Forza Horizon 6 Review: Nobody Was Excited About This, and It's One of the Best Games of 2026

Before release, one prominent rundown of 2026's thirty biggest open world games put Forza Horizon 6 in thirtieth place. Dead last. The write-up amounted to a shrug: unless something catastrophic happens, it will probably be excellent. Nobody was wrong about that. Everybody was wrong about how much it would matter.

Because this is not just another good Horizon game. Having spent a serious amount of time with it, we think it is the best one Playground Games has made, and one of the two or three finest things released this year. It does not reinvent anything. It does not need to. What it does instead is take a formula the studio has been sharpening since 2012 and finally give it a setting worth all that sharpening.

There is a lesson buried in this that 2026 kept teaching. Reliability gets punished by hype cycles. A series that delivers every single time becomes boring to write about, so it slides to the bottom of the list, and then the actual game arrives and is better than most of the things people were excited about instead.

Here is the single most interesting thing about Forza Horizon 6, and almost nobody is talking about it. The Japan map is not dramatically larger than Horizon 5's Mexico. It feels roughly twice the size, and the reason is elevation.

In Horizon 5 you could pick a point on the far side of the map, aim your car at it, and drive there in a straight line, ignoring the roads entirely, because the terrain was flat enough to permit it. You cannot do that here. Mountains, ravines, sheer drops and switchbacks stand in the way constantly, so getting anywhere means actually following a road. That one decision changes everything downstream. Journeys take longer, roads matter, corners matter, and the map stops being a surface you cross and becomes a place you navigate.

On top of that it is dense in a way the series has not attempted before. Villages, petrol stations, temples, castles, farms, houses — there is always something in your eyeline. The game tracks every road you have driven for the first time and turns discovery into its own quiet progression system, and it works, because the roads themselves are worth discovering. Curves that beg to be taken at speed, shortcuts that only reveal themselves once, mountain passes that are essentially purpose-built drift courses at night.

Tokyo is the showpiece and it earns it. It is the largest and most carefully built urban environment the series has produced, with Tokyo Tower, Shibuya Crossing and the rest present without feeling like a checklist. Our one complaint is that it can feel slightly underpopulated — a city that dense deserves more traffic and more life moving through it. But the construction of the thing is outstanding.

A lot of games move to a new country and change the scenery. Horizon 6 built event types around where it is. That distinction matters more than it sounds.

The progression around them is the wristband system returning from earlier entries, which means you work up through class tiers rather than being handed everything at once the way Horizon 5 did. It is more structured and it is the right call. Horizon 5 could dump the entire map on you in the first hour, which sounds generous and in practice was paralysing. Here there is always an obvious next thing without ever feeling like you are being marched.

The other quiet improvement is fast travel. The collectible boards are gone entirely. Drive a road once and you can fast travel along it for free, no property purchase required, no hunting down boards with a guide open in another window. It is the kind of change that sounds administrative and removes a genuine annoyance from every previous game in the series.

The presentation is the same problem it has always been. You create a character who looks slightly wrong, and then two relentlessly upbeat racing acquaintances walk you through things in cutscenes that are stiff, oddly acted and impossible to care about. Horizon has been doing this for six games. It has never once improved. At this point we would genuinely rather it were removed than tolerated.

The radio is the other irritation. There is a good spread of English and Japanese stations and some genuinely great music on them, but the DJs talk constantly. Change the station and you get a DJ. Start a song and you get a DJ. It is a small thing and it grated on us long before the thirty-hour mark.

The property building is the most interesting near-miss. You now buy land rather than houses, and the toolset is enormous — tracks, dirt trails, drag strips, half-pipes, buildings, trees, entire street layouts, plus a fully customisable garage interior for displaying your cars. It is far more capable than anyone expected. The problem is that the game gives you almost no reason to use it beyond showing other players, and the tools are fiddly on a controller. The garage is the better half of the feature precisely because it is smaller and more focused.

Two smaller notes. The per-car skill trees are functional but dull, mostly stacking XP bonuses rather than anything that changes how a car drives. And there are manufacturers and individual cars missing that were present in earlier entries, which will annoy people with a favourite.