Playground Games are masters of the arcade racer. Forza Horizon 6 is the latest in their globe trotting series, this time bringing its neon-soaked motorsport festival to the stunning climes of Japan. That in turn brings a new flavour to the racing action, with anime inflexions, cute food mascots and more of a focus on the iconic stable of Japanese car manufacturers, meaning that the Forza Horizon formula might be familiar, but still manages to feel relatively fresh.
This is still Forza Horizon, though. For the uninitiated, that means there’s a huge swathe of countryside, towns and cityscapes to plough a ridiculous number of shiny vehicles through, and a map so covered in events and things to do it’d make Ubisoft blush. Through the previous five entries, Playground Games have taken us to the US, Europe, Australia, the UK and Mexico, each time forging a compressed rendition that manages to capture the look and feel of the country, while steering clear of being a 1:1 facsimile. That means that each location can have multiple interconnected areas and even different climates, which you can actually drive between without stopping for overpriced gas or needing to stuff your face with a floppy sandwich at a service station.
So, this time it’s Japan. The countries in each Forza Horizon game are the central character – whatever you might think about your self-styled Drivatar – and Japan is a beautiful, evocative place that still manages to carry a certain amount of mystery about it, particularly once you venture beyond the capital city of Tokyo. That’s actually a bit of a task here, because while cities like Edinburgh felt like modest towns in previous games, Forza Horizon 6 captures a lot more of the urban sprawl of Tokyo.
As we’ve come to expect, Forza Horizon 6 and its new setting look stunning. Car models have been painstakingly crafted, and the vast bodies of water you can drive along are gorgeously reflective – screen space on console, or ray-traced if you’ve got a suitable GPU on PC. If you’re a fan of cars in general, there’s more than 550 to collect, whether bought in the store, from a parking lot, or the hide and seek of the Barn Finds.
Finding these cars is probably my favourite part of Forza Horizon, but they’re now joined by Treasure Cars. Instead of a purple search zone, these give you a picture of a car, and task you with finding their location. It takes some mild sleuthing – slightly diminished by the overly helpful NPCs – and it’s all good fun. Shame that there’s only nine of them, though.
If looking behind farm outbuildings isn’t your idea of an automotive good time, you’ll be pleased to hear that there are, in fact, races in Forza Horizon 6. These cover a variety of different types and categories, including drag racing, off-road and straight-up street racing – there’s a bit more of an emphasis on night races for that underground racing vibe, and touge too – and they all showcase Horizon’s excellent handling model, with the added depth and difficulty there if you fancy turning off frivolities like traction control and the racing line.
Tune the settings to match your abilities and there’s plenty of challenge here, even if you’re buying the cars with the best stats, and you simply can’t tire of fighting for position, careening through streets, fields, rivers and hillsides, and coming out in first place. It remains familiar, but when that familiarity stems from the most consistently enjoyable racing series of all time… well, it’s hard to complain too much.
The game casts you as a newcomer to the Horizon festival once more, building through different stages of coloured wristband that you earn, with each milestone event culminating in a major set-piece race. With this being Japan, it makes sense then that one of the first of these is a frankly unforgettable race against a mech. A real, gosh-darn it Gundam-sized mech. On rollerblades. It’s gloriously silly, and it makes for a real point of difference, a tonal shift that Horizon 6 doesn’t quite manage to replicate elsewhere.
The Japan difference does still feed into the moment-to-moment gameplay, and each region has a series of culinary mascots, which you have to hunt down and smash to bits in addition to XP boards. If you’ve ever wanted to run over large eggs, smiling edamame beans and a grumpy bowl of curried rice, Forza Horizon 6 has you covered. Seriously, though, I love running them over.
Of course, the cars are the stars, and when you have the likes of Japanese manufacturers like Honda, Nissan and Mistubishi on hand, you have to tailor the roster to fit. The Barn Finds and Treasure Cars help to give you some gratefully received context for these, but it’s equally cool to be out spinning around and finding a rare NSX for sale in a parking lot.
Whether it fully captures the car scene in Japan in quite the same way as something like Japanese Drift Master or Tokyo Xtreme Racer, I’m not sure. It’s very much ‘Horizon does Japan’ rather than the other way around, but it’s still an exceptional and memorable package.
Playground Games want you to feel as though you have real ownership over Forza Horizon 6, and so they’ve introduced Estates to expand on the previous home ownership. Now, when you buy a house, you also gain access to all the land surrounding it, and you can edit the entire area to live out your dreams of… I don’t know, probably just owning a house?
Building on the Forza Horizon 5’s EventLabs toolkit, there’s an array of different level furniture, from trees, bushes and leafy ornaments through to stones, rubble, and manmade objects, as well as all of the racing-based items you’d need to build your own track.
It’s a great idea, and gives you something tangible to put your own mark on the map. I can see the kind of person who spent hours making Fallout and Starfield outposts spending more time here than anywhere else in the game, though its menus and control systems remain a bit finicky. Whether you want to lay down multiple objects, or you want to place something on the ground when it’s covered in grass and shrubbery, the game can get a bit confused about what it is you’re wanting to select. It would be, unsurprisingly, much easier with a mouse, and yet, you can’t currently do that.
It’s clear that Playground Games really want you to dive deep into your Estate, so much so that the menus want to physically lock you in, and you can’t back out easily. Seriously, I was stuck here for about ten minutes on one occasion, while in another, I lost all my progress by leaving without saving.
Forza Horizon 6 is, once again, the arcade racer to beat. Expansive, beautiful and consistently fun, whether you’re playing alone or with others, it’s ideal whether you’re dropping in for a few minutes or you’re chewing up the scenery for hours. Does Forza Horizon 6 do much that’s new? Not really. But just like dessert, there’s always room for more Forza Horizon.