I raced a Gundam through Tokyo in Forza Horizon 6, yet something still feels missing

Forza Horizon 6 is the best-driving game Playground Games has ever made, and I am still not sure that is enough. I came into this review expecting a postcard version of Japan-beautiful, sterile, and ultimately hollow. Instead, I got a country that feels lived-in. After spending the last two weeks tearing across its Japan map-from the neon chokehold of Tokyo to the mist-slicked roads of Legend Island-I keep coming back to the same thought: this is a masterclass in refinement that is terrified of revolution. Every mile of asphalt confirms the studio’s obsession with polish, yet every familiar menu screen and progression gate reminds me that familiarity can be a gilded cage. I have raced through nine distinct regions, hunted down fifteen Barn Finds, and even outran a towering Gundam through the streets of Tokyo City. I have also wrestled with a car selection interface that fights me more than the AI does. Horizon 6 is a gorgeous, content-rich contradiction, and my feelings about it are messier than a touge drift at midnight.

Japan Is the Character Horizon Needed

The moment I left the opening festival grounds and punched the throttle toward Tokyo, the map stopped feeling like a playground and started feeling like a place. Playground Games has built something genuinely architectural here. Tokyo City is not just a scattering of neon billboards and tight alleyways; it is a dense, vertical labyrinth where expressways curl over canals and shrines hide behind convenience stores. I spent my first three hours simply trespassing through parking garages and hillside switchbacks without touching a single race icon. The atmosphere is that thick. I stumbled upon a mountain pass torii gate at golden hour and just idled my engine for a full minute, watching the light filter through the trees. I have never done that in a Horizon game before. Driving through a rain-soaked Shibuya crossing at dusk, my headlights cutting through particle effects that actually feel wet, gave me a sense of place that Horizon 5’s Mexico never quite managed. The addition of Legend Island, a separate landmass off the main archipelago, provides the kind of coastal serenity that contrasts violently with the urban chaos. It is the most meticulously crafted map this series has seen, and for once the environment justifies the open-world format instead of merely occupying it.

The Driving Finally Feels Like It Has Teeth

For years, Horizon’s handling model has flirted with accessibility at the expense of consequence. That changes here. The circuit design is tighter, more vindictive, and more rewarding than anything in Horizon 4 or 5. I noticed it immediately during a touge sprint up a mountain pass where my rear-wheel-drive Nissan Silvia demanded constant correction. Even my bone-stock Mazda RX-7 felt alive, its tail stepping out on cold tires with a predictability that made me trust the physics instead of fighting them. The physics communicate weight transfer with a clarity that made me genuinely nervous approaching brake zones. Playground has not turned this into a sim—this is still Horizon, and you can still yeet a Hoonigan truck off a cliff for laughs—but the refinement is undeniable. Road surfaces feel distinct. Wet pavement in the rural north is genuinely treacherous, and the expanded tuning depth let me dial out understeer on my all-wheel-drive builds in ways that actually mattered during championship events. When I finally nailed a clean lap through a Tokyo City street circuit without using rewind, the victory felt earned, not handed to me.

Content Breadth That Borders on Absurdity

The car roster sits somewhere north of 500 vehicles, and the variety is staggering. Whether I was building a drag-spec kei car or a grip-focused GT3 machine, the modification options felt bottomless. I found myself swapping between a vintage Nissan PAO I uncovered in a Barn Find and a 1,000-horsepower hypercar for the same afternoon’s playlist. Those fifteen Barn Finds are scattered with genuine craft—one required me to decode a vague topographical hint near a coastal temple, which felt closer to classic Horizon magic than any GPS arrow ever could. The Festival Playlist remains the structural backbone, but the surrounding activities keep the map from feeling like a checklist. Treasure Hunts like “Pier Pressure” in Tokyo City handed me 100,000 credits and three Playlist points for solving an environmental puzzle that had me driving along shipping docks at a specific speed. It is smart, varied design. Then there are the signature events. I will not spoil the context, but racing against a full-scale Gundam as it stomps through a neon district is one of the most ridiculous things I have done in a racing game, and I mean that as a compliment. It is spectacle with a pulse.

Multiplayer and Accessibility: Steps Forward, One Stumble Back

Online play supports up to seventy-two players in a shared world, and on PC the performance held steady even when a convoy of us decided to block a highway for an impromptu drag meet. The netcode felt stable during my sessions, and the expanded multiplayer menus make joining specific event types less of a scavenger hunt than it was in previous entries. On the accessibility front, Playground has clearly listened. The Spanish dubbing is fully realized and energetic, and the suite of assists and UI scaling options made the game significantly more navigable for a friend I often co-op with who struggles with small text. These are not token additions; they change who gets to participate. That said, the progression system carries a friction I did not expect. Around the mid-tier festival ranks, my advancement slowed to a crawl unless I repeated events I had already dominated or farmed specific Playlist challenges. It is not broken, but it is a grind that sits at odds with the freeform exploration the map otherwise encourages. I wanted to wander, but the game occasionally demanded I punch a clock.

Technical Fidelity on PC and Console

I spent the majority of my time on PC with ray tracing enabled, and the visual presentation is often breathtaking. My rig runs a 4070 Super at 1440p, and the ray-traced reflections in Tokyo’s glass towers never dropped the frame rate below a locked sixty. Tokyo’s puddles reflect neon signage with a fidelity that borders on photorealistic, and the particle effects during Japan’s torrential seasonal rains are the best I have seen in an open-world racer. On Xbox Series X, the game maintains a rock-solid frame rate with only minor dips during the most explosive multiplayer moments. Xbox Series S and last-gen Xbox One versions exist, and while I spent less time with them, the technical performance across the board is admirably consistent. Load times are snappy, fast travel is nearly instantaneous, and the HDR implementation makes sunset drives along coastal highways genuinely hypnotic. This is a game that understands its own spectacle and has the engine to support it.

The Friction Beneath the Polish

Not everything in my garage runs smooth. Car selection and flexibility carry a frustration I cannot fully explain without access to the exact backend logic, but the filtering interface felt stubborn. Finding the right build for a specific championship often meant wrestling with categories that did not behave the way I expected, and the lack of granular sorting options turned roster browsing into a chore once I crossed the three-hundred-car threshold. The housing and garage decorating tools also exhibited minor hiccups that interrupted the flow of personalization. I wanted to build a showcase garage to match my Tokyo apartment’s vibe, but the decorating tools made the process clumsier than it needed to be. These are not game-breaking flaws, but they are persistent mosquitoes in an otherwise pristine room. They remind me that refinement does not always mean completion.

TL;DR

Forza Horizon 6 refines rather than reinvents, offering the series’ best map and driving model yet inside a familiar festival framework. It is an easy recommendation for open-world racing fans, held back only by cautious design and minor progression friction. I give it an 8 out of 10.