I failed to pick up the “Car Guy” gene from my father, and accordingly the style of racing game I most enjoy has historically been Mario Kart and its ilk. I want to go fast, I want to drift around every turn without consequence, and I want to obliterate my foes with abilities. I do not want to operate a rear-wheel drive vehicle, I do not want to have to think about “my tune”, I do not want to worry about if my tires are suitable for the current track condition, I just want to press the gas button and go fast.

My previous engagement with the Forza series was about 20 minutes with one of the Motorsportses that either came free with a previously purchased Xbox or popped on Game Pass at an opportune time when I wasn’t in the middle of something else more engrossing. It’s certainly a technical achievement, incredibly pretty, and – as best as I can tell – an exceptionally competent racing simulator. I’m certain that to true car sickos (affectionate) it’s lacking in some kind of features that can only be remedied with whatever the car equivalent of X-Plane is, but as soon as I saw that it was simulating, tracking, reporting, and providing real-time telemetry and charts about the thermal status and tread-wear of my four individual tires I knew it was Not For Me. I love charts, but this is information I simply am not equipped to do anything with.

That was enough to keep me away from the Forza Horizon sub-series, even though at some level I knew it was less-crunchy than Motorsports. I also knew it was open-world, but I don’t know, I guess I assumed it required partying up and didn’t have structure? I was very wrong, and I apologize.

So for anyone else as uneducated about this as I was, Forza Motorsports is a reasonably hardcore simulation. It only exists on tracks. It has a variety of types of tracks, but they’re legitimate real tracks, with real cars, and obsessive levels of simulation fidelity and customization. Forza Horizon is an open-world collectathon except everything you can do is in a car because you’re not allowed to exist outside your car. It’s like a Far Cry or Assassin’s Creed level of chasing down map-markers except instead of the map marker being a person to violently murder its a super-car from 1987 or a race where you’re only allowed to drive Kei cars. It is very arcade-y, but is built on the same engine as Motorsports, so if you really want to fiddle with your engine timing for some absurd reason go nuts.

The Horizon series is presented as a global racing festival, with each installment taking place in a different condensed simulacrum of a country as its setting. FH6 is set in Japan, which was enough for me to give it a go as a slowly-recovering weeb. I’ve since sunk about 60 hours in, and have been having a fantastic time.

The vast majority of the game is spectacular. The cars look great, they feel great, the setting is beautiful and provides a good mix of environments to race through, the open-world is densely packed with stuff to do, and the stuff to actually do is varied enough that you never feel stuck doing one kind of event.

The game is pretty openly structured. At any time you can bail out of what you’re in the middle of and go do something else. Want to drift around sideways through Shibuya Scramble Crossing? Want to race super-cars on the highway through the middle of Tokyo? Want to screw off and find collectibles? Want to fight your friends on a leaderboard for who can jump the furthest off a cliff? Want to spend six hours painstakingly recreating Lightning McQueen’s racing livery? Want to barrel down ski slopes in a souped up Bronco? Want to do a technical stunt race next to an active rocket launch? Want to race a bunch of incredibly slow weirdo JDM cars that have zero business being on a racetrack? Yes. Yes I would. All of these.

All of these activities except for the “actual” races take place out on the open world, there’s nothing to select, no loading, you just go there and do it. Beef your sick jump off a mountain? Well good news, you can rewind back up the mountain like in Mario Kart World and try again. Same thing goes for “speed zones” where you try to set the highest average speed possible through a specific stretch of road, “speed traps” where you’re trying to just hit the single highest speed at one point, “drift zones” where you’ve got a set amount of road to set as high of a drift multiplier as possible, and so on. All of these have both friend & global leaderboards to play against, and they provide a pretty wide range of difficulty options. In most cases you can also bring whatever car you want, from your tiny little Honda Beat that struggles hitting 50mph, to all varieties of Lambos, and multi-jillion-dollar super-cars.

Difficulty in FH6 is… strange. It is incredibly customizable, possibly to a problematic degree. The game provides a staggering list of accessibility settings from how simulate-y the game is, how much assistance is applied for steering, braking, guidance, driving-line, how much the physics engine matters, etc. There’s also a slider for how aggressive the AI Drivatars are. This is all presented as a “do whatever you want” situation, if you have it all cranked to as easy as possible, that’s fine, that’s “normal”. Every setting you turn up just goes into the calculation of how much bonus reward credits you get after a race. My specific settings tended to give me about a 30-45% multiplier, and it felt good. If I was winning too many races in a row the game would helpfully nudge me to bump the Drivatar difficulty up for more rewards, but by the end of the game I was pretty much over it and just played on average or above-average.

…but here’s the problem: Drivatar “difficulty” is a little too ham-fistedly implemented. It’s normal for racing games to have “rubber-banding” implemented so that cars you’re not actively staring at can move at unbelievable relativistic speeds to catch up with the pack and make your race more interesting so you’re not just alone at the front of the pack forever. That’s fine, I’ve come to terms with the fact that some degree of rubber-banding is necessary. Mario Kart also historically has severely weighted item drops so that people in the back get the insanely overpowered power-ups as catch-up mechanisms, while the leader just gets coins. Again, fine.

Drivatars only appear to have two actual settings: on anything below average, they might as well not exist. You’ll wave to them as you smoke past everybody at the starting line and never see them again for the rest of the race, basically turning the whole game into a time-trial. Anything above average and they all become godlike beings, able to move their vehicles at speeds which would be impossible for any mortal to catch up. But how are you supposed to win a race? I’ve come up with basically one strategy for success: Aggressively throw yourself face-first into the pack as they go around a corner. Cut them off. Slam them into walls. Treat them like safety railings. Rubbin’s Racin.

But what about the straightaways, you say? How am I supposed to catch up with a vehicle that is seemingly unmoored from the physics simulation of the game, able to corner perfectly, able to completely disregard off-road conditions no matter the vehicle or tire style, able to plow through trees and take no slow-down whatsoever? The answer is that you aren’t really playing a racing game, you’re playing… something else. At anything above “average” it seems like the game implemented inverse rubber-banding. As stated, rubber-banding is a catch-up mechanism for drivers who are doing poorly. Here, it seems like when you do a good job cornering, or a good job drafting behind a car, or basically anything else that gives you a score boost, the game artificially slows down the cars ahead of you so you can pass them. Please understand they do not appear to brake and this isn’t a reaction to like “you took an aggressive line and so you’re going to get to a point faster”. It’s disconnected, like you had a good corner, we’re going to slow down the dude ahead of you 2% for the next 20 seconds.

This whole system felt terrible after I realized what was happening. Near the end of the game, if I wasn’t already in the top-3 by like 45% through a race I’d just restart, because with that much track left there’s not much hope of recovering. I could sorta understand that this might be something you’d add to higher difficulty settings – where I expect the CPU to start cheating – it’s crazy to me that it’s there on Average.

But that’s fine, because this isn’t “just” a racing game, it’s an open world self-directed screw-around game. By that measure the game is fantastic. The sandbox is great, the setting is beautifully presented, the variety of cars is absurd, they’ve just built a fun world to tool around in. You’re never more than a couple meters from some kind of something popping up and giving you a notification that you found a new road, or found a bonus board, or found a mascot to plow into, or found a new map-activity, or found a new race, or found a sick new 2004 Honda Civic Type-R on the side of the road.

So should you get this? Ehhhhh. I hadn’t played a big open-world collectathon in awhile, so I was in the mood. If you’re burned out, it’s absolutely skippable. But if you’re up for one of those, or are remotely weeb-inclined or a Car Weirdo (Affectionate), there are worse ways you could spend your time.