The third Forza title on Xbox One and the second from the core Motorsport series, Forza Motorsport 6 brought some major upgrades since FM5 two years earlier. In 2013, its direct predecessor was unfairly criticized for supposedly lacking in content due to being the first series entry on a new platform, but FM6 expands upon the hordes of cars accumulated over the course of FM5 and Forza Horizon 2. The car list that circulated before the game was even released boasted 460 cars, and that doesn't count the upcoming DLC which can be expected on a monthly basis for many months to come. What's more, every one of those cars is beautifully modelled for current-gen hardware in intimate detail, and all are explorable in ForzaVista. This stands in stark contrast to main rival Gran Turismo, which previously came along with just over 200 cars modelled for PlayStation 3 and 800 outdated PlayStation 2 models crammed in there to pad its numbers, and then GT6 did much the same by continuing to recycle outdated garbage.

The Forza games tend to improve on performance from game to game, and this is again the case with FM6 which now boasts twenty-four cars on the track at one time, which is 50% more than FM5's sixteen cars two years earlier, and AI rivals now take damage in the main career mode again as well as now having telemetry available for study during replays, which things were absent in FM5. The biggest, most dramatic, and most noteworthy change, however, is in the addition of night and rain for the first time in the Motorsport series. Time of day and weather do not change dynamically, as they did in Forza Horizon games, but rather they are fixed throughout a race, but at least we have them available to us and they're done properly. Even with the 50% increase to the number of cars rendered at once, the addition of night and rain, and the game being openly honest with AI performance complete with full telemetry for AI cars, the game still manages to keep to the series standard of 60 frames per second, and that's not "generally 60 FPS" but a true, locked, constant 60 FPS.

In so many other games, night isn't quite dark enough and light sources aren't really important. So often you can run around or, in the case of a racing game, drive around at night and find yourself perfectly capable of seeing even without headlights because the darkness isn't black enough. In FM6, night races are truly black, except for the night races in venues with overhead lighting like Daytona, or the grandstand section of Circuit de la Sarthe. In Forza Motorsport 6's darkness, if you don't have headlights you don't see anything. That isn't a bad thing. It's a difficult thing, but it's supposed to be.

It's much the same with rain. I've seen pretty rain in other games, but FM6 goes beyond aesthetically pleasing rain. It's one thing to make a track look wet and render water falling from the sky, or even to make the track more slippery and less grippy and have that significantly affect performance, but another thing to do what Turn 10 did in Forza Motorsport 6. Here we actually have true puddles of standing water. It goes beyond slapping a wet-looking texture onto the road surface, by additionally rendering three-dimensional pools of water with actual physical depth to them. Apparently the developers studied where water pools in actual race tracks like Sebring or Brands Hatch and then rendered pools of standing water in those places. The effect on gameplay is dramatic and significant. Yes, the entire track surface is slippery and you have to adjust your driving techniques accordingly, but it's another thing entirely when you hit one of those pools of water. Just as in real life, whatever tires cut through that standing water will be slowed, and that can not only slow your car but also upset or turn your car. Racers have to either take alternative lines to avoid these puddles or adjust their path through them to maintain control. I've played a lot of racing games over the years but none have done what Turn 10 did here.

Night and rain also run cooler than dry day races, which means decreased tire grip. Consequently, this can mean slightly adjusted driving and also different tuning setups, especially for rain. Another new place that we see performance alteration is in the new mod system. As players progress, they can unlock and accumulate mod cards, and they can also purchase mod packs which feel sort of like booster packs for collectable trading card games. They come in three colors - green, blue, and purple, and players can use up to three mods at one time, but no more than one of each color at once. Green mod cards are single-use, so once they've been used for a race they are gone, while blue and purple mods can be used over and over and don't even unequip until the player chooses to remove or replace them. Most mods provide some sort of performance improvement, like a slight increase in power or grip, or moving the player up on the starting grid or making them a ghost for the first lap, and some increase race winnings, but some offer bonus winnings in exchange for added difficulty, either by requiring certain driver aids be off or by decreasing vehicle performance. These things can be interesting and add a new gameplay element, but personally I have mixed feelings about mods because they also feel very unrealistic. Having more power because you upgraded your motor is one thing, but having better performance because of a mod card is another and the latter doesn't feel right, from a realism perspective.

The game plays just fine on a wheel, though people have complained that it lacks substantial resistance or force feedback in general when played through a racing wheel accessory compared to competitors like Project CARS, and it plays wonderfully with a control, continuing to stand as the benchmark by which all other racing game controls are judged. Yet again the game offers a full range of assists available as options for the player, and this time the option offers either "on" with no reward bonus or "off" with a percentage bonus to race winnings, unlike Forza Motorsport 5 which instead let you keep it as an option available to you but penalized you by taking some of your winnings depending on how often you used it. We still have a broad array of potential upgrades available to us as well as tuning, a vinyl and livery editor, and an option to share our designs or tuning setups with the community, which earns us CR (Forza currency) as players download and use them.

Drivatars return, this time with an option to turn off their aggression, but this time there's a bit of a bug and it's caused some players a fair deal of grief, including this one. We still have the option to set the AI difficulty higher or lower, depending on our desires and skill level, but our main rivals, which the game pulls from our friends, are notably faster than we are. Even if you're a newbie and set the difficulty pretty low, that handful of Drivatars will still magically run significantly faster than the rest of the field. They were intended to be more of a threat than Joe Sixpack, but they shouldn't be several times the selected skill level. If you a player sets it to one of the lowest settings, it seems particularly unfair to throw some more talented Drivatars that they're highly unlikely to beat before advancing. While I cannot swear to what difficulty that handful of AI drivers run at, it appears to be either Professional or Unbeatable, which are the two highest tiers out of many.

While I don't necessarily agree with every change to the formula (I'm looking at you, mods.), this is still a solid, outstanding product of which Turn 10 should be proud. If you don't play this, you aren't a fan of racing; simple and plain. Nagging complains are just nitpicking and while there's always room for improvement FM6 still stands without peer, not only on Xbox One or in the foreseeable future, but across all current platforms.