There’s something about prying open the door of your majestic Ferrari 250 California or Reliant Supervan as waves gently lap against the shore off to your right and a blazing sun beats down on you from above that you don’t truly appreciate until it’s gone. Or, at least, that’s what I’ve found playing Forza Horizon 6.
Playground Games’ latest work, while undeniably iterative even by sequel standards, still comes with some noteworthy additions and changes to the foundation established by its predecessors. As I outlined in my Horizon 6 review, home customisation has made its debut in two forms, a blank track-building valley dubbed The Estate and custom garages built into each of the racer’s eight or so purchasable houses.
Going in, I was keen to try out the latter. Adding a touch of personalisation to Playground’s private car-tinkering hangouts seemed like it could add something unique to the Forza homemaking experience. Though, I hadn’t really considered what this would come at the cost of. Entering a house in Horizon 6 sees you immediately shuttled indoors into garages that offer the same white and grey blank slate. Unless you’ve got the radio on, they’re totally silent voids. To that soundtrack, you start placing a smorgasbord of fairly generic building blocks and clutter.
A black sofa. A nondescript set of tool drawers. One of those plastic things mechanics lie on when they slide underneath a motor. An arcade machine your character can’t interact with. A stash of wooden logs. Some castle steps without a castle. Some trees and rocks if you’re aiming to try and pretend you’re outdoors. The brick-shaped building from the top of a multi-storey car park’s stairwell, which you can’t enter because there aren’t actually any stairs inside. Various gaudily-coloured Horizon festival-themed gazebos. A metal palm tree that lights up in one set colour.
Or, you give up and import someone else’s pre-made design. The latter you’re unable to put a personal spin on, since they’re uneditable by folks who aren’t the original author.In previous Forzas, garages weren’t customisable. Instead, each house made use of the outdoor driveway space designed by Playground Games’ talented artists as a stopping point. When I pull into Buenas Vistas, the coastal villa I’ve long had set as my home base in Horizon 5, I can see and hear the beach as I wander around my rides in the series’ car viewing mode, Forzavista. Sea birds call out as I decide which ludicrous spoiler I fancy fitting. I never feel like I’ve left the living world of Mexico, even if I’m segregated off from it and other players by a partition of menus.
Horizon 6’s DIY garages could be the foundation of something good in future Forzas, but at the moment I find they make for pretty uninspiring haunts. Beyond the monolithic garage doors lies a Japanese landscape dripping with authentic detail, varied biomes, and vibrant colours, but in returning home you seal yourself away from it. The last home that goes on the market as you work your way up through Horizon 6 is called the Vision House. It’s an uber-modern mansion with swanky architecture and its description touts the view it offers out over Tokyo City. That’s not the estate agents telling porkies, the view’s spectacular, made all the better by the fact that if you look in the opposite direction to the metropolis, snow-tipped Mount Fuji looms in the distance, offering a vista just as breathtaking.
In previous Horizons, you’d pull up in the driveway of this house whenever you returned to it, and be able to do all your car tweaking or buying while at least some of these sights lurked within view. Your soundtrack would be the diegetic symphony of the Japanese countryside, likely some combo of wind rustling through trees, wildlife chittering, and maybe the low hum of a distant road.
I generally find Horizon 6’s surroundings to be a more pleasant place to hang out than Mexico was, and yet it keeps funneling me off into bland purgatories I’ve got to spend my own time trying to make visually palatable. So, I’ve found myself sometimes deliberately stopping off on the drives of its houses to take in the view before pressing the button that shuts me away in my cell. The Fuji Unkai House has a delightful traditional Japanese garden and, as its description boasts, “an unmatched view of Mount Fuji”. An unmatched view that disappears the moment you head inside.
The Hakusan Mountain Lodge looks out over an alpine lake at the foot of snowy peaks. The Ito region’s Minka House is less grandiose, but still offers a rustic stop-off right in the bay of a fishing village. The Tokyo House goes back to the well of charming Japanese gardens, this time with enough drive space for a whole gaggle of rides. Even Soko 78, the warehouse by Tokyo’s docks, boasts a decent view despite its industrial environs.
All of them are ideal spots for a driveway offering as nice a backdrop as those of previous Horizons. Maybe Playground Games will add in the option to stop outside of them for some menu tinkering further down the line, if takeup on the custom garages is massively disappointing. I can’t honestly see it happening though. For one, someone’s already made a custom garage which surrounds the player’s car with dinosaurs on bicycles. No doubt there’ll soon be endless other options folks are content to run with. I, on the other hand, will probably be stuck lusting for a perch in Horizon 6’s great outdoors where I can pop open bonnets and gaze longingly at engine blocks just as I did at Horizon 4’s Derwentside Lake Lodge.