The Forza Horizon series has always been defined by approachable arcade-style racing and beautiful open-world locales, and with its sixth entry, Playground Games has delivered what many are calling the franchise’s finest hour.
Set amid the breathtaking landscapes of Japan, Forza Horizon 6 invites you to become a racing legend at the Horizon Festival. After the longest gap between instalments in the series’ history, the wait has paid off handsomely — though not without a few familiar caveats.
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Setting & World Design: Japan Delivers
The choice of Japan, long the most fan-requested location in series history, turns out to be a masterstroke. The map has very diverse elevation — mountains, valleys, tall bridges, touges, wide highways, and tiny and narrow back roads between buildings in Tokyo City. Different heights and sizes make the map much more interesting to drive and quite challenging in specific conditions.
The use of Tokyo and its surrounding regions makes for a varied map that offers dense city streets and beautiful mountain ranges. The lights of Tokyo City made street races feel cooler than ever. Tokyo City itself is five times larger than Forza Horizon 5’s Guanajuato, full of stuff to do — races, jobs, landmarks, and enjoyment on narrow or massively wide highways.
This sleek, Japan-set open world arguably makes for the most ‘AAA’ racing game ever made, and it’s hard to disagree when you’re watching neon light shimmer off wet Tokyo asphalt or cresting a mountain pass at dusk with Fuji in the background. One minor gripe noted by several critics: Mt. Fuji serves mostly as a backdrop and isn’t part of the actual playable map, a missed opportunity given its iconic status.
Cars & Audio: 550+ Machines, Better Than Ever
The game features over 550 real-world cars, including fan-favorite JDM classics, with cutting-edge engine audio and updated steering animations with up to 540 degrees of wheel rotation. The cover car — the 2025 Toyota GR GT Prototype — is a race-derived road car combining motorsport performance with road-going excellence, a perfect showcase for Japanese engineering.
Cars sound better than ever, with remastered engine audio and more detailed surface interaction, all brought to life by new acoustic modelling technology that simulates the soundscape of the world. The result is an auditory experience that makes every gear change feel genuinely tactile. The soundtrack is equally impressive: the game features more music than any previous title, including exciting Japanese artists, creating the most diverse soundtrack of any Horizon game yet.
Gameplay & New Modes
Competing in Horizon Festival events like traditional circuit races and sprints, as well as Discover Japan events like unsanctioned street races and winding touge battles — both solo and with other players — makes for an absolute blast.
The headline new addition is the Touge mode. Touge Battles are 1v1 racing events on famous Japanese mountain roads — Hakone, Mount Haruna, Bandai Azuma, the Norikura Skyline, and Arahiyama Takao Parkway. If you’re a fan of Initial D, you know exactly what to do. These battles play unlike any other race in the game, putting an emphasis on mechanics like drifting and control on narrow, winding roads.
Beyond Touge, new events also include Time Attack (with in-game billboards showing friends’ best times), Horizon Rush (skill-based showcase-style events with preselected cars), and Drag Meets (where purpose-built, heavily tuned machines are essential).
Progress is tracked through the Collection Journal, which keeps tabs on participation in the Horizon Festival as well as exploration of Japan. Completing specific events earns Horizon Festival Points to unlock set-piece races. Whether it’s a race against a giant mech or an intense drive down a snowy mountain, Horizon Festival Events deliver most of the game’s jaw-dropping moments.
Even more than 30 hours in, there are still many activities left uncompleted — a testament to the sheer depth on offer.
Handling: Smooth, Accessible, Occasionally Too Safe
The handling model is where opinions diverge slightly. The races showcase Horizon’s excellent handling model, with added depth and difficulty available if you turn off traction control and the racing line. Tuned to match your abilities, there’s plenty of challenge, and you simply can’t tire of fighting for position through streets, fields, rivers, and hillsides.
However, on default settings, the car handling actually owes more to an arcade sensibility than Forza Motorsport — on tarmac, everything feels a little too sanitized, a bit “nice” and inoffensive compared to the genre’s best. For veterans seeking simulation depth, the default feel may disappoint — but the extensive difficulty and assist toggles mean that challenge is always available for those who seek it.
Multiplayer & Social Features
Forza Horizon 6 offers a dedicated ‘Solo’ mode where you don’t need an active online subscription to play. When online, loads of additional gameplay flows in — races restricted to single vehicles, group activities like hunting petrol pump characters, and more. You can challenge anyone in free roam to a quick race or ask them to join you.
The community creation suite has also been massively upgraded: CoLab, the upgraded EventLab toolset, now features multiplayer support and the ability to build custom events literally anywhere in the world, with a constantly evolving catalogue of community-created content.
Presentation & Technical Performance
At a mix of high and ultra settings at 1440p on PC, the game runs at a solid 100–120 FPS, which is more than comfortable. On Xbox Series X/S, performance is equally polished. The game supports ray tracing and, on PC, DLSS 4.5 Dynamic Multi Frame Generation 6X Mode for outstanding visual fidelity at high frame rates.
Extensive field recordings across all four seasons in Japan create a rich, truly authentic world. The cultural integration goes beyond aesthetics — a series of story events takes players on tours throughout different regions, with an in-game guide teaching them about historical landmarks and signature Japanese vehicles.
The One Legitimate Criticism: Formula Fatigue
The elephant in the room is familiarity. While most reviews agree the setting is fantastic, some critics feel the game is too familiar to previous entries and believe the formula can start to feel stale. The menus, HUD, in-game pop-ups, and overall presentation stayed pretty much exactly the same as Forza Horizon 5 — which itself was the same as Horizon 4. Revamping the whole UI would have gone a long way to giving the game a fresh coat of paint in terms of perception.
Gamesreactor UK was the lone major dissenting voice, scoring it 70 and finding the overall experience disappointing — a view clearly in the minority but not entirely without basis for long-time fans.
Verdict
Forza Horizon 6 is an accumulation of its past five iterations, but somehow remains light on its feet. It’s a game that understands spectacle without becoming hollowed out by it. For a series about driving fast, its real achievement is teaching you to notice what you’re passing through — and stopping to admire it.
Playground Games preserved what people love about Forza Horizon and made it better, bigger, and more fun. If you love racing and want an open-world experience that’s equal parts heart and horsepower, Forza Horizon 6 is a no-brainer. It’s the top dog for a reason, and this chapter just cements it.
The formula hasn’t fundamentally changed — and for some, after three nearly identical UI generations, that’s starting to show. But Japan’s setting is so inspired, the new Touge mode so fresh, and the sheer volume of content so staggering, that Forza Horizon 6 earns its place as the best entry in the series to date.
Score: 9.2 / 10 A stunning open-world racer that finds genuine freshness in Japan’s roads, culture, and cars — held back only by a reluctance to modernize its structural bones.
