Forza Horizon 6: The best racing game in the best setting

Japan is not just a major car manufacturing nation, it has contributed much to motoring pop culture. From street racing, which features illegal street races across the motorways of Tokyo in souped-up cars, to drifting, a form of racing born out of illegal mountain road races, known as touge, that involve breaking traction into a controlled corner.

Drifting was made popular by the manga Initial D, and later Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. Now, you get a chance to live your street racing touge dreams in its birth place, Japan, which is the setting for the new Forza Horizon 6. 

The Horizon Festival is a made-up event that everyone wishes was real. Every iteration of the game, sees the festival in a new location, the last one being Mexico with Great Britain and Australia before that. The goal is to convert that city into a massive sandbox, where every street houses a race and every mountain vista in the distance has roads you can drift down on.

You play a budding racer, couch surfing in Tokyo with a few other participants to earn and race your way across Japan, and to the top of festival leaderboards.

The story is a standard career format, designed to open up doors at the right time. There is so much to do in Horizon that things could get overwhelming pretty fast. Your new BFF is Mai and gang, whose house you are staying at; they are loveable and get you into the right events at the right time, such as helping you through the qualifiers and getting you cars to race in. 

Forza Horizon drops you into one of its signature intro sequences that lets you drive through all its racing highlights in a playable teaser reel. From off-road racing, dirt track and street racing, to high speed supercars and spectacular showcase racing that throws in jets, rockets, helicopters, robots and more into the mix.

There is so much to do in this game which is not only jam-packed with races, but is also a treasure hunt for cars through clues and barn finds.

The Garage is a collector’s paradise giving you a chance to customise everything including the paint and find upgrades for cars settings and configurations. All your stylistic creations can be shared online and if you are too lazy to create, you can use all of the community creations as well.

There are cars from major manufacturers, but given the customisation culture in Japan, there is a healthy representation of classics, including the Nissan Silvia, Skyline, Honda NSX-R and for fans of Initial D, the Toyota Sprinter AR86 Trueno, the poster car and one you will definitely want, if you catch my drift. 

Forza Horizon 6 pays a lot of attention to the handling in Japan. Weight matters as you break and round corners. Dropping the traction control system and fiddling with the steering axis dead zones will help your drifting by leaps and bounds. The street races are fast, but the mountain roads are technically challenging, which is a different sort of fun. The elation and joy of sending your car out of control in a perfectly controlled drift around one corner and then seamlessly counter-steering it into a cloud of smoke is unparalleled. 

While the best part of the game is the drift, the showcase races are equally good, ranging from adrenaline-packed obstacle courses to all-out cross country sprints usually involving other faster moving rivals, many of which will surprise you, but no spoilers in this review — you will have to find out for yourself.

The map is filled with events; there are seasonal ones, and some hidden behind specific completion gates, so it is important to keep a vigilant eye, especially if there are certain cars you need to unlock and collect.

Turn 10 Studios has taken a lot of pain in making Horizon 6 as photo real as possible and Japan is chock full of photo spots such as Mount Fuji, Tokyo’s neon lights, Shibuya crossing hops and much more, all waiting to be captured in any car from your garage. It is just so picture perfect, you do not get Japan in one season but all four.

Forza Horizon 6 is one of the most beautiful games out this year and it is quite hard to find a flaw. It combines competent racing with an astounding amount of detail in its handling, cars and world. There are hours of races and when you are not racing, there is so much of Japan to explore and enjoy.

Horizon 6 is whatever you want it to be — from your dream Japan road trip in your favourite car or a touge racing challenge sprint, to your very own collect-‘em-all fantasy garage and everything in between. 

Published – June 05, 2026 02:41 pm IST