Forza Horizon has become a quintessential Xbox series over the years. I’ve loved my time with almost every entry, from all the way back with Forza Horizon‘s Colorado to Forza Horizon 4‘s take on Great Britain, pretty much every game has given me the digital road trip that I so often crave. I must admit though, Horizon 5 was a bit of a dip for me; open-world Mexico just didn’t have the stopping power of previous entries in the series, despite the game around it remaining fantastic. Well, I can safely say that Forza Horizon 6 is remedying pretty much every issue I had with the previous game. Horizon Japan is amazing, and a real return to form for developer Playground Games.
How do I know this? Well, I’ve been taking part in a big Forza Horizon 6 preview in recent days – one that provided the game’s full open world to explore (except for its high-level bonus island), alongside a handful of races and events. While those races and events were pretty much as I expected from an FH game at this point, the map did surprise me a little bit. This is easily the biggest, densest and most diverse Forza Horizon map to date, and I can’t wait to get back to it next month. If you too found FH5’s map a little empty in places, you’ve got nothing to worry about with Horizon Japan.
Twisting city streets, huge alpine forests, sweeping highway networks, charming Japanese villages, hidden coastlines – Horizon 6’s map has everything I want from an open-world racer. It all connects together well too; there’s never a sense of wasted open space driving around this particular Forza Horizon map. You’ve probably heard about how dense Tokyo City is, and while that’s true, the rural areas of FH6 surprised me most. We’re looking at the most interesting set of landscapes the series has had to offer, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing more of the game’s races and other events play out across the breadth of Horizon Japan. This has the potential to be best map in the series so far.
As you’d expect, it’s all bloody gorgeous too. This demo version of FH6 only contained the game’s 30FPS Quality mode, but it looked a real step up from previous efforts to my eye and was super stable as well. Subtle, diffused lighting from headlights during dusk and streets lined with fallen cherry blossom leaves stood out as lovely little visual flourishes from my hands-on time with the game, but we’re sure there’s much more to it than that. All I can say is that Horizon Japan is a real looker, and that includes the Xbox Series S version where I played this preview. The team has assured us that a 60FPS Performance mode will be available in the full game at launch as well, and I’m curious to see what changes have been made with that mode on Series X|S – but we’ll have to wait for launch to find out.
When it comes to the game’s campaign, this preview version of FH6 didn’t quite give me as clear of a vision for how the full version will play out, aside from its included events being very typical Forza Horizon. I got to experience a race or two, a few of the game’s new dynamic events and some extremely tight and twisty drift sequences (and other PR stunts); which were all great, but didn’t really serve up anything I haven’t seen before in some form with past games. Playground has said all the right things when it comes to the newly-reworked campaign progression though, and based on what I’ve played so far, I have no doubts that the team will deliver. I’ll just have to wait for the full release to see how all of that plays out as I get deeper into the main campaign.
I was already incredibly excited for Forza Horizon 6 and the series’ much-anticipated move to Japan, but this week’s preview has only made me want to play the full game even more. After spending a few days exploring its open world, I can safely say that Horizon Japan is the team’s most impressive driving playground to date, and the visuals on offer are a notable step up too. The campaign requires a little more playtime to get a grasp of than what I was afforded in this demo, but given that Playground seems to have really listened to the feedback about Forza Horizon 5’s map, we’re going to give them the benefit of doubt and assume the same care and attention has been paid to the campaign too. Forza Horizon 6 is shaping up to be an incredible open-world racing game, and potentially the franchise’s best entry to date.
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