Forza Horizon 6’s Take on Tokyo Looks Beautiful but Barren

Playground Games has given us a glimpse of pure, unadulterated Forza Horizon 6 gameplay ahead of the May 19 release. It’s our first opportunity to sample some of the game’s map of Japan at a normal pace, including a slice of the Tokyo city environment and areas immediately beyond its limits, seemingly in a spring or summer setting. And while there’s certainly much to like about the world as it stands—the natural areas are gorgeous in a typical Horizon fashion, and the urban portions do seem denser and more vertical than anything before—I can’t shake a nagging feeling that something was missing during those nine minutes of cruising.

Let’s start with the good. The transition from the countryside into the city, climbing highways with circular overpasses, snaking through the forest until you get that first view of bridges, buildings, and the Tokyo Tower, was impressive. Cities in Horizon games have previously felt like afterthoughts to me—a blip, a change of pace, but not rich or deep enough to explore for a length of time. That certainly doesn’t appear to be the case here, given the detail of the scenery within FH6’s rendition of Tokyo, and how the Metropolitan Expressway has been faithfully woven into its fabric. I can’t wait to see it at night.

The areas beyond the city, too, look wonderful, but you already expected that. The highways are long and mostly straight, giving you ample space to hit top speed in something like a Saleen S7 LM—an oddly niche choice for this gameplay snippet. I particularly liked the stretch that ran along the coast, which appears about six minutes in.

Forza Horizon 6: 9 Minutes of Exclusive Gameplay | IGN First

All that being said, I can’t deny I’m concerned about the vibes, particularly in Tokyo proper. First off, the streets are wide—like, really wide. And we knew Playground would go this route to prioritize playability over authenticity. Judging from the result, though, the devs certainly had room to scale roads closer to reality while still being wide enough to comfortably accommodate multiple cars at speed. Plus, blasting through narrow streets can be fun!

The surreal expanse of open asphalt in FH6’s Tokyo leads to another problem, though: It creates space that should be filled, in a bustling metropolis, with cars. And this is a fine line that every open-world racing game has to walk. Throw in too much traffic, and smooth driving becomes impossible; not to mention, syncing all those computer-controlled drones across every player on a server is a bear. But give the city too little, and you end up with the deafening emptiness of this footage.

During this slice, we see entire streets in Tokyo connecting major thoroughfares with nary a single car on them. On streets that should be more populated, there’s only one car as far as the eye can see. Lose the hustle and bustle of traffic in a city like Tokyo, and you lose its soul. There are no sources of ambient noise, and, this being Forza Horizon, no pedestrians on sidewalks to really convey the impression that people actually live here and you’re not in the modern gaming equivalent of a Twilight Zone episode. (No, I don’t think you should be able to run over people in Horizon, but Midnight Club: LA managed to replicate all these ancillary signs of life, sans vehicular manslaughter, and released with only a Teen rating—18 years ago! Surely, FH6 could do the same.)

Everyone plays these games for different reasons. I know plenty of people enjoy Horizon together, but, for me, it’s always been a more solitary experience. Occasionally, particularly in the FH4 days, I’d have a small group of friends that I’d hop online with, but we’d never have an objective, so everything would just devolve into donuts and terrorizing traffic until somebody got bored and left. Personally, having just had the opportunity to visit Tokyo for the first time in my life last year, more than anything, I want this to feel like an escape there in a car I love.

Which gets to my fear with this game: That Playground has, once again, built a peerlessly rich and detailed world, but didn’t go that extra mile to make it feel lived-in and real. At this point, if it comes at the expense of playability, so be it. There is enormous potential here for FH6 to truly set itself apart from what’s come before, in a series that, while very competent, has appeared content to repeatedly deliver a cookie-cutter experience in various locales.

Perhaps traffic was turned down for this play session; it definitely seems like it’s on a lower setting than what we saw during the Developer Direct in January. But even that earlier look felt lacking, so we’ll have to see how the final product turns out. It seems IGN, who presented this first look, has a month of FH6 content ahead, so maybe we won’t even have to wait that long.

Got a tip? Reach out to tips@thedrive.com