Forza Horizon 6 review: pure video game joy at 200mph

Just as the Mixtape furore threatens to reignite the whole ‘games as art versus games as entertainment’ debate all over again, along comes Forza Horizon 6 to crash the conversation and remind everyone that sometimes the best games are the ones that simply want you to have an incredible time. No awkward self-seriousness, no existential crisis about the medium, just a massive open-world arcade, sim-cade racer set in a gorgeous, wonderfully realised version of Japan where you can spend three straight hours drifting down mountainsides in an old Subaru while cherry blossoms cascade across the screen.

What’s smart about Horizon 6 is that Playground Games clearly knows exactly where Horizon 5 frustrated people. That game already drove beautifully, but after a while, Mexico could start to feel flat despite how technically impressive it all was. Horizon 5 was a game I loved initially, but dropped out of after a week or so because it had too many long, empty stretches between events and access to the best supercars never felt earned. Horizon 6 fixes a lot of that simply by slowing down a little and giving the whole thing more balance, a more flexible two-path progression and a map where there’s always something to see, do and experience.

At first, it still feels like total overload and can be a little bewildering. The map is enormous, icons pop across the screen every few seconds, radio DJs won’t stop chuntering about events, and before long, your garage is filling up with rally cars, hypercars, drift models, saloons, classic cars and ridiculous off-road monsters, but crucially, there are plenty of powerful exotic cars out of reach until you've unlocked the 'wristband' tiers. After three hours or so, the game settles into an easy rhythm, everything clicks into place, and Horizon 6 feels like it has enough rewards to keep you hooked, but demands you earn some of the more interesting cars and events.

Improved progression and event unlocks

The return of the old wristband progression system from Horizon and Horizon 2 helps massively. Instead of immediately showering you with the fastest cars imaginable, Horizon 6 makes you work through seven event tiers, unlocking tougher championships, specialist race types, and new sections of the map gradually – resulting in tentpole Rush Events that can be anything from a technical obstacle course to 'car snowboarding'. At the same time, the Discover Japan progression path pushes you towards scenic roads, hidden landmarks, mountain routes, and local car-culture hotspots.

This two-path progression setup gives Horizon 6 the satisfying momentum Horizon 5 occasionally lacked. After a few hours, I stopped the Ubi-tick-sheet-thinking and just started naturally falling into the flow of the world itself, driving to events, stumbling upon others, or taking time out to complete stories and track down hidden treasure cars. One race leads into another, and a drift challenge appears halfway down a mountain road, and suddenly I've abandoned my original destination completely because a hidden shrine tucked away in the hills draws my gaze, or rumours about a Barn Find treasure car underneath a bullet train railway bridge demand my attention.

This Japan is absolutely stunning to drive through, too, because Playground has crafted a map centred on its progression rhythm and road design rather than just giant postcard vistas. It also helps that the game looks incredible and varied, both realistically and in a gamey way. Tokyo’s dense streets glow with reflected neon and rainwater, mountain passes coil around pine-lined forests and waterfalls, countryside roads open into huge rolling corn fields, and every region feels built for a different style of driving, whether that’s retro snow rally, stadium stunts or the new Initial D styled Touge downhill head-to-heads.

Touge or not to Touge?

Most importantly, the tracks are memorable this time. Though there are, of course, some that feel like filler, there are absolutely courses that have the personality I loved in games like Ridge Racer and Sega Rally (ah, the new-car smell of nostalgia). I can already picture specific corners, banked hills, downhill stretches, and late-night Touge routes in my head in a way I honestly never could with Horizon 5’s wider open roads.

The Touge Showdown events are probably the clearest example of that improvement, and the fact I’ve namechecked this new race type a couple of times already speaks volumes for how much fun these challenging head-to-heads are. These Initial D-inspired mountain races are fantastic, tighter and rougher than Horizon’s usual supercar circuits, full of narrow corners, dangerous overtakes and scrappy recoveries where bouncing off a barrier doesn’t necessarily kill your race, and you always feel on the verge of winning or losing in a split second (and the rewind function is a god-send). They feel gloriously messy in a classic arcade racer way, but if you're into tuning and simulation, there's scope to tune and win with more finesse.

However, I love racing on the edge with that roughness, which suits Horizon 6 perfectly because this is still a game that understands racing should sometimes feel chaotic, even when you’re racing perfectly tuned supercars. One moment you’re carefully tweaking suspension setups and tyre pressure because wet-weather grip matters, the next a giant mech is stomping through the background of a Rush Event, at the same time as fighter jets scream overhead and fireworks explode across the skyline.

A finely tuned balance of styles

For me, that balancing act between sim detail and classic arcade energy is what makes Horizon 6 work so well. Turn assists on, and it’s approachable enough for almost anyone to jump into immediately, but you’re not going to win much. Strip those assists away, and suddenly cars become twitchier, the weather affects handling more aggressively, and tuning starts to feel like something more important in the game. It becomes weirdly addictive to tinker and create a car setup that suits you, but it's also fun to embrace the lower end of sim-cade and just bash down the slopes with abandon.

The handling itself feels more nuanced than Horizon 5, too, which admittedly already nailed that arcade/sim-cade balance nicely, but Horizon 6 pushes it a little further. You'll definitely feel the drift, lightness, and different handling of cars depending on whether they're rear-wheel drive, 4WD, and so forth, and different builds, cars, and models feel genuinely distinct rather than simply being faster or slower versions of the same thing. You can still brute-force some races by buying absurdly fast cars, but the game is much better at encouraging experimentation this time around. And, in fact, sometimes the faster, more powerful cars are simply too tricky to handle unless you’ve earned the right to drive them through hours of racing – trust me, I tried, I bought an Evolution Coupé 1020 (2015 Ultima) thinking I could rush the opposition and simply found myself skidding past corners and tumbling over bridge sidings.

Personally, I still think Horizon 6 shines brightest in the dirtier events, such as the rally races that are phenomenal, proper elbows-out Sega-like chaos through mud and forest runs where sliding is an art. At the same time, saloons have a wonderful touring-car aggression that feels meaty and raw. The tighter street races are great too, and need to be for a racer set in Japan, especially if you grew up on Need for Speed, but for me, the looser, arcade-leaning events are where Horizon’s personality really comes alive.

Naturally, with these reference points comes the spectre of me-to gaming, you can add DiRT: Showdown’s obstacle courses, Crazy Taxi deliveries, and there are touches of DriveClub and Gran Turismo in here – but the fact Horizon 6 can cross the gamut of casual to sim racing all in one unified world is an achievement, and makes this a genuine sandbox where everyone can find their joy.

So much Content

There’s an absurd amount to do outside the main races, too. Drift Zones, Speed Traps, Horizon Arcade events, cross-country championships, drag strips, obstacle courses, seasonal playlists and Barn Finds (to collect secret cars) – all this is constantly tempting you away from whatever you were originally planning to do. Story missions offer respite from the rush of racing, with your aiding your Horizon Festival team in tuning cars and helping the locals to, well… tune cars (which usually means point to point racing). Even the food delivery missions become weirdly compelling little bursts of Crazy Taxi-lite drifting fun through Tokyo's backstreets. While these missions are in no way as frantic as Sega's classic, you can keep running new deliveries, and there's an entire career progression system just in deliveries.

Not every activity lands, for example, some Discover Japan objectives drift dangerously close to Ubisoft-style checklist busywork, where you're going through the motions just to earn a car and Credits. This means the more sedate Day Trip missions, which see you follow-the-leader through Japan’s cities, spotting landmarks and being given the grand tour, are nice but can feel like filler, an easy way to collect a new car, take photos and earn Credits, rather than truly challenging. But then, if these weren’t included, Horizon 6 would feel less rounded, less interesting and a little one-dimensional for an open world game. So we're back to that fine balancing act Playground manages so well.

The third act in Horizon 6’s racer performance is, of course, multiplayer. Horizon Play turns the map into one huge social space, with players drifting in and out naturally while live events ping across the world at set times or in time-limited ways. Convoys make grouping up with friends painless, and the new Spec Racing race mode is the best addition, as it locks everyone into driving identical cars and tuning setups, so races stop being dominated by whoever built the best build or invested more time collecting outrageous rides. I did have some issues connecting in my pre-release review build, with a diagnosis issue dropping me from matchmaking, but the world itself, Convoys and the option to just hook up and admire cars and import designs into your livery is a nice nod to Japan’s car culture scene.

Too much content?

If there’s a real criticism here, it’s probably that Horizon 6 occasionally risks exhausting you through sheer volume of content and challenges – weird, I know, but too much of something can feel overwhelming. Notifications never fully stop, and after hours of in-game time, some activities inevitably begin to blur together a little. Playground still hasn’t fully figured out the fine art of restraint, and perhaps it shouldn’t?

But honestly, that feels like a tiny niggle against a game this joyful, because Horizon 6 succeeds at the important stuff – handling, pacing, accessibility, tuning, visual design and more. Fundamentally, progression finally has proper structure, which makes the world a vastly more memorable place to drive through than Horizon 5’s Mexico. The handling has more depth, the multiplayer is more accessible, and the whole thing feels built around the simple idea that driving should be exciting at all times.

So while half the internet continues arguing about what games should be, Playground has gone and made one of the purest celebrations of video games I've played this year, perhaps since Leon S. Kennedy rode a motorbike up a skyscraper in Resident Evil Requiem, matched to a colourful, bold world that demands to be explored, in the fastest ways possible, all the time. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got mountains to drift down in the best rally game Sega never made.