Forza Horizon 6: Full Game Review

Forza Horizon 6 is the best-reviewed game of 2026. It is also the most comfortable one. After multiple hours across Tokyo's expressways, the alpine passes and a great many convenience-store car parks, here's what Forza Horizon 6 actually asks of you - and what it still won't.

Playground Games' Japan is the largest and most varied Horizon world yet, the 550-car list is the deepest the franchise has shipped, and the new touge battles are the finest racing content the studio has ever made. A too-generous credit economy is the one real flaw.

Forza Horizon 6 At A Glance

Forza Horizon 6 Review: Let’s Dig In

Mostly, remarkably, it measures up. Forza Horizon 6 is the biggest, most technically accomplished and most content-dense open-world racer ever made, and it carries a 90 on Metacritic and a 91 OpenCritic top-critic average across 166 reviews, 99% of them recommending it - the highest-rated game of 2026 so far, above Resident Evil Requiem and Pokémon Pokopia.

IGN gave it a 10, Eurogamer and VGC full marks; GameSpot's 8/10 and PC Gamer's 84 are the notable dissents. That consensus is deserved. It is also, the longer I played, increasingly beside the point. The interesting question about Horizon 6 is no longer whether Playground can execute. It is whether a studio this good at execution still remembers how to make something that resists you.

Forza Horizon 6 Map

Playground's headline statistic is that the Tokyo City district is five times larger than Guanajuato in Forza Horizon 5, previously the studio's most ambitious urban build. That claim holds up when you drive it. The city is not a token skyline you loop around; it is a genuine district network with an elevated expressway system modelled on the C1 loop, an underpass layer beneath it, arterial suburbs feeding in, and a set of recognisable nodes - a Shibuya-style scramble crossing, a Ginkgo Avenue analogue that turns gold in autumn, an Akihabara facsimile stacked with signage.

And yet Tokyo is the weakest region on the map. Not visually - visually it is a showpiece, particularly wet at night, when the whole city becomes a smear of reflected neon, and on PC or in the Series X Quality mode the ray-traced reflections finally justify their cost. It is weak because it is empty of people in a way that Horizon's other cities could get away with and this one cannot.

Guanajuato was a small colonial town where a quiet street reads as charming. Tokyo is the densest metropolitan area on Earth, and a Tokyo with no crowds, no pedestrian flow, no queue outside a ramen shop, is uncanny. The iconography is present and the population is not. You get the sign for the city rather than the city, and the mismatch is loudest precisely in the districts Playground spent the most money on.

The countryside is where the map becomes genuinely great, and it is where I ended up spending most of my time once the novelty of the expressway wore off. The northern third is alpine - high snowfields, a route clearly modelled on the Tateyama Kurobe corridor with its walls of cut snow, and switchback descents long enough to become a proper test of tyre temperature and patience.

Below that sits forested shrine country, low stone walls, single-lane roads cutting through cedar. The western coast gives you beach runs and harbour towns. The transitions between these zones are the smoothest Playground has ever built; there is no obvious biome seam, just a gradual change in road surface, vegetation density and radio reception. If you want to understand why this is the series' best map, drive from a snowfield to a beach in one uninterrupted run and count how many times the world gives you a reason to stop.

Buy Forza Horizon 6 Items

Forza Horizon 6 Regions

How Forza Horizon 6 Drives

The handling model is the reason this series has no real competition, and Horizon 6 does not reinvent it - it sharpens it. The core is unchanged: a weight-forward arcade model that communicates load transfer clearly enough to be readable on a pad, forgiving enough that a mistake usually costs you a second rather than a race, and deep enough that switching to a wheel with the assists off produces something meaningfully different.

What has changed is the top of the range. Playground says it has "fully overhauled" the car roster to balance it across performance classes, and the headline of that work is the new R Class for track-focused cars. Its job is separation, not escalation: it pulls the purpose-built machinery - prototypes, time-attack builds, race-derived cars - out of the same bucket as fast road cars. Previously S2 was a chaos tier where a hypercar and a caged track special were nominally equivalent. Splitting them means downforce finally behaves like downforce in the bracket where it matters.

Surface variety does more work here than in any previous Horizon. Japan gives Playground a legitimate excuse for tight, cambered, guardrail-adjacent tarmac, and the physics respond to it. Damp mountain tarmac under tree cover behaves differently from dry coastal asphalt. Snow is genuinely low-grip rather than decoratively low-grip; an RWD build in the alpine north is a bad idea and the game lets it be a bad idea. After five games in which the optimal strategy was frequently "buy the AWD thing and drive through the scenery," Horizon 6 has environments that punish the wrong tool.

One detail sits oddly against all of that. The game ships with an Autodrive feature that, on the easiest difficulty, will win races for you automatically. It is an accessibility option and a defensible one - but it is also the clearest possible statement of what this game thinks difficulty is for.

Touge Battles Are The Best Thing In Forza Horizon 6

Touge Battles are the single best addition Playground Games has made to this series in a decade, and it is not close. The format is the one the mountain roads demand: a one-on-one pursuit on a closed pass, where holding or closing a gap matters more than crossing a line first, and where the passes are narrow enough that a single wide entry ends the run.

What makes them work is that they are the only content in the game where the world's design and the driving model point at the same thing. Horizon has always been a game of enormous roads and enormous margins; touge is the opposite, and the mountain belt was clearly built to support it first and everything else second. The rhythm of a good downhill run - braking earlier than instinct wants, riding the camber, feeling the car go light over a crest with a guardrail on the exit - is the closest this series has come to the tension of a proper driving game.

And there are five of them. Five Touge Battles in the entire campaign. I finished the last one wanting twenty more and instead got sent to photograph a mural. Playground built the best mode in Horizon's history, put it in a world purpose-designed to host it, and then rationed it like a side activity. The Touge Showdown playlist in Horizon Play softens this a little by turning the format into two-player championships online, and if you want more of this you will end up there - but the single-player campaign treats its own best idea as a garnish.

The rest of the event roster is the familiar spread, executed well. Horizon Rush events string together short high-intensity obstacle challenges and, alongside the returning Showcases, gate the Wristbands. Time-attack circuits are now woven into the open road rather than being separate loading destinations, which sounds minor and substantially changes how often you actually do them. PR stunts - speed traps, speed zones, danger signs, drift zones - are unchanged in function and vastly expanded in number.

Then there is the Raku-Raku Express food-delivery job, which is the game's best surprise. Each run has a gimmick attached - hold a minimum speed, keep the car sideways for a stretch of the route, deliver the order intact. It is silly, it is charming, it teaches car control sideways rather than through a tutorial, and it repurposes the map's least-used residential streets into something worth driving. It also pays into Stamp progress, which means the game's most enjoyable throwaway activity is quietly one of its more efficient ones.

Forza Horizon 6 Car List

550-plus at launch - more than any Horizon has shipped on day one - and for the first time the Japanese half of the list is the point rather than a subsection. Playground has secured the depth a Japan-set game requires: multiple generations of the same nameplates, the kei oddities, the vans and the wagons, the Group A homologation specials.

The result is a garage where a stock 1980s hatchback and a hypercar can both be the correct answer depending on which mountain you are on. The new body-kit system with functional aero components means visual builds and performance builds finally overlap instead of fighting each other, and livery customisation now extends to car windows, which the community abused gloriously within a week.

Forza Horizon 6 Progression

This is the most structurally interesting thing Playground has done in years, so it is worth laying out properly. Progression runs on three parallel tracks that feed into each other: Wristbands, Stamps and Horizon Play.

Within a handful of hours I had a garage full of cars I had not chosen, several of them dramatically better than anything I would have bought. Wheelspins fire constantly. Credits accumulate faster than you can spend them. The game hands you a 700-plus-horsepower prize car before you have finished deciding whether you like the first one.

The consequence is not that the game becomes too easy - Horizon has never been about difficulty. It is that forming an attachment to a car becomes impossible, because attachment requires scarcity.

The one place the game does still ask something of you is the far end of Horizon Play. Level 100 uses exponential XP scaling and is, by community reckoning, a hundreds-of-hours proposition - meaningfully grindier than the equivalent in Horizon 5

Buy Forza Horizon 6 Accounts

Forza Horizon 6 Vs. Forza Horizon 5

The honest summary: everything is bigger and better tuned, one genuinely new mode has been added, and the underlying loop is identical. If Horizon 5 wore out its welcome for you, nothing here changes the shape of the thing. If it didn't, this is a straight upgrade in every measurable direction.

FAQs About Forza Horizon 6

The Final Words And Score

Buy it. That is the honest bottom line, and if you have Game Pass you already own it. This is hundreds of hours of the most consistently well-made driving content available on any platform, wrapped around the best map Playground Games has ever built and the best new mode the series has ever added. The technical execution is close to flawless, the car list is the deepest in the franchise's history, and the mountain passes alone justify the purchase.

Come to it, though, knowing that Horizon 6 will never ask you for anything. It will not make you earn a car, tighten a screw, or feel the loss of a race. It hands you everything and asks only that you enjoy it, and for a great many players - particularly anyone arriving new to the series - that is exactly the right deal. For anyone who has driven the last four, the pleasure is real and the déjà vu is unavoidable. This is a series that has perfected its own formula so thoroughly that it now has nothing left to do but repeat it beautifully.

The Final Score: 9/10 - Playground Games' finest execution and clearest plateau. Essential if you want to drive; unremarkable if you wanted to be surprised.

Forza Horizon 6 & Gameboost Products

Forza Horizon 6 Key
Buy Forza Horizon 6 Credits
Forza Horizon 6 Items For Sale
Buy Forza Horizon 6 Accounts
View all GameBoost Accounts
View all GameBoost Boosting Services
View all GameBoost Currencies
View all GameBoost Game Keys
View all GameBoost Gift Cards
View all GameBoost Items
View all GameBoost Top Ups