Forza Horizon 6 review: Playground Games outdoes itself with an essential racing game

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of the Forza Horizon series to Microsoft.

In an era where the Xbox company has faced all manner of challenges, Forza Horizon has remained one of its unarguable success stories. Horizon 5, in particular, had been played by more than 53 million players by the start of this year, according to its in-game leaderboard – this, of course, includes Game Pass subscribers who didn’t buy it, but it’s a remarkable figure regardless.

Add to that widespread critical acclaim with a Metacritic score of 92 (including a 5 from VGC), and a hell of a lot was riding on developer Playground Games to ensure it didn’t drop the ball with Forza Horizon 6.

It didn’t. The sixth entry takes everything that worked in Forza Horizon 5 and adds to it with more race types, more side missions, and a more diverse map.

At its core, Forza Horizon 6 is similar to its predecessors in that it revolves around the Horizon Festival, a traveling car event that puts on races in a different country each time. This time, after years of requests, the Horizon Festival has finally come to Japan.

While the fifth game’s Mexico setting delivered some outstanding vistas, its one weak point was city racing. While Guanajuato was a colorful city to explore, with a population of just 70,000 in real life, it’s not quite a sprawling metropolis. Not like, for example, Tokyo.

Naturally, Forza Horizon 6 solves this with a ruddy big Tokyo City region in its map. It’s clearly significantly smaller than the real-life Tokyo, and much like previous games, it’s not massively accurate either – think of it as more of a Greatest Hits of the city, with notable landmarks moved closer together. Tokyo Tower is just around the corner from Shibuya Crossing, instead of a 15-minute drive away, for example.

The rest of the map is a treat, too, making the most of Japan’s diverse scenery. The countryside has a number of lovely smaller towns, while shrines are dotted throughout the forests. There’s a coastal area, and right up at the top of the map is a snowy mountain area. It’s a big improvement on the Mexico map, as long as you weren’t emotionally attached to its dunes – other than the odd beach here or there, you won’t find much sand this time.

During its initial reveal presentation, Xbox made note of the fact that Forza Horizon 6’s career progression differs from that in the previous games because you’re not part of the Horizon Festival right away and have to earn your wristband first. Don’t put too much stock in this – you’re entered into qualifiers almost as soon as you arrive in Japan, and you get your wristband after the first few races, so it’s not like this is a rags-to-riches story.

It’s only the first of numerous wristbands you pick up along the way, mind you. Forza Horizon 6 splits up its progression system into two distinct categories – the Horizon Festival itself and Discover Japan, a group of non-sanctioned races and other events separate from the official festival.

The Horizon Festival events are dotted around the map and will be familiar to those who played previous games in the series. You’re looking at road races, dirt races, cross-country races, and time trials, as well as ‘PR stunts’ – speed traps, speed zones (where you have to hit an average top speed over a stretch of road), danger signs, drift zones, and the like.

Completing these earns you Horizon points, and as you hit certain milestones, you unlock special Showcase events – racing a giant mech, zooming round an obstacle course on a pier, racing two stunt biplanes, that sort of thing. Complete a Showcase, and you’ll earn the next color of wristband, unlocking the next batch of Horizon events on the map. Once you get all seven wristbands, you unlock a special section of the map called Legend Island, along with the final batch of races. I obviously won’t spoil these, but there are some fun variations there.

As for the Discover Japan events, there’s a bit more variety here. There are still some standard races – street races (which mostly seem to take place at night) and touge races, where you zoom down twisty mountain paths – but a lot of this section focuses on exploration of the game’s large Japan map.

You gain Discover Japan points for taking photos of landmarks, knocking over the 200 small mascot statues dotted around the map, going on day trips (where a tour guide gives you facts about Japan and the cars you’re driving), buying houses, collecting and upgrading cars, and other things.

My favorite of these Discover Japan categories is the food delivery missions. Located in the middle of the Tokyo City area is Raku Raku Express, a small food delivery company in the style of Uber Eats. You can take on delivery jobs for this company to earn extra money (and Discover Japan points, when you hit certain experience tiers), but rather than straight fetch quests each one has a different gimmick attached.

In one job, the food you’re delivering hasn’t been properly mixed, so you have to hit a certain number of drift points before you reach your destination, to ensure it’s been shaken around enough. In another, you have to maintain a certain speed and will fail the job if it drops below that for too long. It’s nothing earth-shattering, but it’s enough to ensure that what could have become a monotonous side-quest doesn’t feel repetitive.

As with the Horizon Festival, there are seven tiers to unlock in the Discover Japan section – stamps instead of wristbands, this time – but there are far more points than you need, meaning you can unlock them in a way you prefer. I reached the final tier through a combination of hitting mascots, doing street races, taking photos, and doing food deliveries, but you could just as easily do it by taking part in drift club events, focusing on collecting cars, and going on day trips instead.

In a nutshell, it’s this level of freedom that’s the joy of Forza Horizon 6. While completists will eventually want to clear every icon on the map, those who simply want to ‘beat’ the game can do so in any combination of ways.

“In a nutshell, it’s this level of freedom that’s the joy of Forza Horizon 6. While completists will want to eventually clear every icon on the map, those who simply want to ‘beat’ the game can do it in any combination of different ways.”

For example, if you don’t like drifting and were worried that the move to Japan would mean a heavier emphasis on drifting events, you don’t have to worry – there absolutely are a lot more drift races and PR stunts here than in previous Forza Horizon games but it’s also perfectly possible to get all seven Festival wristbands and all seven Discover Japan stamps without ever doing a single one. Trust me, that’s what I did.

Along the way, you’ll be constantly unlocking new cars – not just by buying them with the money you earn, but getting them as rewards for certain milestones. Some have complained in the past that the Forza Horizon games are too generous with their reward systems and that it’s too easy to build a huge collection of cars. If you were hoping for that to change this time, you’re going to be disappointed.

Forza Horizon 6 still throws new cars at you like confetti, and happily gives you powerful ones near the start, too. This isn’t game-breaking, because the official Horizon Festival events have specific cars to choose from, and while the unofficial Discover Japan races often let you pick any car you want, they tend to choose opponent cars that closely match the power of the one you chose.

Cars remain a dream to handle. Playground Games has this down to a fine art by now, and whether you’re belting down the highway at 260mph in a comically overtuned car that can barely turn, or swinging yourself around winding hairpin bends in an old Subaru Impreza like a reborn Colin McRae, it’s never not satisfying.

It’s also gorgeous. I played most of the game on a high-end PC, so naturally, you’d expect it to look fantastic there, but it also runs great on Xbox Series X, whether you’re playing on the 60fps Performance mode or the 30fps Quality mode. The last game was no visual slouch, and that carries over here.

It also runs surprisingly well on the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X. I had my doubts that a massive, graphically detailed open-world racing game would perform acceptably on the handheld, but it pre-downloaded the appropriate shaders on first boot and, recognizing it was running on the ROG Xbox Ally X, recommended its own visual preset. The result is a game that looks sharp on the handheld’s screen, yet moves at a near-solid 30fps. I tried it out of duty more than anything, but ended up putting 4-5 hours into it on the handheld.

Whatever route you take to the endgame, one thing remains constant – this is a large game. It took me more than 50 hours to reach the last tier of both the Horizon Festival and Discover Japan, and even then, there were still plenty of incomplete icons on the map and a large number of collectibles to tick off. Anyone considering 100% completion is looking at hundreds of hours of gameplay. There’s a reason these aren’t annual releases.

“Anyone considering 100% completion is looking at hundreds of hours of gameplay. There’s a reason these aren’t annual releases.”

That’s before you take the live service element into account, too. At the time of reviewing the game, Playground Games had yet to start its first Festival Playlist (the studio’s name for seasons in Forza Horizon). If it’s anything like the last game, though, a wealth of extra content is to be expected.

Forza Horizon 5 is currently in its 59th monthly season, each of which has featured time-limited goals that let players unlock new cars and other items. At times, Playground Games will also add new decorations or features to the map, meaning it constantly evolves. Expect to see the same thing happening here, too, meaning you’ll never be without something to do, even if you manage to clear the main map.

For now, this review can only be judged by what’s put in front of us, and even if Playground Games was to suddenly have a bizarre change of heart and never release a single online update, there’d still be enough in the base game to make it not only the best Forza Horizon game so far, but one of the best racing titles ever made. Anyone with even the slightest interest in the genre should consider this a definite must-have.