FH6 Review: The Ultimate Open-World Racing Experience

FH6 arrives as the most ambitious series entry yet. Our comprehensive review covers the Japan map, progression, car roster, and whether FH6 meets expectations.

/14 22:13 Forza Horizon 6 Sets A New Benchmark For Open World Racing Forza Horizon 6 Review: Japan Marks A New Peak For The Open World Racer Tokyo's neon streets, snowy mountain roads, and endlessly satisfying driving make Forza Horizon 6 the strongest entry in the series yet.

By Allyson Cochran – May 14, 2026, 8:00 AM EDT /14 22:13 Forza Horizon 6 Sets A New Benchmark For Open World Racing I moved to Chicago back in 2022 and, like any respectable urban cliché, sold my car.

The CTA, the city's public transit, became my substitute for ownership and agency: trains that arrive in theory, buses that arrive in myth, and an entire city that insists it is more navigable than it actually is. Driving receded into memory and became something I used to do with music too loud and maps half-ignored. Which is why it is mildly absurd that, despite all that, a video game about driving would be the thing to make me miss it most.

Forza Horizon 6 is, on its surface, another entry in a series that has long since mastered the art of open-world racing. But this sixth installment succeeds so marvelously because it makes driving itself feel enjoyable. Beyond the racing, the simple act of moving through its world is a delight.

Tokyo Is At Its Most Brilliantly Overwhelming In Horizon 6 /14 22:13 Forza Horizon 6 Sets A New Benchmark For Open World Racing Japan is an especially strong setting for such an approach. Playground Games’ virtual take on the country is not attempting to depict realism so much as capture how it feels to move through it. Tokyo is crowded and overstimulating in exactly the way you want it to be, full of neon-lit streets that make every high-speed turn feel slightly irresponsible. Outside the cities, pacing changes completely. Mountain roads stretch into forests, rural highways open into wide scenic views, and Mount Fuji sits in the distance with the kind of confidence only a mountain that famous can have.

The end result is Horizon’s most ambitious map yet. Tokyo overwhelms in a way that feels deliberate rather than indulgent. Glowing skyscrapers and neon signage stack across the skyline. One minute, you are threading through tight roads that demand precision; the next, you are on a highway moving fast enough that the city becomes a beautiful smear of light.

The countryside, by contrast, is calm. Forests don’t frame the road so much as swallow everything that isn't road. The game understands when to overload you and when to let you breathe, even if ‘breathe’ still involves going 140 mph through a countryside straightaway.

/14 22:13 Forza Horizon 6 Sets A New Benchmark For Open World Racing I drove nearly 20 miles from the city’s outskirts toward a snowy mountainous area, just to see how the world changed and evolved as I did. It took about 15 actual minutes, which is to say: it took pretty damn long. For context, you can drive the full length of GTA 5’s map in about ten minutes. The world is truly enormous, but it never really loses its sense of beauty or detail, no matter how far you push into it.

Even when you’re not doing much, driving rarely feels like wasted time because the world is consistently gorgeous enough to justify the detour. And with seasons back, those long, aimless drives feel even more rewarding.

Mount Fuji appears in the background as a constant landmark that the developers seemed to decide on early and refused to compromise on. It is the kind of sight that risks becoming a postcard cliché, yet you notice it, then stop noticing it, then you notice that you are noticing it again.

Every Race Feels Like A Big Budget Action Film /14 22:13 Forza Horizon 6 Sets A New Benchmark For Open World Racing What impressed me more than anything was the choreography of Horizon’s moment-to-moment gameplay. Races are staged with a kind of cinematic arrogance that is hard not to admire. Camera angles tilt just slightly too far into melodrama.

The screen shakes at moments that felt more than necessary. Finish a race, and you might find yourself trailed by aircraft painting the sky in a rainbow of colors right after screeching into first place. Horizon 6 wants to make you feel like the most badass person on the planet.

These flourishes extend into the tracks themselves. Helicopters dip low enough that their rotors kick up dust. Cargo containers are lifted just as you enter an area, as if the environment is being assembled in real time around your decisions. At one point, I drove across what looked like solid ground only for it to give way into glass beneath me; an elegant little betrayal that felt like a joke told by the road itself. The races are at their best when they lean fully into this sense of drama.

Driving remains one of the series’ biggest triumphs. Controller feedback does a surprising amount of work to make the experience feel tangible. Grass feels light and slightly shifting under your tires; dirt feels even looser and less stable; asphalt feels /14 22:13 Forza Horizon 6 Sets A New Benchmark For Open World Racing firm and predictable. Snow noticeably reduces grip and makes the car harder to control. Drifting through corners shifts from being about precision alone to also managing traction and recovery.

It helps that the car roster, past 550 at launch, avoids feeling like catalog inflation. Everything is rendered with a kind of affectionate specificity, from modern performance machines to classic models that feel like they arrive with stories already attached.

A Game Built For More Than Just Racing Some of the best parts of Forza Horizon 6 are, technically speaking, pretty unnecessary. For all its mechanical excellence, what stays with me most are the smaller systems that are almost incidental in the grand scheme of things. Food delivery missions, for example, should not work as well as they do. Somehow, one of my favorite parts of the entire game was delivering takeout to random strangers.

/14 22:13 Forza Horizon 6 Sets A New Benchmark For Open World Racing They are essentially glorified Uber Eats side quests. You pick up food, race it across Tokyo, and slowly rank up from a junior courier to a master courier. It is absurd. It is also perfect. I became deeply invested in the fictional honor of getting someone their ramen on time. I spent almost as much time doing this as I spent racing, which says a lot.

The game’s willingness to treat ‘just driving around’ as a legitimate activity loop rather than filler feels so honest in an industry so obsessed with user retention metrics. That extends into Car Meets, drift clubs, convoy drives, and photography.

These exist to justify lingering in the world, rather than simply gamifying it. Unfortunately, the game’s performance is a reminder that ambition has hardware costs. On my mid-to-high-end PC, I found myself settling on High settings. Ultra was technically possible, but unstable enough to feel like a dare rather than a legitimate option. The difference is not subtle: at higher settings, the game becomes almost aggressively beautiful. On High, it is still impressive, but closer to the aesthetic vocabulary of other well-rendered games. The magic is slightly reduced, like turning down the brightness on a memory.

I wasn’t able to test the Xbox Series X/S versions, but expect them to lag behind the visuals and performance of a more powerful PC like the one I reviewed Horizon 6 on.

Still, even at slightly reduced fidelity, the underlying design holds fast. There is never a shortage of things to do, which in open-world games is often less of a compliment and more of a warning. But here abundance feels curated. I never felt like I was running out of events or being padded toward content.

/14 22:13 Forza Horizon 6 Sets A New Benchmark For Open World Racing That in time becomes the game’s most elegant achievement: it makes repetition feel fresh. You can race, drift, deliver food, photograph a skyline, or simply take a mountain road because it looks better than that other mountain road you passed by several minutes ago.

It would be easy to say that Forza Horizon 6 is simply the best version of itself so far, and leave it at that, but that undersells what it truly achieves. It is an accumulation of its past five iterations, but somehow remains light on its feet. It’s a game that understands spectacle without becoming hollowed out by it. For a series about driving fast, its real achievement is teaching you to notice what you are passing through and stopping to admire it.

/14 22:13 Forza Horizon 6 Sets A New Benchmark For Open World Racing Racing Open-World Systems OpenCritic Reviews Released May 19, 2026 Everyone / Mild Lyrics, Users Interact, In-Game Purchases Developer(s) Playground Games Publisher(s) Xbox Game Studios 14 Images WHERE TO PLAY  /14 22:13 Forza Horizon 6 Sets A New Benchmark For Open World Racing Forza Horizon 6  Expand Pros & Cons  Tokyo and the wider map are vast and genuinely beautiful to drive through.

 Driving feels excellent, with strong feedback and satisfying handling.  Plenty of activities that all tie naturally into exploration and racing.  Higher settings come with a steep performance cost.

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