock to 1600MHz helped here. This does use up more power, but the result is better as far as I'm concerned on the OLED model. Barring this, I also recommend setting Motion Blur to Long instead of Short since the former is recommended for lower frame rates. You can also turn this off based on your liking. I usually turn off motion blur in most games, but I've always liked the Forza Horizon implementation across every game I've played.

The Anti-aliasing option here defaults to TAA, and you can play around with the sharpness level to see how you like it. My preferred setting is 0.6 here. As for HDR, right now, there are no settings to tweak the brightness on the Steam Deck OLED with HDR, so I cannot give you recommended settings for that aspect.

There is a way to turn the settings down below the Low preset to get better performance, and I do not recommend it, as turning off shadows makes the game look awful. I also tried playing at a lower resolution, FSR ultra performance, and the Very Low preset. Even with those settings, you can't get close to a locked 60fps on Steam Deck.

These settings are the perfect blend of getting as stable an experience as possible without degrading the visuals too much. Forza Horizon 6, even on its low preset, is a very good-looking game on the Steam Deck's display. I also tested it out docked via the Steam Deck Docking Station. It doesn't hold up as well as expected with the same settings, and this is where I opted to use my ROG Ally Z1E in turbo mode. I was able to get it to 1080p 30fps on the medium preset, and I found it delivered a good complement to my portable Steam Deck 30fps experience.

The developers have noted that there will be more Steam Deck optimization, and if anything major changes in the future, we will revisit this. Until then, Forza Horizon 6 delivers a very good portable experience on Steam Deck, both online and offline.

アクセシビリティ：

Forza Horizon 6 has an absolute plethora of accessibility settings, as we've come to expect from the series. We obviously have the basics like subtitle support, as well as driving assists, but we also have plenty of added extras to make this game playable by as many as possible.

These include a very customizable high contrast mode which lets you assign bright colors to differentiate parts of the world for those with vision impairment, proximity radar with audio cues to alert you to nearby vehicles, the ability to play the game in slow-mo (offline mode only), or allow you to progress even if you don't win the race, as well as audio cues that can read out your current lap, current position, and if you just gained/lost a position.

結論

Forza Horizon 6 plays it safe in almost every aspect. Whether that's a good or a bad thing depends on whether you enjoyed the previous entries in the series, and whether or not you were hoping for something new. The rural areas of the map are a delight, but the city of Tokyo left me feeling disappointed with its relatively bland depiction and empty streets. The cars are still great fun to drive, with a huge showing from Japanese manufacturers this time around, and exploration is as rewarding as ever.

このレビューはPC版に基づいています。

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