Playground Games does it again: equal parts adept teacher and artisanal tour guide, Forza Horizon 6 takes the lessons from 14 years of series history and applies them with panache.
Forza Horizon 6 does not reinvent the wheel. It doesn’t need to. The latest open-world racing behemoth from Playground Games instead rethinks and reworks the five titles that came before, trimming the fat and reintroducing the best bits to make Forza Horizon 6 the cleanest, buzziest, and most engrossing experience it can be, all galvanised by a stunning Japanese backdrop, and flavoured by decades of well-researched Japanese car culture. I think Horizon 6 is the highlight in a pantheon of already great racing experiences, and shows Playground Games as a developer at its peak. This is the best racing series in gaming, but that accolade comes with some caveats.
Forza Horizon 6 review
- Developer: Playground Games
- Publisher: Xbox Game Studios
- Platform: Played on Xbox Series X
- Availability: Out 19th May on PC (Steam, Microsoft), Xbox Series X/S. PS5 coming 2026.
Let’s tackle the thorniest issue first; progression. Projecting a sense of achievement and growth is hard in an open world racing game: part of the promise of the Horizon series is that you’re given a sandbox, populated with a wealth of challenges to complete at your leisure. Do you want to show flagrant disregard for Japanese road safety laws and get three stars on a ‘Speed Camera challenge?’ or do you want to take to the northern regions of Hokkaido and put your snow tires to the test in a cross-country slalom against 15 other players? Do you want to cruise around the sunflower fields of Akeno, hunting down collectible XP boards and smashable mascots, or take an iconic Nissan Skyline GT-R to the streets of Tokyo and burn rubber in drifting challenges? You can do what you want, when you want… sort of.
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Here’s a Forza Horizon 6 trailer to show it in motion.Watch on YouTube
One of the smartest moves Playground has made in Horizon 6 is reintroducing the Wristband feature from the first Horizon game (the one set in Colorado). There are seven levels of access, gating opportunities behind each colour wristband, all the way up to the aspirational, ‘access all areas’ Gold band. I really like the implementation of this feature – as you earn new Wristbands, you get to participate in races with higher car class restrictions. Previously explored areas are populated with new races and tasks, and as your skills improve, Playground starts to filter more Road, Dirt and Cross Country races your way. Each task has specialised car themes, and some are far harder to nail a podium finish in than others.
Winning races, finishing races, snapping photos of featured cars, and generally being a good example of a festival participant will grant you acclaim, edging you ever closer to that next wristband. Once you qualify, you can take part in a Showcase event: show-stopping, jaw-dropping moments that – six games in! – I am still somehow stunned by. I’ll let you discover the bulk of these for yourselves, but the one I’ll highlight is the ‘mech race’. Forza Horizon 5’s Mexican escapade had you racing daredevils in wingsuits, storming down canyons, or racing against personnel-carrying airplanes, and I thought it’d be hard to top that. But, with 6 being set in Japan, of course I should have expected mechs or anime references of some kind. And this standout showcase does not disappoint. It’s dumb, it’s unrealistic, it’s childish fun. The only mark against these setpieces are the Horizon hosts: influencer types characterised by endless, pointless babbling. Remember, though: you can turn off all NPC speech in the settings. Thank me later.
Image credit: Eurogamer / Xbox Game Studios
Running parallel to the Wristbands is the ‘Discover Japan’ progression track: a thinly-veiled advert for the Japanese Tourist Board focused on getting you to explore all corners of the island nation to unlock more activities to take part in. Your achievements here are tracked via stamps, and you get points towards your next stamp by collecting and customizing cars, photographing murals, and smashing mascots, plus finding landmarks, doing day trips, completing Street and Touge Races, or – Death Stranding eat your heart out – taking up a part-time food delivery job. Yes, really.
To offset all the horsepower and diesel you’ll spend on drag strips and street circuits, one of the new features to Horizon 6 is a part-time job. These missions don’t add too much to the experience, but if you like the idea of pootling around the sharp corners and tiny sidestreets in a tiny version of Tokyo, then the world’s your oyster. I found these missions a low point of the whole game, to be honest, but there’s the joy of Horizon: I did about four and never touched them again. I didn’t have to! Praise be to player agency! Playground has been treading this unenviable tightrope between structure and player freedom ever since Horizon 3, but here – thanks to the sheer scale of the map and the sheer number of things to do – it feels like you, really, are in control. The way the two progression tracks eke things out to you is nothing short of genius, really; you rarely feel invisible hand supporting and teaching you at every turn.
Because the driving model that underpins all the game’s activities is fine, there are certain classes of race I was loathe to take part in, too: ‘dirt races’ on wet grass are always a disgusting, super high-spec sports car races on slick roads aren’t very fun, and some of the challenges that go from tarmac to dirt and back again are just a bit too much for my brain and fingers to take. I mostly play on Above Average difficulty, but sometimes I’d get prompts to drop down to Novice (how dare they!) or bump it up to Highly Skilled (why, thank you!). That’s how variable the race types are here; in previous Horizon games, I stayed at one skill level for the entire game. Here, the classifications and categories vary so much, you can really feel yourself being tutorialised at each wristband rank.
My comment about the average driving model just above isn’t totally fair, I don’t think: whilst Horizon’s approach to racing simulation is never going to have the same depth as Gran Turismo or the parent Forza Motorsport series, it manages perfectly well for an open world romp like Horizon. I am not a master at driving games. I do not want to be. But I feel like my career in the Horizon series has taught me enough to have a fun time playing the campaign, and be able to at least get podium finishes in the majority of online scuffles I take part in. The fact that the physics are robust enough to handle road races, dirt track races, snow slaloms, beach tracks and whatever else – whilst also handling the nuances of 671 cars – is worthy of praise.
Horizon has long been viewed as as much a collect-em-up as it is a racer, and of course that’s true in Horizon 6, too. Early on, I fell in love with a 1992 Ford Escort RS Cosworth, a legendary and charming World Rally Championship (WRC) car with a very identifiable ‘whale tail’ spoiler. As such, I dipped my toe into the tuning and upgrades portion of the menu here – something that I’d previously been scared away from thanks to all the horrible menus (menus which, by the way, have been improved drastically since the Horizon 4 era). Thanks to the Series X’s SSD and load speeds, making changes, heading back to the garage, tuning them up, and then trying them out again is a breeze. Trial-and-erroring your way through the process like that would have taken days back on the PS3 and Gran Turismo 5.
Forza Horizon 6 accessibility options
Subtitles (with size, background opacity, and keyword highlighting options), standard or guaranteed story progression, offline game speed slider (0-100), Screen Reader settings, various difficulty settings; assists for barking, steering, traction control, stability, shifting, et al. Rewind feature to quickly undo crashes, errors, and lapses in concentration.
Playing pre-launch, I haven’t had the benefit of seeing the servers teeming with festival attendees as a regular buyer would, but there have been other media and – notably – Playground and Turn10 devs joining me in the odd race here and there. I even managed to beat some of them, very occasionally! Otherwise, my races have been populated by devs’ ‘Drivatars’, aggressive bastards, mostly, but a fun challenge in categories I’d have otherwise thought myself a dab hand at. When other players do cross your path, you can taste the power of the stable netcode (not always a given in Forza games), and the seamless transitions between seeing a human player on the roads and joining in stunt parties, or travelling to race start points with them will forever seem like magic to me. The original Horizon concept was inspired by Turn10’s director, Dan Greenawalt, and his experiences at Coachella – that festival spirit is alive and well, six entries later, and I have made new friends on Kanto roads through wordless play in the same way I’d make friends waiting in the queues for the portaloo at Primavera.
Forza Horizon exists at the intersection between simulation and arcade. There have been missteps along the way, where the balance has thrown out to either side, but here, in Japan, Playground Games has the traction, the momentum, and the confidence to barrel through the finish line apace, hitting all the corners and nailing all the lines. This is Forza Horizon at its most powerful: with broad appeal and niche specialty, overclocking the fun factor whilst adding depth to its most finicky mechanics. The Japanese backdrop came at the perfect time; a beautiful accompaniment to a beautiful game. It’s taken 14 years to get here, but I think Forza Horizon 6 finally delivers on the promises the original game made, way back in October 2012.
A copy of Forza Horizon 6 was provided for this review by Xbox Game Studios.
