Playground Games released “Forza Horizon 6” on May 19, about four and a half years after its previous title in the series, “Forza Horizon 5.” What makes “Forza Horizon 6” so special is that it takes place in Japan, a location fans have been waiting on for years.
Japan has contributed a lot to car culture, with things like “Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift”, “Initial D”, the invention of drifting and the Midnight Club, an underground street racing club.
The scenery in “Forza Horizon 6” has a good balance of Tokyo City, the mountains and the small villages on the outskirts of the city. The outskirts are full of small fishing villages, ponds, lakes, flowers and cherry blossom trees.
Playground Games usually models their current title after the previous title and adds some features, but “Forza Horizon 6” is different compared to the other games. It features the wristband progression, where each section in the game has its own challenges for players to complete in order to earn festival points.
You start off with the yellow wristband, which unlocks a small number of races and challenges, and as you progress, you earn more wristbands. The final wristband, the gold wristband, unlocks Legend Island and the Goliath Race, which is exclusive to gold wristband members. This makes progression a lot harder, especially because in order to get the gold wristband, you must master all types of racing, not just road racing like in previous titles.
“Forza Horizon 6” also follows its identity of being an open world game with a lot of freedom for players to do whatever they want. Even with the new progression system, the game never stops encouraging exploration. The moment you earn a new wristband, the map opens up even more, which makes it feel earned instead of handed to you. The new structure makes every upgrade, every tune and every completed challenge feel like a step toward something bigger, not just another box checked.
In the “” series, there are different classes of cars. The cars are organized into classes based on the Performance Index (PI). The classes are D, C, B, A, S1, S2, X and the new addition of the R class, which has the same range of PI as the S2 class. However, the R class is meant for track specific cars instead of road legal cars, which is what S2 consists of.
I like this change because it reminds me of women’s and men’s sports. Men are biologically stronger, so they don’t compete with women. It’s the same concept for Forza cars, with some meant specifically for going fast and having an unfair advantage over cars that are built for more than just speed.
Playground Games also changed the driving physics to match Japan’s terrain. Mountain roads feel tighter, which rewards control over straight speed. Drifting events benefit from improved weight transfer and tire‑grip modeling, making them feel closer to the real techniques of drifting, popularized by “Initial D” and Japan’s early drift scene. The result is a game that respects the culture it’s portraying, rather than just using it as a location.
