Forza Horizon 6 Review
About halfway through a rally race in the Tokyo countryside, everything about Forza Horizon 6 began to click. By that point (I’ve played 24 hours at the time of publication), I had already done a couple dozen races, and I was playing Playground Games’ racer like a low-stakes arcade experience. Horizon does everything to ensure you have the most fun possible playing it that way. But underneath the slick presentation and the boundless content, it still has all of the real Forza physics and tuning underneath the hood. And when you combine that peanut butter and chocolate, you end up with something truly special.
That rally race was the first time I turned off the driving assists and increased the difficulty in Forza Horizon 6. This forced me to have to actually drive my massive 4x4 Subaru around the dirt corners for real. What this meant was that I needed to use my brakes to throw the SUV’s weight onto the front tires. I also needed to gently squeeze the gas so I could hold onto that grip. This is all made that much easier thanks to the Xbox controller’s haptic triggers that rumble differently depending on how much grip your tires have on the driving surface.
It feels magical when you go from exploring its open-world Japanese map to white knuckling it through a troublesome chicane.
Forza Horizon has always been two great things that go great together. In Forza Horizon 6, that package is the most refined it has ever been.
That refinement comes in many forms.
As someone who has never found “become a social-media superstar” to be a compelling fantasy, I appreciated how much Horizon 6 tones that down. This game is much more about hanging out at a festival with your friends.
Honestly, it’s only now occurring to me that the toned-down influencer angle also fits the setting. Horizon 6 seems more interested in public space, respect, and shared celebration than in turning Japan into a backdrop for clout-chasing.
Of course, you can still barrel through a Japanese forest in a lifted Dodge Viper. And yeah, the trees will come popping out of the ground like dandelions. But that’s the point. Playground knows how to do it all, and it knows how to showcase all aspects of the experience in the best light possible.
Key to that for me is the ability to just turn off my brain and drive. The computer assistant Anna returns in this game and gives you the option to bring up some nearby race suggestions. This has been great for a while, but it just feels even better here. And then as you are driving to your next race, it’s inevitable that you will get distracted by a speed-zone challenge or some hidden car.
Japan is also more than the latest backdrop for the series. Tokyo City feels like the biggest urban center we’ve seen in one of these games so far. It is dense with even more verticality.
Playground is also ready to give you a multi-pronged approach to play and progression. If you play the way I usually do — mostly vibes, minimal planning — you can just keep clicking through to the next recommended event. Doing that will quickly earn you new wristbands that unlock new challenges in new regions.
A stamp-collection system and a collection journal system, meanwhile, provide progression for exploring the world more casually or finding special photo locations. And then you have to remember that even when you are playing solo, the game often has connected events that you can join for a quick bit of multiplayer gaming.
And then you have new race types like the Japanese-themed Togue Battles. These are one-on-one downhill mountain duels. As with any racing game, it’s not some startling new revelation, but it does come with its own quirks like having to worry about sharp corners that are often angled downhill. That makes it a little bit more difficult to get grip because the car naturally wants to rock back on the rear wheels.
Really, though, I’m here because this game is Forza. The driving and physics systems are still amazing. Playground even improved things like the aerodynamics simulation this time around. I still like racing asynchronously against my friends’ drivatars, and I like unlocking a dozen new supercars and then spending 45 minutes racing as a tiny kei truck instead.
In a lot of ways, this is my ideal video game. Becoming one with the controller and the vehicle in a drop-dead-gorgeous setting that essentially never runs out of content? It’s almost perfect, and I think it’s fair to use that word for the craft that is on display in Forza Horizon 6.
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