The festival swaps sunshine for neon, snow, and the C1 at midnight
The Festival Finally Reaches Japan
I have wanted Horizon to go to Japan since roughly the moment I understood what the series was for. A country that treats driving as folklore, that gave the world mountain touge runs and a tuning scene every other nation only imitates, was always the obvious destination, and the long wait makes Forza Horizon 6 feel less like another sequel and more like a homecoming the series kept postponing. Playground Games has finally made the trip, and the version I drove on Xbox Series X is the studio operating at the very top of its craft, even when it declines to take the risks that the top deserves.
This is, by a clear margin, the most assured open-world racing game I have ever played. It is also the most familiar thing I have played in years. Both statements are true at the same time, and reconciling them is the entire job of reviewing it.
A Country Built for Driving
The premise has not moved, and the game is confident enough not to pretend otherwise. The Horizon Festival pitches up across a stylized slice of a real place, hands you a key, and lets you become the protagonist of an endless automotive holiday. You arrive as an unknown, you win events, you collect wristbands, and you climb toward the title of Horizon Legend. There is no plot worth the name and no need for one. The narrative here is geography and momentum, and Japan supplies both in quantities the series has never had access to before.
What this setting gives the formula is contrast, the productive kind. One drive can carry you from the strip-lit canyons of downtown Tokyo to a silent ginkgo-lined boulevard, then out to a mountain pass where the only company is the guardrail. The festival’s relentless sunshine finally has somewhere interesting to cast a shadow.
From Shibuya to the Snowline
Tokyo is the headline, and it earns the billing. This is the largest and densest city the series has built, several times the footprint of the Mexican town that anchored the last game, and the first urban environment in a Horizon title that feels like a real place rather than a stage set with traffic. Shibuya Crossing, Tokyo Tower, the gantried sweep of a road clearly modelled on the C1 loop, the working docks and industrial districts: the city has texture and a sense of its own life, and reflections crawling across wet asphalt at night are reason enough to take the long way home.
Beyond the city the map keeps giving. Climb out of the suburbs and you reach genuine touge country, with passes drawn from real mountain roads, before the world opens onto the Japanese Alps, a full ski resort, and snow that sits year-round if you fit the right tyres. Mount Fuji watches over much of it like a logo the landscape designed for itself. Seasons return with far more conviction than the desert ever allowed, each one rewriting the foliage, the grip, the light, and even the ambient noise of a place. More than six hundred roads thread the whole thing together, and very few of them feel like filler.
The Driving Comes First
None of the scenery would matter if the cars felt wrong, so it is a relief to report that the handling is the best the series has produced. Playground has kept its signature trick of being welcoming in the first corner and quietly technical by the hundredth. A controller newcomer can throw a car at an off-ramp and slide out grinning, while anyone willing to read weight transfer, brake with intent, and respect a wet surface will find a model with real depth underneath the accessibility.
Japan flatters that model. The roster of more than five hundred and fifty cars leans hard into the JDM canon, and the touge battles are where the driving sings, all commitment and corrected slides on roads that punish greed. Cars now animate their steering through a far wider arc of rotation, the cockpit view responds to the surface with new fidelity, and tyres pick up cosmetic wear as the miles stack up. For anyone who likes to race from the bumper or the cockpit, the new car proximity radar is a small mercy that keeps wheel-to-wheel traffic clean without dumbing anything down. This is arcade driving with a craftsman’s attention to feel, and it remains the reason the series has no real rival.
The Climb to Legend
Progression is built from the festival’s usual buffet, broadened for the new setting. Circuit races, point-to-point sprints, off-road brawls, drag runs, and the freshly added Time Attack Circuits all funnel credits and experience back into your rise through the ranks. The standout newcomer is Horizon Rush, a set of obstacle-course events that send you flinging a car through choreographed chaos at places like the Tokyo docks, with wristbands gating your march toward Legend status.
Here is where my enthusiasm meets its ceiling. The structure is generous and beautifully paced, but it is also deeply, almost defiantly familiar, and the festival’s tone has not aged gracefully. The writing is so relentlessly upbeat that it tips into noise, the presenters still talk like a brand activation that learned to speak, and the set dressing carries a whiff of a template that needed retiring two games ago. The driving has evolved. The pageantry around it has mostly stood still, and a series this accomplished can afford to be braver with the wrapper.
Car Culture, Faithfully Kept
Where the game does show ambition is in ownership. You do not merely buy cars, you live with them. Rare aftermarket models sit parked around the world waiting to be test-driven and bought, often at a discount, which turns ordinary exploration into a treasure hunt. Back at base, customizable garages let you build a proper showroom for the collection, and the new Estate hands you a patch of the open world to decorate as you please. Tuning and visual customization go deeper than ever, with reworked aerodynamic parts, the long-requested ability to paint liveries onto windows, and independent rim choices front and rear. It is the most convincing expression of car-enthusiast fantasy the series has managed, and it suits Japan’s obsessive tuning culture perfectly.
Better With Company
The festival has always been more fun with other people moving through it, and the shared open world is the connective tissue. Time Attack Circuits, Car Meets, and Drag Meets are stitched directly into the map, so you can spot real players gathered at a meet, drift over, and join without a single loading screen breaking the spell. Car Meets double as a swap shop for tunes, liveries, and the cars themselves, Drag Meets line up a dozen players at the lights, and co-op LINK skills reward driving as a unit. The community-building tools have grown up too: Horizon CoLab takes the old event editor and opens it to a group of players building in the same space at once, which is the kind of feature that quietly keeps a game alive for years.
Tuning the Airwaves
The soundtrack is the biggest the series has assembled, nine stations and well over two hundred tracks, and for the first time the playlist makes room for J-pop. The new Gacha City Radio is the cultural centrepiece, a love letter to city pop, anime themes, and future funk that could only exist in this entry, sitting alongside the familiar spread of drum and bass, indie, electronica, and modern classical. Global names share the dial with Japanese icons, and the mix finally feels like it belongs to its setting rather than touring through it.
The audio engineering underneath is even more impressive than the playlist. Engine notes have been re-recorded and rebuilt with modular turbo flutter and backfire, surfaces speak with new clarity through the controller, and a new object-based reverb system models how sound actually bounces off the world around you, fed by field recordings captured across all four seasons. Brake by ear, listen to a tunnel swallow your exhaust, and you will notice the work.
Four Seasons at Sixty Frames
On Xbox Series X you choose between a quality mode running at native 4K and thirty frames with the visual settings pushed up, and a performance mode that targets sixty frames at a dynamically scaled 4K. I spent almost all of my time in performance mode and rarely regretted it. Sixty frames is the right call for a game about reading a corner at speed, the resolution scaling is handled cleanly enough that you stop noticing it, and the frame rate holds its composure even through the visual stress test of central Tokyo after dark, when neon, rain, and reflections are all fighting for the same pixels. Loading is brisk, the world streams without stutter, and the only argument for the quality mode is the photographer’s one: stand still on a mountain road at dusk and the extra fidelity is genuinely lovely.
The One-More-Drive Problem
What keeps pulling me back is the rhythm. The festival is engineered so that finishing one thing always drops you within sight of the next, the seasonal rotation refreshes the map’s challenges often enough to reset your curiosity, and the simple act of driving from one objective to another is pleasant enough that I keep “forgetting” to fast travel. This is comfort food cooked by a three-star kitchen. It asks very little of you on a hard day and rewards real commitment when you have it, and the balance between those two moods is the quiet thing the series has perfected.
The Checkered Flag
Forza Horizon 6 is the finest open-world driving game I have played, and it is the safest big release I have touched in a long while, and I have made my peace with the fact that those can be the same review. The driving model is sublime, Japan is the best canvas the series has ever painted on, the car culture is rendered with real love, and the Xbox Series X version runs beautifully. It is held back from a perfect score by a refusal to reinvent anything beyond the cars, a festival voice that grates more with each entry, and the sense that Playground is polishing a formula it long ago stopped questioning. None of that stops it from being a magnificent machine for the simple, durable joy of driving somewhere gorgeous very fast. If the series is going to coast, this is how you want it done.
