Forza Horizon 6

Long-term players complain about the live-service loop again and again. Exclusive cars sit behind weekly and monthly tasks, so missing a week can mean missing a car. Players say reward cars started repeating by the second season and that the weekly points needed for both rewards went up from 30 to 40, which pushes them into online tasks such as the Eliminator, the Trial and Hide and Seek. One player wrote "It feels less like a game and more like a second job you have to clock into on Thursdays." A minority defend the playlist as light, since a few hours a week clears it.

Many of the angriest reviews are about technical problems. Players report FHC01, FHE01 and FHC11 crashes, games that would not start without running as administrator or switching the game language, and a late-June hotfix after which the game disconnected from online services and crashed to the desktop within a few minutes for many players. Others mention VRAM leaks, early AMD stutter, GTX 10-series cards that stopped working, and poor stability on Linux and on a Steam Deck the store lists as Verified. Support replies are described as copy-pasted. One reviewer called it a "great game... if it lets you stay in it for more than a few minutes." A smaller number say it has never crashed for them.

The wall-contact slowdown penalty often hits the player who was pushed into the wall rather than the one who pushed, as one player put it: "you get pushed into a wall on each corner and game punishes YOU instead of rammers." A handful of meta builds (the Honda Beat, AWD-swapped cars on rally tyres) dominate every class, cheaters fill leaderboards and end drift lobbies with zero-point wins, and teammates ram each other in the team-based Trial. Players also complain about matchmaking that picks a random class, joining championships halfway through, no ranked mode and no chat.

Players expected street racing, touge and drifting. Instead, they say, the wristband events lean heavily on dirt and cross-country races, many drift zones are on dirt, Tokyo hosts only a handful of races, and street races do not count toward wristbands. "Nothing says Japan like generic rally track in the middle of a field," wrote one player. Some enjoy the rally content, while the reviewers who raise this see the setting's car culture as mostly decoration.

Wheelspins mostly pay 5,000 to 15,000 credits, players say, many cars can only be won from wheelspins, and sniping bots dominate the auction house. According to reviewers, a mid-July update limited EventLab events to a single skill point and raised the auction price cap so rare cars now list for 20 million credits, after earlier wallet resets over an Eliminator exploit that some players say hit them without having used it. One reviewer described the best remaining method: "the most efficient grind to obtain a single wheelspin now involves driving your car in circles in a forest to knock over as many trees & bamboo as possible". Some link these changes to the paid car vouchers offered next to the buy button. A few players disagree and say flipping cars on the auction house still earns plenty.

For a game set in the home of tuner culture, players expected more than the shared Forza aero kit, whose swan-neck wing many find ugly, and the few body kits on offer. They ask for exhaust tips, underglow, headlight colours, wheel offset and adjustable aftermarket parts. One player who still calls this the best Forza Horizon says "People have been asking for better customisation for years, and somehow they made it worse." Another asked: "Why can I customize my garage more than my car?"

Above the middle difficulties, players say AI cars stick to the racing line as if on rails, take corners with impossible grip, rubber-band ahead, brake-check, and shove the player off the road in braking zones. Several noticed the AI scales with the player's own tune; one long review concluded that "races are easier when you tune you car worse". A patch after launch toned the AI down and some players now find it fair, but many still drop the difficulty for specific races. The AI driver BowieKnife99 is a running joke in the reviews for exactly this behaviour.

The story, dialogue and character models are widely disliked, though many players shrug and say nobody plays Horizon for the story. What irritates them is being made to sit through it: unskippable intros and cutscenes, chatty barn-find scenes, and the game stopping you mid-drive to show something on the map. Some miss a voiced protagonist; others are glad it is gone. "Please let these cutscenes be skipped, Playground," wrote one player who otherwise loved the game.

Players object to car packs, a car pass that includes old cars, VIP perks and store prompts after paying $70 or more. Some DLC cars, especially the time attack cars, are called the fastest in their class, which several reviewers label pay-to-win. Others mention the paid treasure map, promotional cars only available on the Xbox version, and a premium upgrade not sold on Steam. One summed it up as "we get 13 cars in an update and only 4 of em are free."

In late September, many reviews reported that players and livery creators were banned for anime-style itasha designs, including some who only shared photos of liveries they had downloaded, with long bans, no clear rule and, several say, no working appeal. Reviewers find this hard to square with a game set in Japan and contrast it with leaderboard cheaters going unpunished: "10 censoring custom liveries bans out of 10. 0 banned hackers out of 10." Another wrote "Game was fun until realising that an anime livery on your car could get your account banned".

Players say the Steam version requires an Xbox account, Gaming Services and in some cases the Microsoft Store, and sign-in loops kept some of them out entirely. A cloud-sync error locks players who switch between a PC and a Steam Deck or Linux install into an endless sync loop, and others report corrupted saves, a car whose customization could wipe a save, and liveries or custom routes lost after updates. UK players also report an age check by face scan or ID before they can use community liveries, tunes and the auction house. One player who never got past the sign-in screen wrote "I did not pay $70 to rent a game from Microsoft."

The food-delivery side job is a recurring target: the same short routes in the same kei trucks for hours to reach the top rank. "Get ready to deliver ice cream and rice dozens of times over several hours," warned one completionist.

Dense traffic appears even on remote dirt roads, spawns just ahead of the player and swerves across lanes, ruining speed traps, drift runs and street races, and there is no option to turn it down. Some also say it rains too often. One review was simply "PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD LET ME TURN OFF TRAFFIC".