Hands-on: Forza Horizon 6 is on track to be another exceptional open-world racer

When your predecessor is considered by some to be one of the greatest games of the generation, that’s a lot to live up to. That’s the challenge faced by Forza Horizon 6.

Rarely has a video game series been so consistently brilliant over so many titles, but Playground Games’ open-world racing series has been so well-loved since the first entry in 2012 – while its ‘big brother’ Forza Motorsport has underdelivered numerous times in recent years – that what started off as a spin-off has essentially become the main event.

As a result, Forza Horizon 6 is now one of the most eagerly anticipated games not only for Xbox and PC players, but also PS5 owners who have already been told Xbox’s racer is coming to their system later in the year.

It has to come to Xbox first, however, so we recently went hands-on with the opening section of the Xbox Series X version to see if a change of location to Japan has ensured the series has kept its magic. So far, the signs are great.

We played through the game’s prologue and a few races after this. Playground Games has promised players that while the previous entries had you instantly joining the Horizon Festival (where the world’s top drivers come to race), this time you have to earn the right to join it first.

Don’t get too intrigued by this – assuming the preview build we played wasn’t abridged, your pal gets you into some qualifier races right away when you get to Japan, and you can take part in the Horizon Invitational within just three or four races. Time will tell if there’s actually more to it than that but let’s face it, it doesn’t really matter – if you mainly played previous Forza Horizon games for the story you’d have moved onto Starfield by now.

Here’s 22 minutes of Forza Horizon 6 gameplay footage, plus we answer VGC Discord members’ questions about the game:

It’s a cliché to say that the setting is one of the most important characters in the game, but clichés become clichés because they’re often true. Forza Horizon has enjoyed some stunning landscapes in the past, from Australia to Mexico, but players have been desperate to see the series come to Japan for many years now, and it appears to have been worth the wait.

The preview build let me explore the entire open world, and there’s a wealth of jaw-dropping environments to discover here, from the urban streets of Tokyo City to narrow mountaintop roads. True to Forza tradition, this isn’t a one-to-one recreation of Japan by any stretch of the imagination – rather, it’s a sort of Greatest Hits package where some of the most remarkable points of interest across the country have been given the Ctrl+X, Ctrl+V treatment and arranged together on a more manageable map.

Much like Forza Horizon 4 let you do the two and a half hour drive from the Lake District in Cumbria to Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh in about 10 minutes, the sixth game has you driving through a series of ‘Osaka Tunnels’ and emerging in Tokyo City some 300 miles away. Try not to worry about it – this might not be the game to go for if you’re studying routes for an actual road trip across Japan, but it’s a great way to see the best of what the country has to offer.

Visually, the game looks outstanding. Driving up a mountain as snowy roads stretch out into the distance is a sight to behold, and when you’re in the city at night, with neon signs reflecting against puddles, it’s clear this is one beautiful game.

What remains to be seen is how this scales down in Performance mode – the build I played was locked to the 30fps Quality mode, and while I appreciate some players prefer fidelity over frames, I like my racing games running at at least 60fps and naturally that’s going to be accompanied by a dip in visual detail. Horizon 5 did a good job handling this, so it’s going to be interesting to see how well 6 does (and then of course there’s the Series S to take into the equation too).

So far, much of the rest of what I played was classic Forza Horizon. I played a lap-based race and a couple of checkpointed A-to-B races, and everything was as entertaining as ever. Your Xbox friend list still drives around the road as ‘Drivatars’ – Forza was doing AI before it was uncool – and you still build XP by chaining together skills like near misses, crashing through scenery, handbrake drifts and the like.

“Driving up a mountain as snowy roads stretch out into the distance is a sight to behold, and when you’re in the city at night, with neon signs reflecting against puddles, it’s clear this is one beautiful game.”

The build I played didn’t have many of the new features promised, such as The Estate – a large home environment you can customise. This is where the game can potentially add something different over its predecessors, and it’s not yet known whether it’s going to bring something genuinely refreshing to the table, or offer a half-hearted attempt at implementing cozy mechanics into the game. Luckily, it doesn’t appear to be crucial to playing the game anyway, so it can hopefully be easily ignored if it doesn’t work out well.

What was included in the preview build, however, was the regional mascots. These are little food-based characters who are different in every region and can be ‘collected’ by crashing into them and breaking them. Players who got a kick out of driving round the open world and smashing through Bonus Boards will be happy that there’s an extra thing they can now track down, though while the Bonus Boards earn XP it’s not yet clear what the mascots do if you get them all.

At this stage, I’m very happy with what I’ve seen so far. Playground Games appears to have no intention of reinventing the wheel (so to speak), and given how fantastic the previous Forza Horizon games have been it’s fully entitled to take that route.

While there’s likely to be another hefty selection of races and other things to unlock in the main game, Forza Horizon 5 proved that Playground and Xbox now consider live service to be one of the key components of this series. This new Japan map is an incredible sandbox which will doubtless host a variety of new features over the next few years, and with PS5 players arriving a matter of months later – as opposed to three and a half years later with Horizon 5 – that’s only going to further accelerate the online community for this one.

If the rest of the game is as good as the small taste I’ve played, we’re potentially looking at one of the year’s best. We’ll have a review of the full game nearer to its release, but at this stage everything’s on track to give Forza Horizon 5 a run for its money and take over pole position as the best open-world racing game around.