Nearly 14 years ago, the Forza Horizon series cracked the code on what was becoming a stale racing game genre at the time. Forza Horizon is only getting more grand with each entry, and there’s no better way for Forza Horizon 6 to make an impact than going to the location that fans have been clamoring for ever since the series began: Japan. This entry is the definitive Forza Horizon experience across gameplay, features, cars, music, and vibes, and there’s so much to unload and unpack into what makes this game great.
Forza Horizon 6 begins just like its predecessors—in spectacular fashion as you race in various vehicles before getting behind the wheel of the 2025 GR GT Prototype. You’re a driver making their debut in the sixth Horizon Festival, which returning DJ Scott Tyler describes as a long-time coming for Horizon drivers, both in-universe and to the player racing down the streets. After experiencing blistering high speeds in some of the vehicles Forza Horizon 6 has to offer, you can finally customize your driver avatar and begin qualifying for the Horizon Festival alongside fellow drivers Mei Hasegawa and Jordan Chambers, the two main supporting characters. From there, you’re given access to the many streets, twists, inclines, and secrets that await in what could be Forza Horizon’s most engaging sandbox yet.
Forza Horizon 6 is the Open-World Japan Racing Game We Needed
Tokyo isn’t as vast as I would have wanted it to be in Forza Horizon 6, but I can’t deny that the developers at Playground Games and Xbox Game Studios crafted something special here. Tokyo feels alive with locations full of pedestrians and traffic populating its main streets, and the surrounding regions are rich with sights and scenes that only Japan can produce. The Horizon Festival atmosphere is thoroughly in the air while racing the narrow streets of Japan, but Forza Horizon 6 also encourages players to venture off the beaten path and spend time with Mei, Jordan, and other supporting characters in fun “day jobs,” street and touge races, and other optional content found throughout the game.
Of course, the main goal of Forza Horizon 6 is to make a name for yourself and get that Golden Wristband to become a Horizon Legend, but there’s so much to experience that will eat up your time. Horizon Festival races will be unlocked and show up on the map as you progress. Similarly to Forza Motorsport, each race is centered on a specific type of vehicle and performance class, such as sport cars, hyper cars, and off-road cars. Forza Horizon 6 certainly leans into the car-collecting aspect of racing games, which I certainly appreciate as a lifelong Gran Turismo and Forza fan. The gameplay is highly refined but robust enough to make you feel the weight and identity of each car you drive, too.
There are various regions to explore, which are all full of speed traps, jumps, drift zones, destructible mascots and XP boards, and cars for sale. Head up north, and the Tokushima region awaits with winding streets perfect for touge battles. Stay south in Tokyo to engage in night racing scene, and you can also head to the Daikoku parking lot to showcase your tuner. There are plenty more examples of the robust open-world, and Forza Horizon 6 crams content into every nook and cranny of its setting. Even after getting my Golden Wristband, I feel like the game is only just getting started. This isn’t just content for the sake of it—all of it is really fun and rewarding.
I appreciate how simple and easy Forza Horizon 6 is to play while still maintaining the simulation elements that makes Forza so great. You can race and earn the Golden Wristband by collecting and using cars at their stock settings without upgrades, but if you want a more personalized machine with the decals and performance metrics you want, you can do just that at your garage. In short, your racing sim experience with Forza Horizon 6 is as much as you want it to be. I personally found a lot of enjoyment driving cars at stock and trying to perfect racing lines, and the difficulty settings add some challenge to each race, making each win even more satisfying.
Forza Horizon 6 certainly strikes a happy medium between arcade and simulation in gameplay, but the sim elements will definitely make itself known as you race across different terrain. It’s subtle, but you can make out the difference between racing on some of the closed circuits found throughout Japan versus racing on normal streets, especially during rainy conditions. When it comes to snow and dirt, they’re worlds apart in terms of control, but that makes racing in Forza Horizon 6 feel fresh and varied as you progress. I think there’s still some tweaks and adjustments to traction and handling to make the game feel even better and more faithful to the performance of certain cars, but Playground Games did a great job for launch.
Forza Horizon 6 is a beautiful and optimized game, but there’s more to it than just visuals—it’s the impressive sound design and music. The Horizon Festival really does feel like a party, and its vibes are, for lack of a better word, immaculate. The soundtrack of Forza Horizon 6 is beyond incredible and might be the best in the entire series with hits by Ado, Calvin Harris, Linkin Park, Hikaru Utada, Kensho Ono, Rise Against, Creepy Nuts, ONE OK ROCK, and so many more artists. It’s felt like an eternity since racing games have had such a diverse and stacked music selection. Whether its city pop, future funk, or hard rock, there’s always a tune in Forza Horizon 6 that keeps you locked in, and I think that’s important in nailing the overall presentation of the game. The personalities for each radio station are also excellent as expected.
In addition, the Skill system is just as fun as ever with a variety of skills to pull off in Skill Chains, including all-new skills exclusive to Forza Horizon 6. The more Skill Points you accrue, the more perks you can unlock in each car’s Skill Tree to boost the amount of Skill Points you can earn from it and unlock additional rewards like Credits and Wheelspins. As you race across the open world, you can also see the cars of other players as they race in real-time, which become silhouettes as you approach to avoid head-on collisions. You can perform LINK Skills by performing the same skills they perform, further boosting your Skill Chain with some impromptu cooperation.
Your Time is Always Well Spent
Forza Horizon 6 is full of incentive in every minute, since you’re always progressing something. At first, the game can feel overwhelming due to how vast the map is, but the game eases you in by starting out in Tokyo and spreading out races into surrounding regions as you complete showcase events and unlock wristbands. When you get into a cadence of racing in events and tackling various challenges, Forza Horizon 6 has you hooked for good.
The game gives you so many opportunities to find cars out in the wild via the returning Barn Find system and Treasure Car hunts, and in general, it’s really rewarding experience. If you’re breezing through races, you can up the difficulty in the settings in order to earn more credits, just like in prior Forza entries. It’s so easy to earn money and unlock new cars, and that’s certainly by design considering there are more than 600 cars to discover, photograph, customize, and collect.
Virtually everything you do in Forza Horizon 6 is tied to a level system. As you complete milestones, win races, collect cars, and explore Japan, you’ll level up your general Horizon Festival level to earn rewards like wheelspins, which give you a random chance of earning more money, cars, and cosmetics. This is the same system from past Forza Horizon games, but there’s some additions that make it extra rewarding.
In addition to the many achievements and milestones you can unlock while working toward getting better wristbands, there’s a Discover Japan leveling system that’s tied to the many side activities and races outside of the Horizon Festival. Discover Japan is an initiative that Mei and the supporting characters participate in to showcase Japan and history while celebrating car history and putting on fun races. It’s essentially a separate progression path you can level up, and there’s a slew of interesting side stories and associated activities to complete.
Discover Japan is definitely one of the most surprising features of Forza Horizon 6, and I’m so grateful that the stories here are actually engaging and fun to play through. The characters are believable with no cringe in sight, unlike those found in some of Need for Speed’s more recent entries. That being said, story elements aren’t a main focus of Forza Horizon as a series, but in Forza Horizon 6, there’s just enough that makes this rendition of Japan feel alive.
Like previous entries in the series, you’ll be able to play with friends in co-op and multiplayer in Horizon Festival and Discover Japan events, but there’s even more to do in Forza Horizon 6. Alongside Horizon Festival and Discover Japan is Horizon Play, a suite of online game modes with its own leveling system. In addition to Horizon Racing and Drift modes, you can build custom races with CoLab features, participate in Shared World Meetups, and compete in fun game modes like “The Eliminator” battle royale, Hide & Seek, Touge Showdown championships, and the stock-only Spec Racing mode.
I’ve only dabbled in Horizon Play for a few matches so far, but it can be just as fun and rewarding as the main game. You’ll earn XP in Horizon Play and earn Badges for every 10 ranks, up to level 100, so there’s a good progression incentive besides the rewards. Every rank up to level 25 grants Horizon Festival Points toward the next Wristband, so those wanting to play the game with friends will get a lot out of Forza Horizon 6 in the game’s early to mid-game portion.
The Festival Playlist Series is already one of my favorite features of Forza Horizon 6, since it gives even more legs to an already sprinting game. With the Festival Playlist Series, players can enjoy championships and other single-player content with certain criteria attached to them, such as usage of cars in a certain performance class. Festival Playlist Series is updated over time with all-new and exclusive rewards that can be obtained by simply playing the game, and I can see myself playing its content regularly after playing everything that the base game offers.
If this isn’t enough, Forza Horizon 6 even offers customizable garages for player houses, allowing you to personalize your home base away from races. As you progress and level up Horizon Festival and Discover Japan, you will be able to buy housing to unlock exclusive perks and unlock some more features. Not only can you customize the garage, but you can visit other player’s garages and download shared layouts.
This is in addition to “The Estate” you unlock early in the game, so you’ve got plenty of locations to showcase you cars. The Estate is notable since it has its own EventLab toolset, so you can customize and build out the surrounding area how you see fit, within limitations of course. Like garages, The Estate can be customized to your liking, and you can also invite friends over to it.
These particular features make up the upgrade EventLab suite, which now allows you to build anywhere in the world and collaborate with others in “CoLab.” Although custom creation is not my forte in games, Forza Horizon 6 does offer an impressive toolset that should be respected. There’s a Challenge Creator, automatic grid positioning for races, and Undo and Redo features, so it appears that many quality of life improvements and features that Forza fans were asking for are now here.
Forza Horizon 6 is a Racing Masterpiece in the Modern Era of Gaming
Forza Horizon 6 is exactly the racing game I needed, and it’s a reminder that open-world racing games with incredible music, a stacked car roster, and fun gameplay are the recipe for success. Funnily enough, it’s a recipe that was repeated time and time again in the past, but it’s one that was forgotten well into the era of the live-service chase. Not only does Forza Horizon 6 have an effective answer to the live-service question, but it’s truly content-rich and engaging single-player racing game first and foremost. Forza Horizon 6 is a refreshing racing game with vibes that are unmatched by any other racing game out there right now.
The music is electric and exciting, the gameplay is almost perfect across all the terrain types, and the visuals and sounds are stunning in day and night cycles. From the amazing car sounds to the realistic-but-forgiving handling model, Forza Horizon 6 is an iterative work in a celebrated series, but it’s one that still manages to stand out tremendously in all that it offers. Whether its off-roading in the mountains or street racing in the city, you’ll have a good time in Forza Horizon 6. If you enjoyed playing those iconic racing games from back in the day like Need for Speed: Underground 2 and Most Wanted, Forza Horizon 6 is the game that will remind you that there’s talent out there capable of making greatness once again in this storied genre.
Forza Horizon 6 is available now for Xbox Series X|S and PC via Windows (Microsoft Store) and Steam, and a PlayStation 5 version is set to release at a later date.
Disclaimer: Xbox provided a Steam key of Forza Horizon 6 Ultimate Edition for review purposes.
