Review Forza Horizon 6: PC Ray Tracing Looks Great - A Hint Of The Project Helix Port To Come?

Forza Horizon 6 marks a significant step for the beloved racing franchise as it recreates the Tokyo cityscape and wider rural Japan. Developed by Playground Games, this entry leaves the Xbox One consoles behind for a true current-generation release. The shift brings immense expectations and places pressure on the game's underlying technology to deliver a proper next-gen experience across PC and Xbox Series X/S.

While racing series like Gran Turismo, Ridge Racer, Tokyo Xtreme Racer and Project Gotham Racing have all drawn inspiration from Tokyo and its surrounding regions, Horizon 6 sets itself apart by attempting a large-scale, open-world interpretation of the metropolis. In classic Horizon fashion, the map is a heavily condensed version of the actual city rather than a one-to-one recreation, with wider roads and much less vehicle and pedestrian traffic than the real thing. However, this distillation serves to compress the Japanese driving experience into a dense, varied world that feels like the largest aggregate urban space in series history.

The demands of rendering this new environment bring fresh complexities to the engine, which needs to handle dense urban spaces, significant elevation changes and thick forests. Despite looking like a bit of a "28 Days Later" depiction of Tokyo, without the characteristic hustle and bustle of the real metropolis, the choice of colours and materials is top notch, and FH6 remains one of the best-looking racing titles.

The PC version is where the game's graphical capabilities truly shine, offering a glimpse into the future with advanced ray tracing features. Unlike its predecessor, which only featured limited self-reflections on player cars, Horizon 6 introduces a new ray-traced global illumination (RTGI) system. This system works alongside traditional rasterised lighting to add nuance and realism, allowing objects and cars to feel significantly more grounded in their environments through realistic light propagation and subtle shadows.

Ray-traced reflections make an even more profound impact on the overall visual presentation. On PC, the city's buildings now reflect like a mirror back onto the player, replacing the dynamically generated cube-maps and easily broken screen-space reflections (SSR) that are typically used. This robust reflection system extends to vehicles, allowing cars to reflect within one another, and provides much more coherent reflections on bodies of water in the countryside.

Naturally, these advanced graphical features require substantial computing power. Reaching high frame rates with maximum settings requires top-tier hardware, though upscaling and frame generation are available to help manage the load. A highly welcome addition to the PC version is a live preview feature that allows players to adjust major graphical settings and watch the changes occur in real-time, without needing to reboot the game as was the case in Forza Horizon 5.

Shifting focus to the Xbox consoles, the performance mode delivers a beautiful and highly stable experience. The game targets a 4K resolution on the Series X and 1080p on the Series S, using dynamic resolution scaling to maintain a flawless 60fps without a single recorded dip in our testing. While the Series S understandably loses some clarity and distant detail compared to its more powerful sibling, both consoles manage to present a visually impressive experience.

The Xbox quality mode holds a pleasant surprise too, granting console players a small taste of ray tracing. In this 30fps mode, Xbox consoles activate self-reflections on cars, similar to the feature seen in the previous game on PC. However, the consoles miss out on the large-scale environmental RT reflections, relying instead on an effective but sometimes inconsistent mix of cube maps and SSR to reflect the world and other vehicles.

Beyond the technical achievements, Horizon 6 maintains the strong atmosphere, robust music selection, and festival vibes the series is known for. While it does not introduce a major shift in the underlying game design - returning to the wristband progression system from the first game and retaining immediate access to various cars - it remains an incredibly fun experience. Bolstered by a fantastic audio presentation featuring Japan-specific music tracks like YMO's Rydeen, it stands as a fast, beautifully optimised title that cements Playground Games as one of Microsoft's most reliable studios.