Forza Horizon 6 review scores are in — and it's the best in the series
Forza Horizon 6 launches on May 19, 2026, and early reviews are near-unanimous: this is the best Forza Horizon yet. The game scores 89–92 on Metacritic depending on platform and 91 on OpenCritic with a 100% recommendation rate. If you're on Game Pass Ultimate or PC Game Pass, it costs nothing extra on day one.
Evolution, not revolution
Critics are clear that Horizon 6 doesn't reinvent the wheel — it polishes it. Playground Games has kept the arcade-racing formula intact: an open world, a festival setting, and a career mode where you climb from newcomer to Horizon Legend. The new setting is Japan, and the game's largest city to date serves as its centrepiece. Touge mountain races and JDM car culture are woven throughout.
Over 550 licensed cars are available at launch, each with deep customization options including 540-degree wheel rotation. The career mode frames your progress through the Horizon festival, earning wristbands as you work toward the top of the leaderboard.
The hardware story
Performance is a genuine highlight. Reviewers report no significant bugs across any platform, and the game runs well even on the entry-level Xbox Series S. On PC, the options are extensive — ray tracing, path tracing, frame generation, and upscaling are all supported, alongside a per-element graphics tuner for lower-end machines. System requirements are also reportedly modest, with older GPUs like the GTX 1650 listed as viable.
Price and access
The Standard Edition costs £59.99 in the UK and $69.99 in the US. Deluxe and Premium editions run higher, with Premium buyers getting four days of early access starting May 15. Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass subscribers play at no additional cost from day one, May 19.
For a series that has been promising a definitive open-world racer for over a decade, the consensus this time is that Horizon 6 actually delivers. Whether "not a revolution" is a problem depends on how much you liked the previous entries — but with scores this high and a day-one Game Pass drop, there's very little reason to wait.
