The big thing to accept is that Forza Horizon 6 is not a generational leap, nor a daring sequel that makes big moves. Less Fast & Furious, more Fast & Mild. And yet like the games before it, this is a superbly polished racing machine packed with things to do. Playground Games remains one of the best developers in the racing business, and this is probably the best Horizon game they’ve made to date. Which is also why I wish it was a bit more ambitious at times. But who can blame them for refusing to fix a car that isn’t broken?

Available On: Xbox, PC
Reviewed On: PC
Developed By: Playground Games
Published By: Xbox Game Studios

This time we’ve moved from Mexico to beautiful Japan, where once again the Horizon festival will set up its giant tent, construct massive elaborate events across the landscape and unleash a horde of petrolheads whose willful disregard of anything resembling a speed limit is less comical and more murderous intent on wheels. It’s the same squeaky clean approach that the previous games had, forgoing any sense of dangerous underground street racing for completely sanctioned car-based fun that never once addresses how you’re allowed to drive at 250+MPH on public roads and smash into the general public without repercussions. Videogames are weird, man.

Japan is a huge improvement over Mexico as settings go. The city areas are denser, with flowing freeways circling above and tight streets below, making for a stark contrast to the rolling hills, valleys and beautiful rice fields of the countryside. It’s not perfect, sure – the main city might be 5x bigger and denser, but traffic is non-existent, probably because Playground Games didn’t want the driving flow to be interrupted. But it’s a big leap over the previous cities we had in the series.

There are heaps and heaps of events to take part in, a wealth of content that’s bolstered by changing seasons, ongoing events which reward you with even more cars and cash over the course of time and heaps more. There’s always something to do, including cool stuff like the Day Trips, which aim to tell you a bit about Japan and its rich culture. But above all that, it remains a pleasure to hop in a car and cruise the map, maybe hang out with some other players organically at a time-trial or drive up a massive hill just to admire the view. Horizon 6 can be as intense or as chill as you want.

Cruising around also gives you a chance to properly connect with the cars, something that focusing solely on getting wristbands and completing events doesn’t. You swap cars so frequently, whether it’s because of a class restriction or because of a side-activity which gives you a specific car – that it’s hard to become properly attached to any of them. But cruising around gives you that chance, and that might lead to the upgrade system and tuning so that you can create the ultimate monster, systems the game rarely encourages you to experiment with otherwise.

Everything comes down to two things: the location change, and how satisfying and enjoyable the racing is. Playground has put extra effort into making the individual cars feel unique, with mixed success – there are 600+ cars, so it makes sense that you can’t give them all their own characteristics. But generally speaking, there’s definitely a stronger variety in the handling this time.

Speaking of which, this is still very much an arcade racer with just a tiny tinge of realism. Whether it’s road-racing a hypercar at 200MPH down a freeway, rallying across snow, throwing an off-road monster over a jump and into a river or drifting around tight canyon bends, the handling always feels terrific. It’s arcadey, but with just enough sense of weight and momentum to make it feel…grounded. Well, as grounded as a game can be when powering 300m off a ramp without instantly decimating your suspension can be.

The soundtrack to your exploits remains solid, although Horizon still feels weirdly reluctant to fully embrace Japanese car culture in its music selection. Still, we get some Japanese vibes, including a personal favourite of mine: Babymetal is in full force. That aside, the radio stations offer up a good mix of tunes for whatever you’re doing.

One complaint I and many others have had is that Forza Horizon tends to throw cars at you like an insecure suitor hurling presents at their victim’s face. Horizon 6 does actually pull back a little, taming its incessant wheelspins every so slightly. Emphasis on the word “slightly”, though, because the game still just hands you cars at a crazy rate. It makes a slight attempt at starting you with something slower, but it takes probably 30 minutes before you can start acquiring much faster machines, and by a few hours you’ll have a bunch of expensive toys in your garage. Money is plentiful, you can buy new rides at a discount around the world, Wheelspins still reward you with cash and cars and so on.

For some people, this generosity is good. For others, it makes a hypercar meaningless because they’re a dime a dozen – easily gotten, sometimes almost by accident. I think Horizon 6 is still too giving, too willing to buy your affections with engines and never letting you actually put effort into getting them. I still find myself wanting Horizon to challenge me a little more, make me work a bit for those faster events and machines.

The game is still basically a dopamine factory, designed to pump dopamine into your system at roughly a billion units per second. Cars are thrown at you constantly, the map is littered with a million race icons and smashable collectables and XP boards, the screen is awash with skill points for every little thing you do, there are heaps of badges you’ll be given, stamps to earn and so on and on and on. In a lot of ways, it’s everything horrible about modern media. But I also can’t deny that it’s super-effective, constantly drilling down into the dopamine mines in my brain.

I do think Playground Games is struggling to find new ways of doing its big events, though. It isn’t that the tentpole races aren’t spectacular at times – there’s literally an event featuring a giant mech and another where a rocket launches into space – but that they keep following the same formula, right down to the multiple slow-mo jumps per event.

On the other hand, I don’t want Playground Games to ditch these big event races, either, because they are part of the series’ identity. Nor do I really know what they can do to help spice them up. All I know is that if we’re going to get a Forza Horizon 7, which is almost guaranteed, then they’ll need to find some way to mix it up.

Bless their mechanical hearts, Playground is still attempting to inject some semblance of storyline into their racing, and still not managing to do it. The start is promising, at the very least, because the game brings back the wristband system and casts you as a tourist who has to start at ground level and make your way up to the top echelons of Horizon Festival royalty. Proper rags to riches. Well, shitty Honda Accord to McLaren.

Much like real life, it’s the people who drag it down. Horizon 6’s cast of forgettable people have the same issue as the previous games, namely, their dialogue sounds like someone handed an HR manual to an AI and told it to write a script based on it. Everything they say is too clean, too cloyingly nice and hyping each other up. It’s stale. It isn’t how people talk. And it feels even more out of place in car culture.

It’s a shame because a compelling story is one of the few big things left for the Horizon franchise to do.

Look, it’s weird to say, and this may be a hot take, but I’m beginning to think the live-action story from Need For Speed 2015 was actually one of the few enjoyable racing game stories. Cheesy? Sure. Cringey at times? Absolutely. But at least it was trying, and had kind of likeable characters. Horizon 6’s characters are so bland that I can’t remember anything they said. Not one damn line. And that’s driven home when you hit the end of the campaign, and the story starts referencing characters from the previous games like I’m supposed to know who they are. Horizon, I need you to understand I don’t even know who the people IN THIS GAME ARE!

Drivatars – the opponents you race against unless you head online – still need some work, though. It’s fun to battle against actual names, including those from your own friends list, though the promise of them driving just like your mates still rings hollow, at least so far as I can tell. But the real problems are how they often find supernatural levels of grip when offroading, thus leading to weird difficulty spikes, and don’t make enough mistakes. I’ve rarely seen Drivatars crash in any spectacular or interesting ways, which makes them seem robotic in their driving – not what you expect when racing against something that is supposed to mimic real people.

I admit, I was hoping for a little more out of the new estate feature. The idea is that you have a main home base that you can build out with props, or even create a giant track or trick park. It sounds cool, but in reality, the building tools feel stiff and awkward, and it only seems worth the effort if you play online as other players can check out your estate, and you’ll earn currency in return. In single-player, though, the roads of Japan are already fun enough, so I never found myself bothering to build. Plus, the estate is separated from the rest of the map by a loading screen, which means if you leave it set as your home, each time you load into the game, you then end up sitting through a second loading screen to leave.

In terms of performance, I played on PC with an older Ryzen 5600 processor, 32GB of Ram and a GTX 5070. With that rig, I ran at the high preset on an ultrawide monitor and generally saw good FPS. It fluctuated but always stayed above 60FPS, although, as always, turning on ray-tracing would cut that in half. I was overall pleased enough with the performance, but there were other people having issues, so keep that in mind.

I have a lot of criticisms of the game, and a lot of things I wish were different. None of those things matters, though, because Forza Horizon 6 is just so fucking fun. I know I’ve sounded negative thus far, but the simple truth of the matter is that I had a blast playing Horizon 6. How could I not? It’s so polished, so good at firing up the dopamine in my brain, so damn fun to race. But it does make me wonder what the future holds. As good as this is, is another location change and some minor improvements enough for another sequel in a few years?

Forza Horizon 6 does not strip the whole thing down and do a full rebuild. It just polishes the bodywork, does some tuning, a few choice upgrades here and there. It takes a great car and makes it better.

It’s the boring approach. It doesn’t give me much to talk about. But it doesn’t change the fact that Forza Horizon 6 is fucking awesome, and the only reason it’s not my favourite from the series is that Horizon 4 had Scotland in it.

If you were getting a bit tired of Forza Horizon 5, don’t rush to grab this. Take your time. Wait a while. Otherwise, Forza Horizon 6 is another 1st place finish for Playground. Now, if they nail Fable as well this year this year, they’ll be able to claim the throne as the King of Xbox Game Studios.