My wife was watching me play Forza Horizon 6 while having a snack and pointed something out: I had a big smile on my face. That happens a lot when I’m staying up late to play a few more hours of Forza Horizon 6. Going 250 miles per hour through scenic Japan while listening to Baby Metal and hitting a massive ramp tends to make you feel good.
Coming to Xbox and PC for those who pay for early access (boo!) on May 15, and for everyone else on May 19, Forza Horizon 6 is Playground Games’ latest installment in the open-world arcade racer that is officially a spin-off of the long-running Forza Motorsport series, but which has since eclipsed it.
The latest entry takes the fun and music to Japan and mostly succeeds at transplanting the experience to this new playground. But don’t expect something fresh or unique from what’s come before. This is still a Forza Horizon game, for better and worse.
Welcome to Japan
Forza Horizon 6’s digital recreation of the country is easily the franchise’s most detailed and gorgeous world yet. Japan, it turns out, is a perfect fit for the globetrotting series, with its own unique car culture, a massive network of highways, and beautiful landscapes that provide a colorful blur outside your window.
Horizon 6 also introduces the franchise’s largest, most complex urban environment in the form of Tokyo. This sprawling concrete maze is made up of neon and a spaghetti network of elevated highways, alleys, streets, roads, and shortcuts. Zipping through it feels unlike any other part of the massive map, which encompasses a compressed greatest hits-like digital recreation of Tokyo and the rest of Japan, including snowy mountains, cherry blossoms, and green farmland.
At one point, during a race unlocked at the end of the game, I drove around all of Japan. It took over 20 minutes, and the variety in scenery was incredible. It felt like I had truly driven across an entire country. And any time my journey took me into Tokyo or the area around it, I was also wowed by the sheer scale of the place. It feels massive. It looks massive. It really is massive.
It’s a shame then that Horizon 6 doesn’t do more with Tokyo. I wanted more races and events and moments in the city, but at launch, it seems a bit barren. Some areas feel like a ghost town due to Horizon 6’s lack of virtual people, and nonexistent traffic. This is an example of the game focusing on fun over reality, which is understandable, but it would have been interesting to navigate rush hour and get a clearer sense of Tokyo’s densely populated scale. But that wouldn’t be as fun as going very fast through the streets of the city. And Horizon 6 is a game that seems downright terrified of ever letting you get bored. So no traffic jams.
When you first arrive in Japan, you are given a few crappy cars, very little money, and must earn your way into the Horizon Festival. Unlike past entries, you aren’t already a well-known racing legend when you enter. Instead, you are just a random nobody trying to make a name for yourself with the help of some local friends.
I really enjoyed this setup. It avoided one of my biggest problems with the Horizon games: The way they instantly shower you with cars, money, rewards, and bonuses. I was hopeful that this time around I’d have to scrap and grind to get some cooler, faster cars beyond the first few hours.
There are even some delivery jobs you can take to make some cash on the side. These take the form of simple time-based missions that ask players to drive from one location to a few other spots in Tokyo while driving a delivery truck. They are quite different than the supercar races and stunt jumps, but sadly, they quickly become a waste of time to complete.
Within three hours of starting the game, I was driving a supercar, had over a million credits in my bank account, and was a fully-fledged Horizon Festival driver who was already being talked about by the various DJs you can hear on the in-game radio stations. I never did another delivery job again. I wish Forza Horizon 6 prolonged that feeling of scraping by and grinding to become a famous, rich race car driver.
But this isn’t a franchise that likes to delay or deny satisfaction. It prefers to dole out cool cars and fast hotrods sooner rather than later, instead of making you earn anything and feel a sense of progression. It’s a missed opportunity, but one I forgot about pretty quickly as the game provides a near-endless amount of fun races and activities to complete.
I love it when we’re cruisin’ together
The most important part of any racing game is how it actually feels to put rubber to the road. And thankfully, the driving in Forza Horizon 6 is still just as good as it’s always been in the franchise. This is largely because, behind the colorful, arcadey open world, still beats the heart of Forza Motorsport’s best-in-class driving and physics simulation engine.
You can open up a tuning screen and tinker with every bit of your car for hours and hours. That’s all still there. But you’ll almost never have to do that if you don’t want to. Even casual driving fans benefit from all the work that has gone into making each car feel incredible and different. Hopping between a supercar and an old roadster can be tricky, as you have to relearn how each one handles.
Or not, because Forza Horizon 6 includes a vast amount of options that let you make the game’s driving much, much easier, or, if you prefer, much, much harder. This time around, you can even mark a spot on the map and have your car auto-drive to it while you enjoy the scenery. Horizon 6 is a truly driving game designed for everyone, even, apparently, people who don’t want to drive all that much.
Horizon 6’s open world, music, and exploration will likely be the things that a lot of players praise, but that’s only because the driving is so damn good that you hardly even notice it anymore. One of the most satisfying experiences a video game can provide is that Forza flow state, where you’re nailing every turn perfectly. And that’s only made possible by the impeccable driving system running quietly in the background. It’s the real reason Forza Horizon 6 works, and I’m happy to report it’s still great.
Breaking signs, winning races, and hitting jumps like it’s 2012
As has been the case since the original Forza Horizon on Xbox 360, the bulk of your time in Forza Horizon 6 will be spent either exploring the open world or taking part in racing events. And for the most part, Horizon 6 doesn’t make too many changes to this formula.
You still have different kinds of races that require different types of cars. Dirt rally, street races, road races, and cross-country events are spread out across Japan. You enter these races and try to win. Nothing fancy. But some of the tracks take advantage of the improved visuals in Horizon 6 to deliver some jaw-dropping sunsets and vistas. And if you fuck up during a race, well, Horizon 6 still lets you rewind time if you want to try again. And again. And again.
Dotting the map in between these events are returning speed zones, speed traps, danger signs, and drift zones that anybody who has played a Horizon game will be very familiar with. The goal of these smaller open-world events is to go really fast, hit a big jump, or drift a lot to earn points. Each of these has a star ranking, and when completed, you’ll see your friends’ scores and speeds, giving you something to strive to beat. Or something to brag about via a late-night text. And finding and checking all of them off the in-game checklist feels as satisfying as collecting orbs in Crackdown. The kind of stuff that keeps you playing hours after you said you were done.
Completing these activities, as well as smashing signs and exploring the map, unlocks new events, races, and rare cars to find hidden in the world. Occasionally, you also unlock bigger showcase events that have you racing in a car against a giant mech or jet. These are still fun, but at this point, the excitement of racing against something other than a car in a pre-scripted event that is nearly impossible to fail has completely evaporated for me.
So yeah, this is a Forza Horizon game. If you’ve played any of them before, you’ll know what to expect, including lots of collectibles to find, challenges to complete, cars to buy and modify, and over 600 roads and highways to discover.
I loved all the meters that filled up as I raced around digital Japan, completing events, collecting cars, spotting famous landmarks, and breaking shit. I know that a lot of this is just superfluous sugar hiding the fact that I’m really doing the same thing over and over. But, damn, the candy tastes good.
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Back-of-the-box quote:
Live out the ultimate American fantasy: Going on vacation.
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Developer
Playground Games
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Type of Game
Online open-world driving and racing simulator
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Liked
Looks incredible, driving feels amazing, Japan is a treat to explore, great music, lots to do, and cool cars to collect
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Disliked
The Estate is meh, no progression, and endgame island is disappointing
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Platforms
Xbox Series X/S (Played), PC
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Played
26 hours. Completed every available race and collected all wristbands.
There’s some new stuff, too, y’know?
This time around, however, if you keep winning races, setting high-speed records, and smashing signs, you’ll eventually find something new: Legends Island. This sounds a lot more exciting than it actually ends up being, because after 25 hours and lots of hype, I was disappointed to find Legends Island is simply a small, mostly empty place with a few new races and… not much else.
Another new idea that flopped for me was the Estate. This is a big open area of the map that lets you build your own personal driving playground using a large library of props. However, the tool for building your playground is finicky as hell, hard to use, and seems to lack features like snapping props, making it hard to build anything without a lot of endless tinkering. It also takes way too long, even on Series X, to load in and out of the Estate grounds, which effectively made me never want to visit it.
Other new ideas in Horizon 6 are much, much better than Legends Island and The Estate. Time trials are my favorite new feature. These can be found at a few race tracks around the map, and you simply drive across the start and then try to set the fastest lap you can. Other players in the world can roll up and try to beat your time. It’s a simple idea, but one that fits perfectly into the Horizon formula, and I’m surprised it has taken this long to add.
Another new feature is online car meets. Go to these marked locations and park your favorite car, and other players can do the same, and you can all check out your rides. Another simple idea that I like and hope returns in future entries.
Lastly, as you drive around the map, you might find aftermarket cars for sale. These tend to be sold at a discount and come with extra upgrades, and can even be test-driven before purchasing. Again, this is a very smart way to make exploring the open world and all its nooks and crannies worthwhile, and a few of my favorite vehicles came from me taking a random detour and finding some rare sports car or rally racer being sold on the side of the street.
Forza Horizon 6 isn’t a radical departure for the series. And I wasn’t expecting that. At this point, you probably already know if you’ll love this game or not. Instead of shaking up the series, Horizon 6 is yet another refinement and expansion on what came before. The end result is a game that I imagine I’ll end up putting over 100 hours into before the end of the year.
The driving is as good as ever; it looks incredible, and Japan is a perfect choice for the series. Some half-baked new ideas and a formula that is starting to feel stale aren’t big enough problems to ruin the experience, even if Horizon 6 sometimes seems overly focused on fun over anything else, like a satisfying progression towards supercars and fame. None of that matters as I’m blasting across Japan in a hot pink Acura RSX from the 90s with a big grin on my face.
