{"id":13310,"date":"2026-05-14T12:00:10","date_gmt":"2026-05-14T12:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nextlevelnews.co.uk\/blog\/2026\/05\/14\/forza-horizon-6-review\/"},"modified":"2026-05-14T12:00:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-14T12:00:10","slug":"forza-horizon-6-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nextlevelnews.co.uk\/blog\/2026\/05\/14\/forza-horizon-6-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Forza Horizon 6 Review"},"content":{"rendered":"
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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 \u2013 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\u2019t help but be glad developer Playground Games waited. For mine, that\u2019s 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\u2019s also the most credible and car-friendly, and I can\u2019t understate how much richness and believability this adds to the world itself. Every corner of the map feels like a place <\/em>I can pause or park, meaning everywhere I arrive feels like a destination.<\/p>\n

And when everywhere is a destination, the journeys are almost limitless.<\/p>\n

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From moment to moment \u2013 particularly while participating in races \u2013 it\u2019s 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\u2019s still great racing, and I will say I feel like I\u2019ve caught the AI making more impressive evasive adjustments than I recall them executing in the past. Broadly speaking, however, the racing itself remains similar.<\/p>\n

On a gamepad, it all feels <\/em>quite familiar too. The handling is still a successful blend of simulation-inspired elements \u2013 with a tangible sense of weight and grip \u2013 with smooth and approachable steering controls. For anyone unfamiliar with the feel of Forza Horizon, it\u2019s by no means a punishing and impenetrable driving simulator that\u2019ll fling you off the road for the mildest misjudgement. However, it\u2019s also not a point-and-squirt, pureblood arcade racer like Burnout Paradise, either. That said, on a wheel it does feel like there\u2019s a very welcome increase in the amount of front-end grip \u2013 and less of that slightly skatey feel that\u2019s been present in past games. This is good news, whether you\u2019re negotiating the many, many kinks and hairpin turns that characterise Forza Horizon 6\u2019s greatest stretches of road (it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s 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 \u2013 totally ignoring what has <\/em>changed.<\/p>\n

Forza Horizon 6 arrives with an adjusted and more satisfying approach to its campaign progression \u2013 one that straddles a middle ground between the curated structure of the original and the unbridled freedom embraced by Forza Horizon 5. It\u2019s 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\u2019s been a massive increase in what\u2019s 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 \u2013 the implementation of a customisation feature that long-time Forza players have literally been waiting 20 years for \u2013 the list of tweaks and improvements squeezed into Forza Horizon 6 is long. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Tokyo Gift<\/strong><\/h2>\n

The style of Forza Horizon 6\u2019s riff on Japan should come as no surprise to those familiar with the series\u2019 history of pilfering a pile of picturesque segments of a country that have otherwise no business being directly next to each other and\u2026 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 \u2013 overlooking it all \u2013 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\u2019s dense metro and industrial areas.<\/p>\n

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It makes no geographical sense, but it\u2019s also not attempting to. This isn\u2019t really Japan as much as it is a Japanese-themed amusement park for cars. It\u2019s supposed to look fabulous and be extremely engaging to move through, and damn if it isn\u2019t both those things in spades.<\/p>\n

At its most gorgeous, Forza Horizon 6 is a total showstopper. Maybe that\u2019s gazing over the Tokyo skyline from the highest point on the map, or perhaps it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

No Forza Horizon map has nailed the sense of both natural and man-made scale quite as successfully as this one. <\/section>\n

But it goes far beyond the postcard-friendly vistas, because I also find myself entranced by the smaller nuances. I\u2019m now a week into my campaign and I\u2019m still consistently finding myself pausing to bust out the camera and pore over the more subtle details on display. Maybe that\u2019s the flaking paint of the concrete pylons of a tunnel that\u2019s become overgrown with vegetation to better blend into its natural surroundings. Maybe that\u2019s 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\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n

Maybe it\u2019s the fact that every single parking lot I\u2019ve discovered around the map (and there are many, many more than I\u2019ve been able to keep track of) appears to be entirely bespoke to its location \u2013 whether that\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

I would\u2019ve 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 \u2013 which is based in the similarly dense Hong Kong and has many underground, polished-concrete parking garages, complete with working boom gates \u2013 has Forza Horizon 6 slightly beat. Like Solar Crown, however, Forza Horizon 6 does feature petrol stations. They\u2019re not interactive, but they are realistically everywhere, all over Japan. There\u2019s only ever been one <\/em>in the whole Horizon series before \u2013 a single outback petrol station servicing Australia\u2019s entire eastern seaboard back in Forza Horizon 3.<\/p>\n

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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\u2019s map feel. It isn\u2019t 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 <\/em>cars. It doesn\u2019t just <\/em>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.<\/p>\n

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 <\/em>the bicycle. <\/p>\n

And Forza Horizon 6 allows that, too.<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s All in the Wrist<\/strong><\/p>\n

The cars look fantastic, but specifically they look more seated into the world than ever before. That\u2019s especially true in frosty weather, where they become encrusted in a rough sheen of ice and water vapour floats from the exhaust as they belch hot gas directly into the frigid air. I love the long-awaited ability to place decals on glass in the livery editor. I\u2019m not one for ostentatious and complex vinyls on my street cars, but I do love the subtle sense of ownership imbued by the simple act of being able to create and place a couple of stickers on my rear glass. <\/p>\n

Car sound is the best it\u2019s ever been in the series. The highlight is easily the incredible and noticeably improved echoing that you get in tight spaces and tunnels, something I\u2019m enjoying constantly thanks to the frankly antisocial and aurally irresponsible amount of downshifting I\u2019m doing in tunnels. But there are understated improvements elsewhere, too, like the faint squeak of performance brakes that have copped some punishment.<\/p>\n

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I do enjoy that Forza Horizon 6 brings back the curated, wristband structure of the 2012 original, and I think the overall sense of progression is considerably better because of it. With a special, sealed-off section of the map that\u2019s exclusively available only after you\u2019ve reached the top rank of the Horizon Festival, this campaign has a really overt crescendo \u2013 more so than previous games. It works well here, and it\u2019s nice to have a clear endgame and a final goal. Each wristband graduation culminates with a large-scale event, which is either a traditional Showcase race or a new Rush event. Only two Showcases may sound low, but I would argue that the Rush events (which are basically giant obstacle races) remain pretty Showcase-adjacent. That is, they still involve aircraft zooming around the vicinity in some capacity \u2013 you\u2019re just not racing them specifically<\/em>. Showcases are just on more straightforward routes, which is smart considering it gives us a lot more time to actually look at, say, a giant mech stomping towards Tokyo. That one may just be the wildest Showcase in the series to date.<\/p>\n

Overall, the tighter career structure only temporarily infringes on the freedom afforded to customise races that players of Forza Horizon 5 should be accustomed to. That is, while a race will initially have a set class and car theme locked, after this has been completed you can use the custom options to race it on subsequent occasions in any other car from your garage. It\u2019s an effective compromise between a more traditional approach and the totally malleable nature of Forza Horizon 5.<\/p>\n