It wasn’t meant to be an Xbox is a mild brand crashed into the side of a game stream subscription. More and more, Xbox covers the entire hardware ecosystem: PCs, handhelds and patient Xbox Series S/X consoles. What’s missing from this reinvention of the Xbox are games—exclusive games.
Forza Horizon 6Set to arrive on May 19, it stands out as one of those games that draws people into a single system, or in Microsoft’s case, an entire set of gaming hardware. And Microsoft has released several patches for Series X, PC and computers Asus ROG Xbox Ally X only at release time. Especially PC gamers already have access to this software so called Xbox Mod, which provides a UI that is easier to navigate with the controller, like your good Xbox gamepad.
I put rubber on the road for over twelve hours on the pre-release version Forza Horizon 6I divide my time between all three platforms. The game is a perfect casual experience that leans more towards a back-and-forth type racer than anything else with a simulation sensibility. It’s the kind of game that creeps into your life for a few hours after work or before bed, gets you excited for a race or two, and then folds away.
This would be the perfect starter game for new Xbox hardware. Think about that as we twiddle our thumbs and wait for the next generation Project Helix console— a device that should bring PC and console games under one roof.
Forza Horizon 6 built with the casual car fan in mind. I have no interest in cars other than how much my next lease payment is going to cost me, but the constant sense of progress you earn with credits – the in-game currency – for everything you do is like a dopamine IV drip for the brain. Driving without hitting your opponents’ cars will give you more points overall, but anything other than sideslips, brake checks and head-on collisions will give you points and a score multiplier.
in the year Forza Horizon universe, cars are indomitable behemoths that don’t care for trees or obstacles. The game awards you points for “landscape work” as you tear down Japan’s beloved forests on your ruthless path of destruction. The horizon does not model car damage other than scratches, dents and broken windows. The cars may look scruffy at the end of the race, but they’ll always be as shiny and chromed as the day they rolled off the line in your garage. If the question was between having more cars to buy, find and drive (over 550 in total) and fewer cars to destroy in more detail, developer Playground Games has always chosen the former.
This casual experience feels baked into the space itself. The game world is a pastiche of Japan – the scenery and culture are just decoration. You can go from one end of the map surrounded by cherry blossoms to the other end swimming in the crimson and yellow colors of autumn. You’re such a tourist that early in the game you buy an akiya, one of those abandoned houses that are sold cheaply in Japanese villages. Admit it: you dreamed of building an akiya and living a quiet life. This escapist fantasy would seem manipulative if the air of casual comfort weren’t baked into every part of the experience.
This game is about spectacle first and accuracy second. If Halo: Combat Evolved built a first-person shooter game around “30 seconds of fun” on the original Xbox. Forza Horizon 6 it does the same with racing. This was helped by the variety of races available. I’ve never enjoyed off-road rally racing nearly as much as I do Horizon 6. This is especially noteworthy given that Codemasters announced this last year to leave his long-running Colin McRae and Dirt franchise.
The console, PC and handheld versions are all effectively the same. The big differentiator is performance. On Xbox Series X, you can choose between a 30fps Quality profile, which delivers native 4K, and a 60fps Performance setting, which dynamically upscales the resolution based on what’s on screen. Quality mode has a distinct visual quality difference, featuring more accurate real-time reflections and stunning highlights on cars. But when you’re rolling at 180 mph, you’ll feel that 30 fps frame rate lag.
I failed my test Forza Horizon 6 with 4K resolution using iBuyPower Trace X RGB R01 PC, packaging AMD’s Ryzen 7 9850X3D and one Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 GPU. When I turned on ray tracing and reflection, the game was just beautiful. Light filtering through the trees and bouncing off the rain-slicked streets adds to the joy as you tear through the environment at high speed, with no regard for people, animals or hapless bushes.
I still had to rely on Nvidia’s DLSS to get more than 60 fps with every setting maxed out. But even if ray tracing isn’t active (realistic lighting models will naturally improve performance), it’s the cars that stand out the most. All male presenting human characters look like Cro-Magnon Ken dolls; their brows never reaching any expression other than bewilderment at being alive. The female characters presented are a nightmare mix of a marionette and a thrift store mannequin, wigs to spare.
This is what characters look like no matter what system you’re playing on. What surprised me the most about the gaming experience on the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X was the level of detail in the cars. By default, the game sets the graphics to High, which is an average of 30 fps. I sometimes found the frame rate dropping to around 26 fps, especially when driving through water when rain particles splashed onto the windshield.
It selects games to make the experience more console-like Default Game Profile In Xbox Ally. This is an exclusive feature for first-party Xbox games on the handheld and automatically adjusts the TDP (thermal design power) for each title, making the experience as accessible as possible. This means that the handset runs on Turbo power at around 27W in some scenarios, which is impressive, but drains the handset’s battery very quickly. Users who don’t want this to happen or prefer fine-tuned controls can turn the setting off.
PC will still be the most premium way to play. It offers the best visual and performance experience. Microsoft has taken steps to offer PC gamers a simpler, console-like user interface than the usual Xbox software. I had to download the latest Windows Insider beta build to access the new “Xbox Mode,” but once it was installed and enabled in Settings, I didn’t have to do much else. Menus are similar to the “Full Screen Experience” in Xbox Ally, allowing you to access all of your main launchers and games from a single menu. All new windows are full screen and can be accessed by holding down the Xbox button.
The biggest issue with Xbox Mode on PC is how it handles sleep. Fortunately, you can sleep, turn off and restart the console from the special Xbox menu that appears when you press the Xbox button (or the corresponding button on third-party controllers). If you put the computer into sleep mode, it will also exit the game you are playing. This creates a problem Forza Horizon 6. Every time you restart the game, you’re teleported back to your “property” (basically your customizable home base, which includes your garage), which means you have to fast-forward to where you were before or to your next destination.
for now, Forza Horizon 6 only locked for Series console, PC and Windows-based handheld devices. Xbox before announced that the game would eventually come to PlayStation 5 Forza Horizon 5 did. CEO Asha Sharma and the platform’s new executives said they are “re-evaluating” console exclusivity. Tom Warren of The Verge recently informed Sharma is “treading carefully” and it’s unclear whether Forza will stick with Microsoft’s favored platforms.
But you need games like Xbox Forza Horizon 6 for the next big console push. The game feels like it’s pushing the Series X to its limits, given how much it relies on more modern hardware. If the next-gen Project Helix lives up to its potential, games like Forza would be great starter titles. Need games like Xbox Forza Horizon 6 to bridge the gap between current hardware and everything that follows.
