Playground Games built its most detailed map yet and backed it with new mountain-pass racing that finally lives up to the setting.
I put maybe forty hours into Forza Horizon 5 and then left it alone for four years, so I went into this one fully expecting to do the same thing again. Forza fans have been asking for Japan since the series left England behind, and Horizon 6 delivers a version of it that justifies however long that took. Tokyo alone is roughly five times denser than the biggest built-up area in Horizon 5, and the full map threads over 670 roads together, from gridlocked city blocks up to snowy passes with a working ski resort tucked in above them.
The touge duels are what I keep loading back in for. They're narrow mountain-pass battles against a single rival, with no traffic and barely any room to correct a mistake, and one of them runs a hairpin sequence anybody who grew up on Initial D will recognize on sight. They reward reading a road's rhythm over raw horsepower, which this series has never asked of me before. My first loss came from overdriving a hairpin I'd already cleared twice on the same run, and it stung worse than any head-to-head in the franchise, because there was no traffic to blame and no rubber-banding to blame and nothing sitting between me and the fact that I'd gone into it eight miles an hour too fast.
“My first loss came from overdriving a hairpin I'd already cleared twice, and it stung more than most head-to-head races in this franchise.”
I've now driven that same pass at dawn, in rain, and at night in a 200-horsepower Trueno-shaped apology of a car, and I'd trade half the map's festival events for ten more roads built like it.
The car list treats the setting with intent instead of putting out a token JDM shelf, running to over 550 cars with an R32 and an R34 Skyline sitting next to the modern GT-R, an RX-7, an A80 Supra, an NSX and a Lancer Evo. I spent an entire evening in the garage doing nothing except reading through it, which isn't a thing I've done since Gran Turismo 4.
Night Tokyo is the showcase, with neon and murals from real Japanese artists on streets that feel dense rather than decorative, running different traffic patterns and a soundtrack mix that only exists after dark.
The Estate, a buildable plot of land inspired by Japan's akiya culture of abandoned homes, turned out to be a stronger hook than the glorified garage I'd definately assumed it would be, and the stamp-collecting Collection Journal gives the map's shrines and landmarks a reason to be visited beyond a checkmark on a list.
The structure around all of this is Horizon exactly as it's been since 2012, the same festival and the same unlock cadence, and the announcer's relentless enthusiasm about how amazing I am lasted about an hour before I found the setting that mutes him. It took me far longer to find than it should have, so here it is: Audio, then Voice Volume, then zero.
The PS5 version is confirmed but undated, which leaves PlayStation players watching this one from outside for the time being, and nobody at Playground has committed to a window.
I've put more hours into this map in three weeks than I gave Horizon 5 across its first few months, and the difference is entirely Japan. I couldn't work out whether the touge rivals scale to your car or run fixed times, because I beat one comfortably in something slow and then lost to the same rival in something much faster, and the game says nothing either way. I've since gone back to the Trueno and stopped trying to bring better cars to those roads.