| Forza Horizon 6 | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Release Date | Gameplay & Story | Pre-Order & DLC | Preview Review |
Everything We Know About Forza Horizon 6
Forza Horizon 6 Plot
Forza Horizon 6 is set in a highly stylized version of Japan, bringing the Horizon Festival to a new country and culture. Players will take on the role of a newbie in Japan and work your way up through the festival ranks.
Forza Horizon 6 Gameplay
Forza Horizon 6 retains the series’ open‑world racing foundation. As with prior Horizon titles, players can explore freely, enter events at will, discover points of interest, and customize vehicles. New features include a Collection Journal progression system, expanded social and multiplayer elements such as Car Meets, and player‑driven experiences in the open world. At launch, the game will include over 550 cars that can be collected, tuned, and showcased in unlockable garages.
Forza Horizon 6 Release Date
Forza Horizon 6 is scheduled to release on May 19, 2026 for Xbox Series X|S and PC, including availability on Xbox Game Pass on day one. A PlayStation 5 version is confirmed to launch later in 2026, though an exact date has not yet been announced.
| Digital Storefronts | ||
|---|---|---|
 Steam |
 Xbox |
 Playstation |
| $69.99 | Coming Soon | |
Forza Horizon 6 Review (Preview)
Beautiful Roads With a Whole Lot of Oversteer
Forza Horizon and Gran Turismo may both be racing games, but they approach driving in completely different ways. Where Gran Turismo is built around precision—clean racing lines, disciplined braking, and cars that behave exactly as you expect—Forza Horizon leans into freedom. The handling is looser and clearly designed to prioritize fun over strict realism. Cars slide more and the game actively encourages you to push things a little further than you normally would.
Coming from years of Gran Turismo, that difference isn’t something that immediately clicks. When I first jumped into Horizon with 5, the handling felt off, too loose and unpredictable compared to what I was used to. But the more I played, the more it started to make sense. I realized it’s less about hitting the perfect line and more about embracing the chaos a bit. Driving fast, sliding through corners, and making it all look good while doing it.
Now Forza Horizon 6 takes us to Japan, and while the game is, on the surface, another ridiculously beautiful Forza Horizon game, I can already feel some of the same old issues creeping back in, particularly with how sensitive the handling is and how easily the cars tend to oversteer. But I’m getting ahead of myself… why don’t I tell you more first about the preview.
Ultimate Freedom Drive
If this is your first rodeo with the Forza Horizon series, here’s all you really need to know: Forza Horizon 6 is an open-world sandbox racing game where you’re free to drive anywhere, enter races whenever you want, and pretty much decide for yourself what kind of driver you want to be.
You’re not locked into a strict career path. You can be doing a street race, or fly down a highway in a supercar, and even drive off-road in a rally car because you saw a dirt trail and thought, "Yeah, why not?" That freedom is the whole point of Horizon. The game isn’t just about winning races, it’s more about the feeling of driving, exploring the map, and constantly finding something to do without really trying. If you’re used to traditional sim racing, a change of mindset is required. You’re not here to chase perfect laps, you’re here to make your own fun, even if that means getting a little messy along the way.
And of course, there are a lot of cars. Not just to collect, but to tune and tweak to fit how you actually drive.
A Stunning Drive Around Japan
So far, Forza Horizon 6 easily has the most beautiful setting and map in the series. The vibes change depending on where you are—mountainside roads, dense city streets, quiet outskirts, even beachside highways—and it never really feels like you’re driving through the same place for too long.
That makes even the "in-between" moments feel rewarding. Getting from one race to another doesn’t feel like downtime, it is part of the experience. You’re constantly discovering new routes, new scenery, and even new events just by driving naturally. It turns what would normally be dead space in other racing games into something engaging, which makes the entire game feel more seamless and alive instead of just a series of races stitched together.
You unlock more of the map naturally as you explore, and the GPS works like an actual navigation system, guiding you with clear routes. It sounds like a small thing, but when the map is this big, good navigation makes a huge difference because you’ll be using it constantly.
Surprisingly, my favorite area isn’t the main city itself but it’s the outskirts. The roads open up, and you get long stretches and scenic routes that let you just cruise instead of constantly braking and turning. The city looks great, but the outskirts are where I actually enjoyed driving the most.
That said, while the scenery is lovely and the traffic is somewhat realistic, it’s still not as reactive as you’d expect. If you get into an accident with another car, there really aren’t any ramifications. Traffic doesn’t respond in a meaningful way, and the world doesn’t react to you causing chaos on the road. It still very much feels like a sandbox, not a living city, which is fine for an arcade racer.
But it does affect how you experience the world over time. Because there are no real consequences, driving around can start to feel a bit weightless. There’s no tension in weaving through traffic, no real risk in making mistakes, and no sense that the world is reacting to your decisions. It lowers the stakes, which makes casual driving easy to jump into, but also easier to disengage from.
That creates an interesting trade-off. The map is beautiful enough that you want to spend time just driving, but because the world doesn’t push back, there’s less incentive to stay in those moments for long. You’re more likely to treat driving as a way to get to the next event rather than something meaningful on its own. It doesn’t ruin the experience, but it does hold the game back from turning its already great world into something that truly feels alive.
At some point, an autodrive feature will become available that can take you to your destination if you don’t feel like making the trip yourself. In theory, it’s a nice quality-of-life feature. In practice, I didn’t like it very much because it just drove recklessly and crashed my car more than once. At that point, I’d honestly rather just drive myself.
Current Handling Favors Rally Racing
There are a lot of race types here and not all of them are just standard point-A-to-point-B racing. You’ve got circuit races, drag races, speed traps, rally events, cross-country races, and even those ridiculous jump challenges where the goal is basically to launch your car and hope for the best. In the preview, the objective of each race isn’t necessarily to cross the finish line first, it’s more about earning enough skill points to progress, which actually makes the tricky handling much more tolerable, since you’re not under pressure to cross the finish line first (yet).
This variety helps a lot because it keeps the game from feeling repetitive. More importantly, it forces you to use different types of cars. You can’t just find one car you like and use it for everything, because a car built for street racing is going to struggle in rally, and a rally car is going to feel terrible in a drag race.
It pushes you out of that comfort zone of sticking to a single main car and encourages you to build out a proper garage. You start thinking less about your favorite car and more about the right car for the situation. That makes you engage more with the game’s systems—tuning, upgrading, even just learning how different cars handle.
The game constantly pushes you to switch things up, and that keeps things interesting because you’re always adjusting, not just your car, but how you drive. Over time, you naturally become a more flexible driver. You’re not just good at one type of race, you start to understand different driving styles, different surfaces, and how each car responds to them.
It also makes progression feel more meaningful. Instead of just chasing faster cars, you’re building a collection that actually serves a purpose. Every new car isn’t just a stat upgrade, it’s another tool you can use, another way to approach the game.
Surprisingly, my favorite events so far are the rally races. I usually don’t like dirt racing in most racing games, but it works really well here because of how the cars handle in Forza Horizon 6. There’s a lot of oversteer, and drifting is very easy to do, so on dirt roads where you’re supposed to be sliding around corners anyway, the handling makes a lot more sense. Instead of fighting the car, it finally feels like the game and the track design are on the same page, and that’s when the driving becomes really fun.
Hyper-Sensitive Handling Leans Hard Into Oversteer
And now we get to the handling—easily the thing that’s going to make or break this for a lot of people. I don’t have a full racing rig, so this is all from a controller perspective, but even then, it’s immediately noticeable how sensitive everything feels. A slight nudge on the stick is sometimes all it takes for the car to start oversteering. It’s very easy to lose the rear, even when you’re not trying to push the car that hard.
And the problem doesn’t just end there because once you start to oversteer, you will naturally tend to over-correct, which then throws off your positioning for the next corner. It creates this chain reaction where one small mistake compromises your racing line and makes recovery across the next few corners much more difficult.
What stood out to me is that this doesn’t really change much whether you have assists on or off. You’d expect those settings to smooth things out or at least make the cars a bit more forgiving, but the overall feel stays pretty twitchy.
Because of that, you can’t just jump into a race and expect things to click right away. You really have to spend time learning how each car behaves, adjusting your inputs, and sometimes even tuning the car just to make it feel manageable. For some players, that learning curve might be part of the fun. For others, it might feel like an unnecessary hurdle.
Tuning One Car at a Time
Which brings me to the cars and tuning. There are only three cars available in the preview build, and I’m not even going to pretend to be unbiased here—I’m already happy because the Nissan Silvia is one of them. If that isn’t your style, there’s also a Toyota Celica and GMC Jimmy. But if those still doesn’t tickle your fancy, worry not, because there will be over 500 cars available at launch and if what’s available now is any kind of foreshadowing for the game’s full lineup, then that’s a very good sign because Nissan in general has always sat in that sweet spot where they’re fast, very tunable, and more importantly, fun to drive.
Tuning is eventually going to have presets you can follow and apply, but in the preview, manual tuning is the only one available and what I spent most of my time with. If you’re not familiar with how Forza Horizon tuning works, buckle up, because if you’re coming from other sim racers, a lot of what you know doesn’t translate cleanly here. In games like F1 25, tuning is very structured. Small and calculated adjustments that follow real-world logic, where you can usually predict how a change will affect the car’s behavior on track.
Forza Horizon feels different. The way the systems translate to actual driving isn’t always as straightforward. It feels like its own thing, and you kind of have to learn it through trial and error rather than relying on real-world intuition.
For players coming from more traditional sim racers, that can be a bit jarring. Instead of applying what you already know, you’re almost starting from scratch.
That said, tuning is actually a pretty big part of the experience. Since the handling can be very sensitive and oversteer-heavy, tuning isn’t just for people who want to min-max stats, but also for the people who just want their car to feel good to drive. You’ll find yourself adjusting things not to make the car faster, but to make it more stable, more predictable, and just more comfortable for you.
And in a weird way, that fits the whole open-world sandbox structure of the game, because Forza Horizon naturally gives you plenty of time behind the wheel to experiment and learn. You’re going to spend a lot of time driving anyway—going to races, exploring the map, retrying events—so learning your car, understanding how it behaves, and slowly tuning it to match your driving style feels less like a chore and more like part of the journey.
Looks Better Than Ever, But Still Plays the Same
Forza Horizon 6 is easily the best-looking game in the series so far. From the lighting to the environments, everything just feels more polished and more alive visually. Japan as a setting does a lot of heavy lifting here, but even beyond that, there’s a clear step up in how the world is presented.
But once you get past how good it looks, it still plays very much like any other Forza Horizon game. The structure, the flow, the way races and exploration are handled… it’s all familiar. Depending on what you’re looking for, that can either be a good thing or a bit disappointing.
If you’re already a fan of the series, this is an easy recommendation. It delivers more of what Horizon does best: a huge map, a ton of things to do, and that same "drive wherever, do whatever" freedom. But if you were hoping for something that significantly changes how Horizon feels moment to moment, at least from this preview, it seems like the game is playing things safe and sticking close to what already works.
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Forza Horizon 6 Product Information
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| Title | FORZA HORIZON 6 |
|---|---|
| Release Date | May 19, 2026 |
| Developer | Playground Games |
| Publisher | Racing, Simulation |
| Supported Platforms | PC, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5 |
| Genre | Racing, Simulation |
| Number of Players | 1 (Campaign Mode), 12 (Online Mode) |
| ESRB Rating | E |
| Official Website | Forza Horizon 6 Official Website |
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