Forza Horizon 6 hands on: bringing the series back down to earth

Forza Horizon 6 dials it down just a little bit. Playground Games' open-world racing sequel takes the series on a long-awaited trip to Japan, but the player isn't ostentatiously air-dropping in as a racing star. This time, the game — which I've played the first hour of in a preview build supplied by Microsoft, and spent a further few hours exploring — frames you as a mere motoring tourist, invited to the country by your friend Mei and hoping to qualify for the Horizon festival.

Despite this humble backstory, there's still a showboating prologue, previewing the cars, the racing disciplines, and the scenic highlights of the game's map. The first thing you do in a game is race a Nissan GT-R against a Shinkansen bullet train through avenues of pink cherry blossom, Mount Fuji towering in the background. Then you take the wheel of a Dakar truck to tear down a snowy mountainside as jets and choppers roar overhead. Then you drift a yellow Porsche down the curves of a hillside touge route. Then you race the game's cover star, the Toyota GR GT Prototype, as a spacebound rocket counts down to launch.

It's pretty exciting, and it looks gorgeous, but set against the extravagance of its predecessor, it feels like an obligation: This is how Forza Horizon 6 starts because this is how we expect a Forza Horizon game to start. When it comes to the campaign, Playground certainly has more modest beginnings in mind. In a recent interview with IGN, the developers explained that they intended to create a more "curated" campaign in which the player graduates progressively through car classes via a wristband system, inspired by the original 2012 Forza Horizon.

This is music to my ears, and not just because my memories of that game are so fond. As much as I love Forza Horizon 5 — realistically, it's as good as any other game in this legendarily consistent series — its maximalism can be overwhelming. I experienced it as a flood of car unlocks that came faster than I could drive them, and map icons offering more events than I felt I would ever be able to check off.

There are suggestions of this new back-to-basics approach detectable in the demo, although in terms of structure, it's a pretty limited snapshot — essentially just three qualifying races, and a few other familiar activities like drift zones, speed traps, and "danger zone" jumps to try out. It mostly feels like business as usual for a game series that is the definition of "not broken, so don't fix it."

The starting car lineup is indeed on the modest side. Mei helpfully hands me the three C-class cars needed to compete in the three qualifying races: a tastily modified 1989 Silvia K's with deep skirts and fat rims for road racing, a '94 Celica GT-Four for rallying, and a 1970 GMC Jimmy for off-roading. The towering American 4x4 doesn't really fit the Japanese theme, but its giant tires and jacked suspension are handy for exploring the landscape.

The entire map is available to drive, and this is where Forza Horizon 6 begins to assert a different personality than its predecessor. Horizon 5's Mexico, like Horizon 3's Australia, is a spectacular assemblage of contrasting biomes. Japan just isn't like that geographically — no jungles or sand dunes here, no active volcanoes or barren deserts.

Horizon 6's Japan is more reminiscent of Horizon 4's Britain in the way it smoothly integrates historical landmarks, forested countryside, picturesque villages, intimate coastline, and characterful city streets — though unlike Britain, it climbs to an extensive, forbidding mountain range in the north, which affords a spectacular view of the entire map. It also has Tokyo City, the closest the series has yet come to capturing an iconic global metropolis. There's no way Horizon 6's condensed map can accommodate the awe-inspiring scale of the real Tokyo. But it's still thrilling to flash through Shibuya junction, gaze up at Tokyo Tower, and climb spiraling spaghetti junctions onto the sky-high strands of the Expressway. Drive it at nighttime and you could be playing a graphically lush update of Tokyo Xtreme Racer.

Playground Games' developers told IGN that their data reveals a large cohort of Forza Horizon players who don't engage with the campaign structure, don't collect many cars or credits, and just "vibe-drive" around the map. The intention with Forza Horizon 6 is to give them more stuff to discover and do organically. The relatively empty map of the demo was a good opportunity to test the success of this, and I did find a few enticing new features.

In the hills north of Tokyo, I stumbled upon a time trial circuit that I could begin lapping and setting times on without entering an event menu and breaking up my exploration session. The whole map is littered with regional Mascots — cute representations of Japanese foods that, when smashed, squeak adorably and grant credits. (Mascots replace the earlier games' Fast Travel boards that reduce the cost of fast travel, which is now free to any previously visited point.) Mascot hunting is a pretty effective way to grind out credits without having to engage in racing, in the early game at least.

My favorite new addition so far is the aftermarket cars, found by the side of the road and in parking lots dotted around the map. They're available to buy at a discounted price, and they often come with performance or cosmetic modifications, like a cut-price, Craigslist version of the Horizon Edition prize cars. Each location pulls randomly from a themed list of cars, so you don't know what will be on sale when you rock up. Despite the Horizon Autoshow store being unavailable in the demo, I was able to add a few tasty rides to my collection from aftermarket finds — including, to my delight, a rare pocket rocket. In a lot in the shadow of the Tokyo Expressway, I found a tuned B-class Autozam AZ-1, the minuscule mid-engined kei car of the '90s.

It's also possible to customize Mei's garage using a bewildering range of furniture, decorations, and mechanic's gear. (Is any video game genre safe from cozy interior design?) This is just a foretaste of the Estate, a portion of the map that the player will be able to own and landscape, planning roads and adding buildings.

It won't be until the final review code that we know whether Playground Games has successfully held the overwhelm at bay and delivered a more grounded and digestible Forza Horizon. (The January gameplay overview hinted at the inclusion of a Gundam mecha, which is hardly down-to-earth.) The Horizon 6 demo mostly exudes the reassuring hum of a game series, and team, that have never broken their stride and aren't about to start now. But as I cruised its typically beautiful map, I found soulful new open-world features and support for a more relaxed, exploratory, maybe even mindful playstyle — a subtle shift in Forza Horizon's character, and one I'm fully on board with.

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Forza Horizon 6 will be released on May 19 for Windows PC and Xbox Series X. A PlayStation 5 version will follow later.