Having loved and completed Forza Horizon 1, 2, and the strange Fast & Furious offshoot to 2 – completed, at least, to the point where I had unlocked and won the final showdown type events, and raced on every track (I’m not going back to complete 156 multi-race championships in 2) – it took me many years to start and then play through 3, hampered by the confusing mess of storyline, non-linear unlocks for races, over-abundance of cars, and confusing map. I would often finish a play session with more on my to-do list than when I started. But bit by bit I worked through, sometimes having a month or two off, and I uncovered and discovered many new ways to play, hidden modes, new types of races, and fun through the more extreme car types. By the time I felt I had completed the game – probably marked as having fully upgraded all the festival sites, which I did in June 2021 – I was still keen to play more, feeling familiarity with the map. My last save was in March 2023.

I’m coming onto 6 soon, I promise. There is a point.

I think the forthcoming release of Forza Horizon 4 spurred me into starting 3, since it looks like I started the earlier game in 2017, a year after its release, and then I played 4 on release, so there was a time when I was playing both in parallel. After a while I dropped 4, to concentrate on playing 3. I returned to 4 occasionally, but really started to play it properly in December 2023, and even a year later I was still finding the map overwhelming. This, as it turns out, was a bit of a foolish thing to do, because it meant that the regular seasonal festivals, which gave special prizes for altered races, had finished – meaning that there are three achievements I’ll never be able to get, and 77 seasons that are sitting there with fun events that I’ll bever be able to play, Although there is a huge amount to do in the game, an amount I’ll probably never get around to doing, I still feel I’ve missed out every time I see the menu option to see the festival history. It was enough to put me off for quite a while, and I don’t think I played 4 at all during 2025.

What I did play during 2025 was Forza Horizon 5. But not much, because the icons and story and choice of where to go next and everything was massively overwhelming. There was too much to do, and I had no idea what was the best thing to do next. I played it a few times in multiplayer online with John and Kieron, which was great fun, but the game has sat there untouched most of the time since its release in 2021.

And then in May this year, Forza Horizon 6 came out. I tried it out on the day it was released – played via cloud gaming, since my Xbox One S isn’t up to the task of running it natively. Since then, in a month I have played it for twice as many hours as I’ve spent in 5 since that game’s release.

The biggest difference I’ve seen is a streamlining of the events. Yes, there is still a map full of icons, but there are effectively multiple pathways you can take now, with the two main ones – the Horizon Festival, and Discover Japan – giving you additional events as you progress through the wristbands and stamps respectively. You can see a much clearer evolution of what is available, and it seems that you have to complete a bit more before new events are unlocked. There’s still a demarcation of road racing, cross country and dirt racing, but you are encouraged to play all and not specialise.

I’ve also been doing the seasonal events. This is a bit of an issue, in fact, because I’m not 20 any more and can’t dedicate countless hours to playing videogames, so completing the weekly challenges actually takes up the majority of my gaming time. I’ve been trying to complete the whole seasons so I can unlock the gift cars, though annoyingly I missed a few of the daily challenges in the very first week so I can’t complete the first season. I hope that once I’ve got a full season done, and they start to move onto other weeks, I’ll be able to spend a bit less time in the seasonal stuff and instead follow the storyline to its conclusion – there’s a whole section of the map locked off until you get the final wristband.

The final thing I’ve found that has helped to unlock this iteration of the game for me is the tuning menu. When I played the first Forza Horizon game I noted how you could tune cars for each race, but I couldn’t get to that much detail. When playing 4 (and to some extent 3) I found that you don’t need to tune the cars yourself, but instead you can browse other people’s tunes and install them. With 6 this is easier than ever, and I’ve found some useful tunes on the Forza Horizon Reddit which create cars that constantly drift, have huge top speeds, or can just shove opponents out the way. I’ve built up a huge collection of cars and there are a lot in which I have raced, encouraged by the fact that several events have strict eligibility criteria.

Forza Horizon 6 is a really enjoyable game, and there is a part of that due to the community that has been fostered around it. Who would have thought that a goods van would be best for drifting?