Forza Horizon 6 Review

On paper, it will always seem a little odd that it took the Forza Horizon series until the sixth game to find its way to Japan. Few countries on Earth command the same level of renown as Japan when it comes to automobile culture – the home of drifting, Daikoku PA, and one of the few cars to ever get Dominic Torretto out of a Dodge. Regardless of how you slice it, a stopover in Japan certainly feels long overdue. However, after playing Forza Horizon 6 for the last week, I can’t help but be glad developer Playground Games waited. For mine, that’s primarily thanks to the astounding step up in map quality. It goes beyond just being the biggest or the most beautiful (which it is, no doubt). Crucially, it’s also the most credible and car-friendly, and I can’t understate how much richness and believability this adds to the world itself. Every corner of the map feels like a place I can pause or park, meaning everywhere I arrive feels like a destination.

And when everywhere is a destination, the journeys are almost limitless.

From moment to moment – particularly while participating in races – it’s fair enough to say that Forza Horizon 6 resembles past games in the series in a number of obvious ways. At its core, it offers more-or-less the same brand of class-based racing as its predecessors. The timer clicks down, you mash the throttle, and then fight your way to the front of the pack. It’s still great racing, and I will say I feel like I’ve caught the AI making more impressive evasive adjustments than I recall them executing in the past. Broadly speaking, however, the racing itself remains similar.

On a gamepad, it all feels quite familiar too. The handling is still a successful blend of simulation-inspired elements – with a tangible sense of weight and grip – with smooth and approachable steering controls. For anyone unfamiliar with the feel of Forza Horizon, it’s by no means a punishing and impenetrable driving simulator that’ll fling you off the road for the mildest misjudgement. However, it’s also not a point-and-squirt, pureblood arcade racer like Burnout Paradise, either. That said, on a wheel it does feel like there’s a very welcome increase in the amount of front-end grip – and less of that slightly skatey feel that’s been present in past games. This is good news, whether you’re negotiating the many, many kinks and hairpin turns that characterise Forza Horizon 6’s greatest stretches of road (it’s impossible to choose just one, because there are so many highlights this time around) or needing that responsiveness to avoid traffic on the freeway that loops around a huge portion of the map.

It’s at this point you might be wondering whether Forza Horizon 6 is just Forza Horizon 5 on a new map, but to claim so would be far too reductive – totally ignoring what has changed.

Forza Horizon 6 arrives with an adjusted and more satisfying approach to its campaign progression – one that straddles a middle ground between the curated structure of the original and the unbridled freedom embraced by Forza Horizon 5. It’s brought with it numerous boosts to car graphics and audio, resulting in the best looking and sounding cars in the long history of the series. There’s been a massive increase in what’s possible with the user-generated content creation tools, and we can now customise garages, construct wild, private race tracks on our personal estates deep in the Japanese countryside, and even build in multiplayer anywhere around the open-world. Touge racing, open-world car meets, drop-in-drop-out time attacks and drag racing with no loading – the implementation of a customisation feature that long-time Forza players have literally been waiting 20 years for – the list of tweaks and improvements squeezed into Forza Horizon 6 is long.

But before I circle back on some of these elements, allow me to explain what it is about the map itself that has me embedded in it like a tick on a hound dog.

Tokyo Gift

The style of Forza Horizon 6’s riff on Japan should come as no surprise to those familiar with the series’ history of pilfering a pile of picturesque segments of a country that have otherwise no business being directly next to each other and… placing them directly next to each other. It takes a distilled and shrunken version of Tokyo City and surrounds it with rolling hills, open farmland, soggy fields, dense forest, sharp mountains, quaint villages, rural race circuits, and – overlooking it all – sweeping highlands and the Japan Alps. The blend of natural beauty and engineering spectacle is just outstanding, from the way low sun lights the patchy snow and lush fields on the fringe of the alpine region, down to the snaking, multi-level ramps and freeways that loom over Tokyo’s dense metro and industrial areas.

It makes no geographical sense, but it’s also not attempting to. This isn’t really Japan as much as it is a Japanese-themed amusement park for cars. It’s supposed to look fabulous and be extremely engaging to move through, and damn if it isn’t both those things in spades.

At its most gorgeous, Forza Horizon 6 is a total showstopper. Maybe that’s gazing over the Tokyo skyline from the highest point on the map, or perhaps it’s emerging from a tunnel to see the wilderness unfolding in front of you, with the freeway flanked by looming mountains carpeted in dense forest, and snowy peaks rising behind them. No Forza Horizon map has nailed the sense of both natural and man-made scale quite as successfully as this one. The fact that it accomplishes this with zero crashes and no stuttering, ever, is as commendable as ever.

But it goes far beyond the postcard-friendly vistas, because I also find myself entranced by the smaller nuances. I’m now a week into my campaign and I’m still consistently finding myself pausing to bust out the camera and pore over the more subtle details on display. Maybe that’s the flaking paint of the concrete pylons of a tunnel that’s become overgrown with vegetation to better blend into its natural surroundings. Maybe that’s distinctions in the actual road surfaces themselves, from the grooved sections within tunnels to the corrugated asphalt that forms the narrow route to your large estate property to the north of the map. Maybe it’s all the idiosyncratic coloured road markings stencilled on the freeways, alleys, backroads, and mountain passes (where the warning paint is already scarred with the burnt rubber of bold drifters that have come before you).

Maybe it’s the fact that every single parking lot I’ve discovered around the map (and there are many, many more than I’ve been able to keep track of) appears to be entirely bespoke to its location – whether that’s the enormous, multilevel, Tokyo Drift-style one by the docks, a modest lot tucked away beneath an overpass, or just a few spots lining the front of a konbini.

I would’ve loved to have seen a full spectrum of underground parking lots, and on that one specific note it’s arguable that Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown – which is based in the similarly dense Hong Kong and has many underground, polished-concrete parking garages, complete with working boom gates – has Forza Horizon 6 slightly beat. Like Solar Crown, however, Forza Horizon 6 does feature petrol stations. They’re not interactive, but they are realistically everywhere, all over Japan. There’s only ever been one in the whole Horizon series before – a single outback petrol station servicing Australia’s entire eastern seaboard back in Forza Horizon 3.

What I love particularly is just how car-adjacent the presence of so many places to actually pause, park, and pretend to fill up a car makes Forza Horizon 6’s map feel. It isn’t just a slab of land with some roads draped across it to drive up and down; all of these considerations make Japan feel like a world built to host cars. It doesn’t just have places you can race them, drag them, and drift them. It has places you can park them. Places you can pause and photograph them. Places you can meet and hang with friends around them.

Japan is a world that respects the car. Of course, Japan is also a world that respects the bicycle. But the car does not respect the bicycle. It is the natural order of things for cars to disrespect the bicycle.

And Forza Horizon 6 allows that, too.