One of your tasks in Forza Horizon 6's Series 3 Autumn series is to travel to Naruo Golf Course to photograph the 1997 Maserati Ghibli Cup for the Afternoon Tee challenge. But unlike most tourist destinations, Naruo Golf Course isn't explicitly marked on your map. To save you from driving around Japan to find the one golf course, I'll show you where to go.

Forza Horizon 6 Naruo Golf Course location

Naruo Golf Course is in the centre of the Minamino region, north of Tokyo. While spotting the course is hard from the map—it's all green and orange, after all—it's surrounded by landmarks such as the Dodge Charger 69 Treasure Car, an Aftermarket Car site, the Airfield Trail dirt race, and the Naruo Cross-Country Circuit event. You'll also find Skirakawa-Go to the north and Ito Airfield to the east.

Once here, just drive behind the 365 convenience store and past the golf buggies to find the course—it's hard to miss.

For the Afternoon Tee photo challenge, you need to take a photo of the 1997 Maserati Ghibli Cup on the golf course's grass. You can earn this car from the Scenic Scrambles championship or purchase it from the Autoshow for just 102,000 CR.

For completing the Afternoon Tee challenge, you'll earn the "Relax, you're doing fine" quick chat (pretty worthless for most of us) and two Festival Playlist points.

Those points will go towards Autumn's 2017 Abarth 124 Spider and the 2020 Lamborghini Huracan EVO reward cars. Plus, you'll also be one step closer to unlocking the Series 3 reward cars—the 2024 Lamborghini Temerario (exclusive to this Series) and the 2022 Ferrari 296 GTB. These are the real reasons to complete this challenge, let's be honest.

Tanks for the Coffee is one of the new challenges in Forza Horizon 6's Series 3 Autumn series, requiring you to smash 20 tank lattes for a frankly measly reward. While it gives you the hint to head to Ine, that's easier said than done if you're not familiar with the map. Plus, everyone's currently driving around there trying to break tank lattes, so it's a bit of a fight to get what you need.

Forza Horizon 6 tank latte locations

You'll find tank lattes in the town of Ine on the north end of the Ito region on the east coast. You'll see lattes spawn on the side of the road and along the dock—including the driveways next to houses, which can be harder to spot.

There are tons of spawns around here, but a good place to start is on the main road through the town, where multiple spawn around the Minka house and the Aftermarket Car location. All you have to do to smash them is drive through them at speed.

Unfortunately, other players can break these tank lattes, which prevents you from scoring a point, like the kind of cursed enemy kill camping you see in MMOs. If this happens, just keep on searching and double back later if you still need more.

For completing the Tanks for the Coffee challenge by smashing 20 of them, you'll earn the Karaoke emote (if you care about that) and much more importantly, three Festival Playlist points. This season, those points will go towards the 2017 Abarth 124 Spider (exclusive) and the 2020 Lamborghini Huracan EVO. You'll also be another step closer to unlocking the Series 3 reward cars—the 2024 Lamborghini Temerario (exclusive) and the 2022 Ferrari 296 GTB. They're much more exciting prizes than an emote, if you ask me.

To this day, the now-stagnant Burnout series is still the prime example of an arcade racer that every other contemporary is compared to. Naturally, it's spurred on a bunch of imitators and spiritual successors over the years, especially after the decline of Criterion Games into a support studio at EA. Nowadays, instead of pioneering racing games, it's a "Battlefield Studio".

One such spiritual successor was 2025's Wreckreation, created by Three Fields Entertainment, a small team of veterans, including from Criterion Games, making games since 1999. Unfortunately, Wreckreaction launched to mixed reviews, not quite reaching the heights of its inspiration.

But it's not the end of the team or the series. "We've made a double announcement today," the developer's latest statement on Patreon reads. "We're making a sequel to Wreckreation … It's built around aggression, pressure, risk, and of course consequence."

"Over the last six months we've been talking directly to players about what they want from a modern arcade driving game, and Wreckreation 2 is the result of those conversations," said studio head Fiona Sperry. "From handling and progression to events and world design, our community has already helped shape key aspects of the experience. We're building this game with the players, not just for them."

There's already a short announcement trailer for the game, showing off a bunch of unique cars (I'm a big fan of all the classic muscle), the arcade handling and, of course, plenty of crashouts inspired by Burnout. Cars go absolutely flying.

The second announcement is that the team has formed a new studio, When Tides Turn. "While Wreckreation began life at Three Fields Entertainment, we've reached a point where it makes sense for the project to have a new home, one that we own completely."

"Nothing has changed about the people making the game. It's still the same team, with the same passion and the same ambition to build the best open-world arcade racer we possibly can. This is simply the next step in our journey."

The developer will continue to post updates on Wreckreation 2 on its Patreon, and you can also sign up to playtest the game. There's no such thing as too much Burnout, so hopefully the Wreckreation sequel delivers where the first one didn't quite hit the mark.

Special commentary on this classic PC Gamer re-review provided by:

I’m not sure anybody has ever had more fun making a game than Sumo Digital did when it made Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed.

On paper, the brief from SEGA would have been as desperately mercenary as they come: make a copy of Nintendo’s monumentally popular Mario Kart, but with Sonic. Take Nintendo’s near-perfect party game series and smear Sega’s blue weirdo and his friends all over it.

Sumo seems to have understood that it was never going to make something pristine with the materials it was given. SEGA found itself resolutely Mean Girls-ed by the end of the ’90s console wars, too scrappy to mean anything as a brand and personally victimised by Nintendo’s radiant coherence.

As mascots go, Mario is a stranger proposition than Sonic—a portly plumber is a weird hero to invest in when you’re a child—but sheer craftsmanship overruled the rule of cool. Sonic found himself too inherently ’90s to hold onto that cool very long anyway, destined for a faltering retreat from the mainstream and a new career in fan fiction.

The first wonderful thing about All-Stars Racing Transformed is that it accepts this: not just about Sonic, but about SEGA’s whole brand. The core cast includes everybody you’d expect: Sonic, Tails, Knuckles and so on, each driving cars that transform into planes and boats as stages change over the course of a race.

Then somebody put their hands on the crossover lever and gave it a push: you can also play as the bloke from Shenmue, who rides around in an OutRun cabinet, or as B.D. Joe from Crazy Taxi. You can play as AiAi from Super Monkey Ball, who appears to have the Dreamcast logo shaved into his head: a gang sign that only middle class ’90 kids will understand.

Nintendo has done this sort of thing before, of course, in the Smash Bros. series. Hell, Sonic is in Smash Bros. Not content to be outdone, however, Sumo leaned even harder on the crossover lever and snapped it off, wholesale embracing Sega’s latter-day existence as a publisher of sober PC strategy games.

You’d be forgiven for not knowing that you wanted to do sick drifts across the deck of After Burner’s aircraft carrier as a tank-driving general from Company of Heroes: but you do, you really do.

You want to fuck up Tails with a well-aimed swarm of bees as a Roman centurion from Total War. You want to fly around a level from Sonic 3 as actual human racing driver Danica Patrick.

Harvest time

You want to do it all as Racing Transformed’s inarguable star, Football Manager: just a regular man in a football-themed car who likes to bellow things like “get in!” as he tumbles from a collapsing bridge in Panzer Dragoon Saga and transforms into a boat.

I can’t express how happy I am that somebody decided to make this, that they were willing to shatter the ideal of a ’90s console brand into pieces and throw it to the crowd.

For this week's photo challenge in Forza Horizon 6, you need to take a photo of a Ferrari in Shikisai-no-Oka, a large flower field. The thing is, there's not exactly a shortage of fields in Japan. To save you from having to scour the map like I did, here's exactly where you need to go.

Forza Horizon 6 Shikisai-no-Oka location

You can find Shikisai-no-Oka in the centre of the Hokubu region to the north of the map—you can actually see the vibrant flowers on the map. It's just up the road from the Lincoln Continental Barn Find, next to the Flower Run Speed Trap event.

To complete the photo challenge, all you need to do is take a photo in any Ferrari—sadly, there aren't any free ones from Barn Finds or Treasure Cars. However, this week's featured car is the 1969 Ferrari Dino 246 GT, so you'll probably want to buy this car anyhow. So, hit two birds with one stone.

Beating this challenge will give you two Festival Playlist points and the Pink Sports Coat (yippee). It's not particularly generous, but at least those points will go towards some new, exclusive Italian sports cars. More specifically, this week's 1984 De Tomaso Pantera GT5, the 2004 Maserati MC12, and the Series' milestone rewards, the Lamborghini Temerario and the Ferrari 296 GTB.

Next, you should drive down to Irokawa Space Center to find the much more lucrative Nangan Treasure Hunt chest before a new one arrives next week.

It's the season of exotic Italian cars in Forza Horizon 6 Series 3, and this week, we're being sent to find a treasure chest near a rocket in Nangan. While tracking down this iconic rocket isn't hard, pinpointing the exact position of the Nangan region Treasure Hunt is a much harder task.

Forza Horizon 6 Nangan region Treasure Hunt location

This week's Festival Playlist Treasure Hunt chest is in Nangan, next to the warehouses and silos to the northeast of the Irokawa Space Center at the bottom of the map, close to the rocket launch pad. Nearby you'll find the Irokawa Space Centre Drag Strip and the Nangan Cross-Country Circuit event. Simply:

1. Travel to the space center on the southern coast of Nangan, in the southwest of the map.
2. Head towards the rocket and turn right at its base to find a group of plain warehouses and silos.
3. Crash into the Treasure Hunt chest to smash it, completing the challenge.

As with previous weeks, you'll earn three Festival Playlist points, 5,000 XP, and 100,000 credits. A pretty good reward for a quick trip down to the space center, wouldn't you agree?

Keeping in the theme of the Series, those Festival Playlist points will go towards various new cars, including this week's 1984 De Tomaso Pantera GT5 and the 2004 Maserati MC12—two stylish sports cars that trump the last few weeks of rewards. You'll also be one step closer to the Series' milestone rewards, the Lamborghini Temerario and the Ferrari 296 GTB.

It's Spring in Forza Horizon 6 Series 2, so we've got another treasure chest to find. While last week sent us into the snowy hills of Sotoyama, this week's Ito region Treasure Hunt calls for a beach day. Finding the specific beach you need on the islands of Japan, you know, where there are tons of beaches, isn't easy. Here's where you need to go.

Forza Horizon 6 Ito region Treasure Hunt location

This week's Festival Playlist Treasure Hunt chest is in Ito, on the beach at the northeast tip of the region, past the coastal town of Ine—you can see the white and blue sign on your map. It's basically as northeast as you can travel in the region, and there are no major events around here, just a billboard. Simply:

1. Travel to the coastal town of Ine in the north of Ito—this is where the Moto Auto Zine story missions take place.
2. Take the road northeast up the narrow coastline on the right side of the harbour.
3. Drive onto the sand and up to the northern tip, where you'll see the chest.
4. Crash into the Treasure Hunt chest to smash it, completing the challenge.

As always, you'll earn three Festival Playlist points, 5,000 XP, and 100,000 credits, which is a good reward for such a quick diversion.

This week, those Festival Playlist points go towards the 2017 Mercedes-AMG GT R and the 2017 Saleen S7 LM, which is much more exciting than last week's trucks to be sure. You should also grab the last few points to unlock the Series 2 milestone rewards, the 1993 Porsche 911 Turbo S Leichtbau and the 2018 Lotus Exige Cup 430, before Series 3 rolls around next week.

As part of this week's Theory of Evolution challenge in Forza Horizon 6's Series 2, you need to earn three stars at the Festival Loop speed zone in the 2001 Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution VI GSR TM. Finding this challenge on the very cluttered map is your first hurdle.

The second is nabbing the full three-star completion. While the Lancer is one of my favourite cars in the game, it's not quite strong enough straight out of the garage. So here's what I recommend.

Forza Horizon 6 Festival Loop speed zone location and how to beat it

You can find the Festival Loop speed zone at the far south side of the Horizon Festival grounds in the centre of the Ohtani region—you're looking for the red sign icon with two cameras on it. This is a very short stretch of dirt (and snow during Winter) that cuts around the festival, with only two turns, and you can start it from either end of the road.

To complete the Theory of Evolution challenge on this course, you need to score three stars, which means maintaining an average of 90 mph. The standard B-class Lancer will struggle to do this, so I recommend upgrading it to S1 for added speed and handling—make sure you've got rally or snow tyres.

You can use the auto upgrade option, but I just quickly downloaded KapienPL's dirt tuning, and it worked a treat. Here's the share code: 129 741 033.

You can pretty safely stamp on the accelerator on the straights, but ease up a little going around the two corners to avoid spinning out or driving on the deeper snow. It's a short speed zone so it's not hard to maintain a high average speed as long as you stay on the dirt path.

The cold chill has arrived yet again in Forza Horizon 6 for Series 2's Winter season, and that means another treasure chest. This week, it's the Sotoyama region Treasure Hunt, sending you to find a small crate surrounded by snow when the entire map is snowy. Bit cruel if you ask me.

Thankfully it's not actually that hard to reach once you know where to look, though I recommend using some snow tyres.

Forza Horizon 6 Sotoyama region Treasure Hunt location

This week's Festival Playlist Treasure Hunt chest is in Sotoyama, next to the small wooden hut in the snowy hills in the far north of the region. In fact, it's almost the farthest north you can go, not far from the Alpine Heights danger sign and the Off Piste wristband event. Simply:

1. Drive up the snow-covered mountains in the north, northeast of Sotoyama.
2. Head up the off-shooting road to find the wooden hut.
3. Crash into the Treasure Hunt chest there to smash it, completing the challenge.

As always, you'll earn three Festival Playlist points, 5,000 XP, and 100,000 credits. I'd say that's pretty good going for a two-minute diversion.

Those Festival Playlist points go towards your Series 2 rewards, which include the 1993 Porsche 911 Turbo S Leichtbau and the 2018 Lotus Exige Cup 430. Of course, there are also the Winter cars up for grabs, the 2006 Dodge Ram SRT-10 and the 2003 Ford F-150 SVT Lightning (two very similar cars, to be honest).

Don't call Galactic Racer "Podracer" in front of its developers—they'll politely point out that their new game is about multiple types of racing in the Star Wars universe, and it is not a sequel to 1999's Episode 1 Racer, despite featuring podracing's most iconic characters and courses. At first this feels like splitting hairs to mollify the strict branding watchdogs of the Walt Disney Corporation, but play a few minutes of the new racer and the distinction starts to make more sense.

Galactic Racer's campaign mode has more in common with Slay the Spire than it does the last major Star Wars racing game—but instead of slinging cards, you're strapping yourself to a rocket going 300 miles per hour.

"We have been making racing games for a long time," Fuse Games creative director Kieran Crimmins said in an interview with PC Gamer at Summer Game Fest. "One of the things we always wanted to bring to racing games in general is a bit more consequence. Your decisions matter, your build matters, the way you play matters, the style you choose matters. I'm not knocking other racing games, there are fantastic racers that are more in that chill space, quite zen. But we wanted something that had real consequence."

Galactic Racer's campaign starts you out at the bottom rung of an underground racing league: before you work your way up to the majors and get to clamber onto a podracer, you'll be flying speeder bikes, landspeeders and skim speeders, which each handle a bit differently but are still faster than the cars in all but the arcadiest of terrestrial racing games. The story follows Hades' lead in returning you to a small outpost between tournaments, where there are a few characters to make idle chat with each time.

The "consequence" comes into play once you jump into a racing league. Here Galactic Racer gives you a selection of races that looks just like Slay the Spire's now-ubiquitous map screen: pick a route through various race types and differing courses, which could be set in day or night and raced forwards or backwards. Wipe out before finishing the league, and you've got to start over—but you'll still earn progress towards a swath of unlocks and pocket some credits to spend on improved parts.

"That's where that structure comes from: it's kind of a roguelike, run structure, which allows us two things," Crimmins said. "You have to build well as well and race well so that you can continue, so your decisions matter. Every line you take matters because the environment has effects on the build.

"Your pure skill matters as well, but on the other side it means that you allow the combinatorics to make racing experience and racing builds that you don't see in other games. An unbelievable amount of options to customize each one of those vehicles, and not just visually, but in the way the build works, the synergies of things that go on there."

I jumped into Galactic Racer on the harder ace difficulty, because I want the experience of piloting a frictionless jet engine through scrapyards and alien canyons to feel dangerous. I got my wish: I crashed out of my first racing league a couple courses in. I made it deeper into my second and third, which gave me a sense of how much variation there really is at play here.

By equipping my landspeeder with a shield ability, for example, I could save myself from otherwise-deadly collisions, and using it enough times across a few races would allow me to unlock a better shield as well as a secondary "racing style" to change my build strategy for a future run. If I swapped out the shield for the Ramjet ability, I could careen past other racers with a sustained turbo boost—but at the higher risk of wiping myself out with one crash.

The one downside to this structure I noticed in an hour-long demo was that failing a league meant having to run the same handful of courses repeatedly before being able to move on to new tracks; that limitation exists in other racing games too, to some extent, but usually with a bit more flexibility to move on to a new course before you've earned a gold medal or whatever.

"From a progression point of view, it's probably more about track knowledge than it is upgrades," Crimmins said. "If you know the tracks, it's not too difficult to get through the planets, and that is the motivation of it: you want to get to the next planet, see what it's about, further the story each time. But you probably need to pick the difficulty that's right for you to get on that curve, which is why we have multiple options, so that it's still accessible to people coming in at different levels."

Well, that's me roasted. But of the slate of racing games coming out this year and next, from Forza Horizon 6 to Clutch to Hot Wheels, this is the one that, surprisingly, has me the most interested. It's too early to say if the parts tinkering will end up feeling meaningful or if the story will deliver anything beyond a thin veneer of Days of Thunder tropes, but no other racer right now is combining this many ideas with this many types of vehicles that go this fast.

In the meantime, I'm eyeing this Episode 1 Racer sale on GOG. It costs about a penny per mile per hour.

The new Bamboo Bash challenge in Forza Horizon 6's Autumn season of Series 2 sounds easy enough on paper. Find and crash into 30 bamboo. How hard can that be? Japan's bamboo forests are iconic. But now you need to specifically hunt it down, you're likely scratching your head, wondering where you've whizzed past it while driving at 100 mph.

Don't worry though, I've found the best bamboo location so you can complete this challenge in a matter of seconds. It's just a shame there's no unique car up for grabs like its Series 1 counterpart.

Forza Horizon 6 bamboo locations

The best location to visit is the bamboo forest by the Arashiyama Run speed zone on the border between Minamino and Ito. Other nearby landmarks include Shirakawa-Go in the former region and Kitayama Big Daisugi located in the latter.

Here you'll find hundreds of bamboo shoots bordering the road, and all you need to do is ram into 30 of them to complete the Festival Playlist challenge. It's also a very lucrative location to rack up a high skill score from all the chaos you're causing, including the Bamboom! Skill.

Another location you could visit is right outside the Porsche 911 Turbo 3.3 Barn Find in the south of Ohtani, very close to Mei's house and Tokyo City. There's not as much bamboo here but it's very convenient.

As mentioned, there's unfortunately no new car for completing Bamboo Bash like there was for last Series' Snack Attack collectible challenge. Instead, you'll earn a Super Wheelspin. I hope you've got good luck then, otherwise this reward is rather terrible—I keep getting the lowest amount of cash possible.

Forza Horizon 6's latest patch released yesterday and with came a whole host of changes. But the ones that initially caught my eye were those concerning the AI drivatars, as they may go some way to curbing the rage of the infamous Bowie Knife99.

Under the subheading of 'AI' are the updates: "improvements to difficulty balancing" and "fixed an issue with drivatar race start behaviour". We're yet to see what this means, although there is some hope that it'll dial down the likelihood of a drivatar from sporadically t-boning you at the start line.

This likely won't, however, change the behaviour of drivatars for the rest of the week. Since Forza Horizon 6 released, there's been swaths of videos depicting Bowie Knife99 (among other drivatars) forcing players off the road, pushing them into trees, or flying through the air to then come crashing down on their heads. While there have been some players fighting back against Bowie Knife99's tyranny, it's still largely gone unchecked.

But the changes to the AI drivatars don't seem to be the most exciting part of this patch notes, instead players have latched onto the update which adds a "Roads Driven" percentage to the Region Overview. Players no longer have to blindly drive around regions attempting to complete all the roads available, or turn to message boards to help solve the puzzle.

"Literally was burning my eyeballs out of the socket staring at the map til I got the message in my mailbox that an update was out," one player says. It looks like the roads percentage overview will be a huge help to everyone trying to check off everything on their to-do list. While another mentions how they've been stuck on 670/671 roads completed for over a week now—no doubt this update will come as a godsend to many.

I became a racing game aficionado at age five playing Lego Racers on my great grandfather's Windows 95 Gateway PC. And I've been a car enthusiast since my days careening the Subaru Impreza Rally Car '99 into walls on the dirt stages of Gran Turismo 2. But sim racing never quite did it for me, and that's become a problem, because sims have largely supplanted mainstream racing games.

Bored during the pandemic and flush with cash after being laid off from my food service job, I bought a Thrustmaster T150 RS—an entry-level rig with a wheel, three-pedal box, and manual shifter (the third pedal and gearbox were extra). I drove my favorite tuner cars in Forza Horizon 4 and tried to make "realistic" driving videos like those viral guys on YouTube do with their thousand-dollar rigs. In sim racing, the sky's the limit; the logical conclusion of the genre is a hardware setup that reproduces every microscopic vibration of your in-game car via high-tech hardware like force-feedback steering wheels and haptic seating.

It was fun, but it never quite stuck. Why? Maybe because my setup, despite being $300—a lot of money for a "casual" gamer to spend on what is, at the end of the day, a controller—provided an at best middling facsimile of the real experience of driving. The T150 RS actually has decent force feedback, but without spending another $2,000 at least on a basic FFB/haptic feedback sim seat setup, the rest of the experience felt about as akin to real-world driving as playing Gran Turismo on a DualShock gamepad.

But as sim racing player counts have grown by over 1000% in the last 10 years, the mainstream racing genre has slowly whittled down to a single, albeit highly successful, franchise. The number of releases in the sim space versus the arcade one suggest that sims have basically replaced the historically prolific arcade/simcade genre.

As Reddit user mido_sama mused in response to an article highlighting Forza Horizon 6's massive sales figures, "It has no competition".

Redditor fvgh12345 responded, "the state of racing and driving games is kinda sad. There was so much variety in the PS2 era, some of my all time favorite games. Would be cool if games or successors of games like Midnight Club, Flat Out, Twisted Metal, Driver, and Vigilante made a return."

Recently, PC Gamer's Wes Fenlon previewed the upcoming simcade racer Clutch, and found it just a bit too sim-focused for what otherwise could have been solid open-world-racing competition to Forza Horizon.

Is sim racing a one-to-one substitute for the old Need for Speed and Burnout blockbusters? Sure, true simulation racers like iRacing and rFactor have sold pretty well for non-mainstream entries. But even the bestselling sim franchise Assetto Corsa has barely beat out sales of Midnight Club—a series that existed for fewer than 10 years in the 2000s, before gaming even hit the mainstream—and has shipped an order of magnitude fewer copies than the Need For Speed catalogue.

My point is: sims may be on the up-and-up, but their rise has accompanied a loss of hundreds of millions of gamers who once flocked to the many now-dead arcade racing franchises. The racing genre writ large has, for whatever reason, simply become more inaccessible and less popular to the everyman.

Meanwhile, real-world racing as a motorsport has become more accessible than ever. In a market where traditional sports executives seem hellbent on hiding their broadcasts behind as many byzantine subscription services as possible, motorsport has gone against the grain. A non-car-enthusiast friend of mine recently told me that he's gotten into F1 and Indycar primarily because it's the only major sport with live events he can follow without jumping through a bunch of expensive hoops.

Remember the good old days when you could afford rent catch a ball game with your mates on the cheap? Or, for a gaming analogy, the halcyon years when you, a casual player, could pick up one of 10 mainstream racers on the market and hop on the couch to lay down some laps on a $10 MadCatz controller you found in the bargain bin at GameCrazy?

But the expensive simulation hobby has quickly exploded from a niche one for the sweatiest among us to a cool yuppie nightclub activity in cities from Las Vegas to Madrid. Now, the world's largest sim racing trade fair has landed on US shores for the first time, as I covered in the article linked above. I had a theory about why that is.

I talked to Mark Puc—representative of the "OG of sim racing" (his words, but it's true) company Fanatec at SimRacing Expo 2026—about his industry insights. As did everyone at the Expo I interviewed, Puc chalked up the growth in part to Netflix's Formula 1 documentary Drive to Survive. And as motorsport grows more popular, sim racing becomes a cheaper way own a racecar—rather than a more expensive way to play a videogame.

Puc noted, "the correlation between sim racing and real racing is very analog, so one supports the other. And right now, there's a lot of people starting sim racing that are going to end up racing real cars".

Puc also highlighted Jimmy Broadbent and my own personal favorite sim racing YouTuber Steve Alvarez Brown, alias Super GT—both of whom are sponsored by Fanatec and both of whom went from sim racing on at-home rigs to professional motorsports. Broadbent, who has over 1 million YouTube subscribers, started off vlogging from a shed and now races in the Nürburgring Langstrecken-Serie sponsored by the motorsports suspension component manufacturer Bilstein. Alvarez Brown, also a driver for Bilstein, now drives GT4 race cars on the 'Ring.

For many, games are a pipeline to future passions. As a child, I spent interminable hours in historical strategy games like Age of Empires, and I now have three degrees in imperial and international history. However, while arcade driving games like Need for Speed, Burnout, and the inimitable Rush 2: Extreme Racing USA prepped me for car enthusiasm as an adult, they did not land me in actual motorsports.

Maybe that's okay. Maybe old-fashioned car games are dying not because of the sim industry, but because real-world car enthusiasm is in free-fall. Maybe sim racers are not less accessible videogames but rather more accessible motorsports, in a world where professional racing has somehow taken off among young people even while their driver's license possession has cratered and, as mentioned above, the rest of car culture is struggling. Maybe a $1,000 sim rig isn't displacing a $10 Play Station controller, but rather a substitute for a $10,000 track-modified Mazda Miata or a $15 million Formula 1 car.

It could be a good thing that enthusiast car culture is slowly dying. But meanwhile, motorsport thrives. I, for one, can always go back to 20-year-old Gran Turismo games and simply accept that sim racing isn't for me. But maybe one day on a lark, I'll download Assetto Corsa, plug in my Thrustmaster T150 RS, and be grateful that the virtual world has kept alive my dream of cruising the Tokyo Expressway in a Dodge Durango SRT Hellcat.

Only the key creatives behind Forza Horizon currently have the sway to start up a brand new studio and secure the tens of millions of dollars in funding necessary to make a movie with a racing game attached to it. That's Clutch, a "cinematic open world action-driving game where the worlds of professional and underground street racing collide across the French Riviera."

It's appropriate that Clutch is partially set in Monaco, because the whole game looks like money.

Big money is not something I tend to associate with racing games in 2026, outside a very small number of legacy names. Forza Horizon's 6+ million sales in a matter of days makes it the only racing series going right now that pulls in the same kinds of numbers as, say, Sony's prestigious third-person action games. So why not make one of those, which tons of people like, but about cars?

The pitch is sensible: So much of the appeal of heist movies or globetrotting capers like the Bond films is seeing suave people driving incredibly expensive cars around beautiful environs. Sim-focused racing games reproduce those cars in painstaking detail, while lighter racers that evoke the old arcade days often let you speed through those fun environments. Yet it's rare for either style of racing game to ever really make you care much about the person behind the wheel, even in the rare instances they have a story mode.

Clutch is betting those millions of dollars that fully mocapped actors, a wealth of cutscenes, and an open world will make the difference. An hour-long presentation at this past weekend's Summer Game Fest highlighted just how much attention the developers are paying to their licensed cars, their recreations of real European cities, the nuanced facial expressions of brother and sister Theo and Cass Martial, promising young stars of the R1K racing league who get pulled into the sketchier world of street racing.

The setup seems to promise quite a routine story, starting with a deadly crash during an R1K race and an on-the-nose threat from the league's chairman to take away the agency of human drivers by using more automated braking systems and such to prevent crashes. Theo, shaken by his front row seat to a friend dying on the track, agrees. Cass and their adoptive father seem to side with the idea that the freedom to live on the edge for the sake of sport is more important, though hopefully the story plays out with a bit more subtlety than that.

Ten minutes later Theo was stealing a car outfitted with our first example of "Clutch Tech," a harpoon he used to drive right off the deck of a penthouse, grapple to a nearby helicopter, and safely swing the vehicle into the hills outside Monaco—so I'm not sure subtlety will ultimately be a high priority for Clutch.

The reason I ultimately really like Clutch's narrative pitch isn't that I hope to be moved to tears by Theo's story, anyway. I like it because it serves as a way to stitch together and give meaning to different types of racing. You can get chased by the police and have to outrun them, breaking line of sight long enough to hide in a parking lot. But these aren't just missions you select from a menu: when Theo went to steal that car, he had to avoid the security detail patrolling a garage, with a dedicated button for ducking out of sight in his BMW convertible. You'll have to do that whenever you venture into an off-limits zone, and if you get caught, a chase ensues.

Street racing with the Midnight Collective lets you earn money to buy new cars, and here Clutch is particularly Forza Horizony, with in-fiction livestreams of the street races letting you build up your popularity (and cash) by taking viewer requests mid-race, like performing drifts or near-misses with oncoming traffic. Winning the race matters, but you could still be outscored by an opponent who puts on a flashier show, adding a nice bit of variety to your goals. Here Clutch Tech like that harpoon gives racing a bit of arcadey flair, too, letting you take impossibly sharp corners that you'll find in the winding streets of the French Riviera.

When Theo and Cass finally make it back onto the track at the R1K, the racing will lean more serious. This was the only bit of Clutch I actually got to play, with just a few minutes of hands-on time at the end of the demo. I immediately drove too fast into a turn and was penalized for careening off the track.

At that point I realized that how I imagined Clutch would control and how it actually feels in the hand are very different things. I spent much of the demo excited that someone was making a game in the vein of classic Need For Speed or Rockstar's Midnight Club, but with way more going on around the edges of those straightforward races. My quick impression, though, is that it feels far more like Forza Horizon—heavier than an arcade racer, with that now-familiar racing line encouraging you to brake as you go around corners. There's no Burnout-style smashing into other cars to knock them out. You may have an E-brake, but you're not going to be drifting around every corner like an Initial D prodigy.

I shouldn't be too surprised that Clutch plays like a game made by people who really care about simulating real cars. And to be clear, it's more approachable than something like Gran Turismo—by lap two I was already doing much better, tapping the brakes as I went around corners and not outright embarrassing myself behind the wheel. But this sort of 'halfway sim' feel just isn't really my style of driving. I crave nitrous and ridiculous drifts; I want Burnout Paradise, but with Clutch's narrative framing populating the open world with rival racers and missions with snippets of story; I want to remember a narrow one-way as the perfect place to ditch the cops or recognize a tunnel as the one I drove that car Theo stole into the back of a box truck, pulling off a perfect Fast & Furious vanishing act.

I'm mourning, a little bit, that Clutch probably isn't precisely the racing game for me. Even in the street races with Clutch Tech bending the laws of physics, I fear it will feel a bit too heavy, the kind of racer that encourages you to brake for every turn instead of grinding your car along the metal guardrail at max speed. But I'm also seemingly the rare outlier who does not outright love Forza Horizon.

And if, like PC Gamer Editor-in-Chief Phil Savage, you love most everything about Forza Horizon 6 except "how bland the dialogue is… all trite platitudes and empty positivity," Clutch is almost certainly going to be the game for you.

I have a feeling that's exactly why it exists—because a few years ago Horizon studio Playground Games was divided over the idea that people would care about anything happening when they're not in control of the car. Forza is bland by design. The new studio, Maverick Games, is pouring millions of dollars into the hope that you won't reach for your phone every time a character starts talking. I hope they're right, because I want a game that looks like Clutch with the energy of Crank: High Voltage—the second you slow down, you're already dead.

Finding the Astro Toy photo challenge location this week in Forza Horizon 6 is much easier than the Tokyo Tower or Edogawa Baseball Stadium, so long as you've done some exploring. That said, finding the Irokawa Space Centre isn't the biggest hurdle. That would be figuring out what a Track Toy is.

Below, I'll explain exactly where you need to go so that you can get back to racing and other Festival Playlist challenges.

Forza Horizon 6 Astro Toy photo challenge explained

This week, you need to take a photo of a Track Toy at the Irokawa Space Centre in the southeast of the Nangan region, at the southern tip of the map. It's just down the road from the Launch Control wristband event that unlocks the purple wristband, as well as the Irokawa Circuit road race and Nangan Cross-Country Circuit.

Unlike the hint suggests, you don't necessarily need to snap a photo of the rocket at the centre of the space facility. Instead, you need to take a photo of a Track Toy, which is a type of car. This includes vehicles like the BAC Mono, a Chevrolet Camaro or Corvette, or a Nissan GT-R NISMO. I recommend filtering your garage (or the Autoshow, if you need to buy one) by Track Toys.

Like previous photo challenges, you'll receive three Festival Playlist points upon completion, which puts you one step closer to Spring's Festival Playlist rewards—the 1996 Toyota Starlet Glanza V and the 1974 Toyota Corolla SR5. You'll also get the "Beam me up!" Forza Link, which is basically meaningless to most players, I'd imagine.

After taking last week off, the Treasure Hunt challenge is back on the menu in Forza Horizon 6's Spring Series 1 update. This week, we've got to find the Tokyo City Treasure Hunt, which is the hardest one yet.

The hint you're given is of the shipping yard in the city, with tons of containers and facilities on the ground below. But it's hard to figure out what direction the photo was taken from, which makes it difficult to pinpoint the location. Don't worry, I'll explain exactly where to go to find the Treasure Chest this week.

Forza Horizon 6 Tokyo City Treasure Hunt location

The Festival Playlist's Treasure Hunt chest this week is in Tokyo City, on a warehouse roof in the docks to the far east of the region. It's not far from the Pier Pressure wristband event—in fact, you can see part of the course in the background of the photo clue. You'll need a fast, powerful car to reach it, though:

1. Head to the west side of the docks, near the large warehouses overlooking the shipping containers—you'll see the red pylons from the photo clue.
2. Drive up the ramp on the northernmost Tomitama warehouse.
3. Jump across the gap to the other warehouse and drive up to the rooftop.
4. Use the ramp on the roof to jump back across to the roof of the Tomitama warehouse.
5. Drop off the ledge on your right, onto a platform where you'll see the festival chest—it's above the first ramp you took.
6. Crash into the Treasure Hunt chest there to smash it, completing the challenge.

Like previous Treasure Hunt challenges, you'll receive three Festival Playlist points and 100,000 credits for your trouble. Can't argue with that for only a short detour.

As for what those Festival Points go towards, this week, you can unlock the 1996 Toyota Starlet Glanza V and the 1974 Toyota Corolla SR5. You'll also be closer towards the 60 and 120 point milestones with the 2008 Mazda Furai and 2010 Nissan 370Z respectively.

This is the last update of Series 1, though there's a good chance that there'll be more Treasure Hunts popping up regularly during Season 2 as well.

Japan at your fingertips, over 600 cars to collect, and now the live-service Series updates rolling out every week, you could easily spend hundreds of hours in Forza Horizon 6. In fact, many people already have. I've put in 50 hours so far, and plan for many more learning to actually beat Touge races in style for a change. But what if you could lose it all in the blink of an eye? Well, you can. Sorry.

A bug has been discovered that's been wiping players' saves pretty indiscriminately. Take a quick look at the various Forza Reddit pages right now and you'll see a swathe of people hit with a blank slate.

"I'm genuinely devastated and there's truly nothing I can do about it but hope it doesn't happen again. I'm sick. Millions of credits, fully tuned cars, custom garage I built myself. F this game," one player wrote.

Unfortunately, the official cause (or more likely, causes) is yet to be determined. While Xbox players are reporting having their progress deleted when using the Quick Resume feature, the same can't be said for PC, where issues with cloud saves on the Xbox App and the game crashing have seen saves wiped. Another theory is that a handful of cars may even be causing data loss if you paint or upgrade them, including:

• 2003 Ford F-150 SVT Lightning
• 1993 Schuppan 962CR
• 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air
• 1994 Ferrari F355 Berlinetta
• 1988 Lamborghini Countach LP5000QV
• 2019 Porsche #70 Motorsport 945
• 2017 Ford M-Sport Fiesta RS
• 2020 Wuling Sunshine S Forza Edition (annoyingly, one of the best cars for drag racing)

You're not guaranteed to run into issues encountering any of the potential causes, but frankly, I'm not going to chance it. For the time being, I recommend avoiding these vehicles. Plus, if you're on console, definitely switch off Quick Resume. PC players, either on Steam or the Xbox App, make sure to back up your save periodically—it should be located in C:\XboxGames\GameSaves/pgs. Just copy the file to a safe location, in case you need it.

If you're unlucky enough to get hit by the reset switch and can't recover your save, you should contact Forza Support, where you can get your inventory—cars, money, Wheel Spins—restored, but you'll still have to retread the campaign, find collectibles, and that sort of thing.

Original story:

It didn't take long, but it happened to me. Less than a week after PC Gamer's Andy Chalk wrote about how these gaming trailer livestreams would start to have their hype trains robbed and wrecked by AI disclosures, I saw it. Crazy Taxi: World Tour, a game I was reasonably excited for, was made with help from generative AI.

"At Sega Corporation, we utilize generative AI as a support tool for developers, aiming to provide better content to our users and enable developers to focus more on creative tasks," the game's Steam page reads. "No AI was used in reference to the performers in the game."

I assume that last bit is referring specifically to voice work. Game Informer's Brian Shea got an expanded statement from Sega which he posted on Bluesky. It includes the extra line, "Assets generated were still subject to review by the development team." It's still a bit vague, but suggests that it was used to create art and not only as a coding assistant.

Fans on social media are not happy. "Using AI slop to make shit for you, more like Lazy Taxi," wrote mat-draws on Bluesky. It's quickly becoming the thing to say. "Lazy Taxi," concurred Bluesky user tehsnakerer. "Lazy Taxi," mused mluckas, also on Bluesky. On Reddit, user RORSCHACH_INC_ commented, "Know what... think I'll just walk home."

It's perhaps especially galling given the faux-counterculture aesthetics Crazy Taxi has always wrapped itself in, blaring pop punk as you try not to crash into the nearest KFC. The AI use, combined with the fact that this is apparently an open world campaign-driven game that takes you across five different cities, suggests that a Crazy Taxi game in 2027 is a very different prospect to the 1999 arcade classic.

Exo Rally Championship first appeared at the 2023 PC Gaming Show, and now the extraterrestrial racing game is back with big news: It's out on Steam today.

Exo Rally is a "brutally realistic racing simulation," its developers say, with customizable rovers that feature "realistic tire models, drive-trains, suspension and damage," plus thrusters for extra maneuverability in low gravity environments.

I assume by "realistic" they do not mean that they are aware of an actual interplanetary racing league, but you never know. Aliens could be up to anything.

Exo Rally includes a career mode "based on real-world rally, Baja, and Dakar events," and though there's no head-to-head online racing, you can compete for the best track times asynchronously.

The alien landscapes are procedurally generated, but it's possible to share seeds so that your friends can generate the same environments to compete with your times in.

I can't help but be reminded of Mass Effect's rover bits—in a good way! A lot of people hated the Mako, but driving around barren alien landscapes is a great vibe. And this time we can do it while going fast and dodging some brutal looking space weather.

You can see the new trailer above, and Exo Rally Championship is available now on Steam.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

The new Snack Attack Series 1 Festival Playlist challenge in Forza Horizon 6 will likely have you stumped. You need to find and smash five vending machines. Easy enough, you think, and then realise you've never actually paid attention to something as inconsequential as a vending machine in a racing game.

Luckily, there's one location where you can quickly find five machines and be done with this challenge. It'll take you just 30 seconds, and you'll get a new car for free to show for it.

Forza Horizon 6 vending machine locations

The best location to visit to find five vending machines is the 365 convenience store at the Minimino Golf Course in the centre of the region, next to the Airfield Trail dirt racing event and the 1969 Dodge Charger R/T Treasure Car. Here you'll find three vending machines outside the 365 shop, and there are two more against the building just over to your left. All you need to do is bump into each one in your car to smash them, and the challenge is done.

Another good location, if you'd rather stay in Tokyo City while you're finding Shibuya Crossing and Edogawa Baseball Stadium, is the road bordering the right side of the park by the Inner City Run drift zone. This is in the north of Tokyo City. Near the end of the road, you'll see a small parking lot with two vending machines against one wall, two more against the brick wall at the back, and a final two across the street to the right, next to a bush.

Your reward for completing the Snack Attack collectables challenge is three Festival Playlist points and the 2023 Lotus Emira. This modern supercar starts at mid-A-rank, so it's pretty handy to have. Plus, it looks the part too.

Tokyo Drift is one of the most annoying Series 1 daily challenges in Forza Horizon 6. Not only do you need to find Shibuya Crossing, but you also need to perform three Awesome Drifts, which is easier said than done.

I'll explain where to find Shibuya Crossing below, alongside how best to complete this pesky challenge so you can get your Playlist Festival points and put this task in the rearview mirror.

Forza Horizon 6 Shibuya Crossing location

Shibuya Crossing is a four-way junction in the northwest of Tokyo City, almost directly south of the Highway Circuit road race, and east of the food delivery job icon. It's not far from Edogawa Baseball Stadium, which you also need to visit this week for the Pitcher Perfect challenge.

You'll recognise Shibuya Crossing by the many road crossings, but also the massive advertisements on the side of the buildings. There are Horizon Festival barriers all around the crossroads, too.

How to beat Tokyo Drift in Forza Horizon 6

As for how to beat Tokyo Drift, the issue with this challenge is how vague the description is. Basically, you need to perform three Awesome Drifts while moving through Shibuya Crossing, so from the main road around the corner into one of the other junctions. It likely won't trigger for you by simply doing donuts at the centre of the road, or drifting but continuing down the main road, for some reason.

A big issue, then, will be avoiding traffic. Wait for the right moment, and as long as you drift long enough through Shibuya Crossing junction for it to score Awesome, then you're done.

I recommend using one of the best cars for drifting, as well as disabling traction control and ABS (anti-lock braking system) to make drifting easier. To get the perfect drift, start drifting around the corner but only tap the accelerator—don't hold the gas like you might be tempted to.

If you thought finding the Tokyo Tower was hard in last week's Series 1 challenges in Forza Horizon 6, then get ready for the Pitcher Perfect photo challenge. This week gives you nothing more than a hint of a baseball field (lucky you if you recognise it as Edogawa Baseball Stadium), which is less to go on than Tokyo City's iconic tower.

The answer, thankfully, isn't actually that far away from last week's photo challenge. I'll explain where you need to go below so you can tick off another Festival Playlist activity.

Forza Horizon 6 Edogawa Baseball Stadium location

You need to visit the Edogawa baseball stadium in the northwest of Tokyo City, which is a few blocks north of the Tokyo Tower and the food delivery job, and west of the Highway Circuit road race. It's not marked on your map, but it's a large grassy square.

While the prompt you're given is on the northeast corner of the baseball field, where you'll see the high fence railings and a large doorway onto the pitch, you actually need to take a photo inside the stadium. Drive inside and snap a photo to complete the Perfect Pitcher challenge.

Like the other photo challenges, you'll receive three Festival Playlist points upon completion, which is a fair chunk of progress towards the Winter season rewards, including the 2019 Subaru STI S209 and 2016 Toyota Land Cruiser Arctic Trucks AT37. You'll also get the Slide Whistle car horn, if you care about car horns.

It did not look like a happy ending was in the cards for Maverick Games when Amazon ended its publishing deal for the studio's in-development racing game earlier this year. But that assessment may have been premature, as the studio has now unveiled its debut project, Clutch, and has a full trailer coming in the Summer Game Fest showcase on June 5.

"This is a game about the love of driving, about the connection between car and driver, and the raw thrill of speed," Maverick Games co-founder Mike Brown says in the reveal video. Brown is the former creative director of Forza Horizon studio Playground Games, so he knows a thing or two about racing games.

"Clutch is the story of a pair of sibling racing prodigies competing in the R1K racing series," Brown continues. "The R1K is a prestigious and historic series that's been the proving ground of the world's best drivers for 100 years. But away from the pomp and the pageantry and commercialism of the R1K is the Midnight Collective, a group of car enthusiasts who don't care about the money and the fame of the R1K. They care about the love of driving and the raw thrill of speed."

You can probably see where this is going, right?

"In the early part of our game, our hero gets himself into a spot of trouble—a spot of trouble that leads him to look up the services of a fixer. And in doing so, we smash open the doors to the underworld beneath the glitz and the glamour of the R1K."

Brown touches on a few more points about Clutch in the video—it will have an open world component, cars will be upgradeable with "Clutch Tech mods," that sort of thing—but other details, including the game's setting and cast, and being held back for the Summer Game Fest reveal—that showcase is set to get underway at 2 pm PT/5 pm ET on June 5.

There are a few pesky challenges in Forza Horizon 6's Series 1 update, and Link Skiller isn't going to be too popular. Why? Because you need to perform Link Skills, and that requires you to work with other players.

The good news is that it's actually easy enough to do without friends once you know what you need to do. I'll explain below how you can get Link Skills without having to go too far out of your way to collaborate with other racers.

How to earn Link Skills in Forza Horizon 6

You can earn Link Skills by performing the same action as another player at the same time, while in close proximity to each other. This can include things like drifting, driving fast, or breaking objects—anything that triggers the score prompt at the top of your screen. This sounds scary, but you don't need to be in a Convoy with other players or playing with friends.

My advice is to do one of the following activities:

• Join a Stunt Party since you'll be matched into minigames with other players, which often involve applicable Link Skills. For example, one Stunt Party task is to break objects, so all you need to do is complete the objective near at least one other player.
• Join Horizon Play races, a three-race multiplayer playlist that you can access either by clicking on the challenge or heading to the 'Online' tab of the pause menu. Here you'll easily get Link Skills for things like high speed and drifting.

It's easy enough to rack up Link Skills in these two modes, and you only need to score one to complete the Link Skiller daily challenge. Of course, if you have a friend, then you can just team up and coordinate whatever action you'd like to perform together.

Complete the Link Skiller daily challenge, and you'll be rewarded with one Festival Playlist point and 5,000 Credits. It's not much, but it's not like it requires too much work once you've got your head around it.

Each week in Forza Horizon 6's Series 1 update, you need to take a photo of a different location. The first week, Summer, started pretty simply in the Horizon Festival grounds, but now you've got to take a photo of the Tokyo Tower. It turns out that finding a massive red tower is actually quite hard when your view is limited to a car's cockpit.

Below, I'll show you where you need to go to complete the Tokyo Tower photo challenge so you can quit being a tourist and get back to racing—there are limited-time cars on the line, here, driver.

Forza Horizon 6 Tokyo Tower location

You can find the Tokyo Tower in the west of Tokyo near the main highway, just south of the seasonal Tokyo City Food Delivery job and northeast of the Tokyo House location. Once you're in the area, it's pretty easy to spot the bright red base and the Horizon Festival boards around it.

For the seasonal challenge that requires you to take a photo of the Tokyo Tower, all you actually need to do is photograph the base. In fact, taking a full-length shot of the tower itself weirdly doesn't count. Drive up to the base of the tower, enter photo mode (up on the d-pad), and take a snapshot of the base. It's that easy.

In return for your troubles, you'll earn three Festival Playlist points and the 'Oooh…Shiny!' quick chat line. The latter is largely meaningless to most of us, but the Festival Playlist progress is all-but required if you want to get the exclusively weekly cars—1997 Nissan Skyline GT-R V-Spec and 1991 Honda CR-X SiR—or the Series 1 reward cars—2008 Mazda Furai and 2010 Nissan 370Z.

Forza Horizon 6 heads into Autumn with the second week of Series 1: Welcome to Japan. And alongside the shift in season, we've got the Minamino region Treasure Hunt challenge in the Festival Playlist. You need to use the photo clue—what looks like a golf course—to track down a chest.

While it's not hard to find the golf course in Minamino, identifying the exact location shown in the clue is harder. Don't worry though, I'll explain where to find the Treasure Hunt this week so you can get back to racing.

Forza Horizon 6 Minamino region Treasure Hunt location

This week's Festival Playlist Treasure Hunt chest is in Minamino, near a white flag on the hill on the western side of the golf course at the centre of the region. It's almost directly west of the 1969 Dodge Charger R/T Treasure Car location, which you've likely collected. Simply:

1. Drive over to the golf course in the centre of the Minamino region, next to the Airfield Trail dirt racing event.
2. Head west past the clubhouse to find the chest next to the flag by the treeline.
3. Crash into the Treasure Hunt chest there to smash it, completing the challenge.

Like last week's Treasure Hunt, you'll earn three Festival Playlist points and 100,000 credits. That's a good return for a five-minute investment and a quick detour to the golf course.

Those Festival Playlist points go towards your Series 1 rewards. This week, you can unlock Autumn's reward cars, including the 1997 Nissan Skyline GT-R V-Spec for 15 points and the 1991 Honda CR-X SiR for 30 points. Plus, you'll also be closer to hitting the 60 and 120 point milestones, unlocking the 2008 Mazda Furai and 2010 Nissan 370Z respectively, especially if you beat everything last week.

Sim racing may finally have broken its glass ceiling; or rather, the plasterboard ceiling of the basements that used to house every car nerd's Logitech wheel-and-pedals setup. If the rest of the family once found the hobby slightly embarrassing, those days appear to be ending.

The proof: thousands of car enthusiasts, motorsports fanatics, and sim techies of all ages and backgrounds gathered in Charlotte, NC this past weekend for the first-ever US-based SimRacing Expo. The expo—inaugurated at the infamous Nürburgring racetrack in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, in 2014—has traced the meteoric rise of the sim racing industry.

The 2026 SimRacing Expo hosted dozens of vendors from the hardware and software sides of the hobby: Fanatec, Thrustmaster, iRacing, NASCAR, Red Bull. Even the auto racing equipment manufacturer Sabelt showed up in full force.

While industry leaders spoke on the ever-growing market and unstoppable advance of haptic-feedback technology, kids drove their favorite cars on sim setups, the fanciest of which cost more than a down payment on a house.

Simulation racing takes motorsports video games ranging from the arcadey Forza Horizon to the hyperrealistic iRacing and applies the physical hardware of cars—a steering wheel, a pedal box, sometimes a manual shifter, and occasionally, tens of thousands of dollars worth of "force feedback" technology with motors built into actual racecar seats to provide games with an ever-improving facsimile of the experience of driving a car in the real world. You can even buy a rig used by F1 drivers for $12 million, if you're the kind of person who wants to spend more on a gaming setup than on an actual Enzo Ferrari.

Since the mid 2010s, sim racing has grown into a global phenomenon from a niche, expensive, and highly inaccessible hobby reserved for the most dedicated motorsport nerds. While those absurdly expensive rigs clearly still exist, a part-time enthusiast can now buy a decent, lightly used starter wheel-and-pedals combo for barely more than the price of a Switch 2 Pro Controller.

Thanks to the recent explosion in Formula 1 interest, there are now (tragically) hip "F1 Arcades"—which are basically nightclubs with sim rigs—in cities across the US, the UK, and Spain, with "more than 30 locations globally" planned by 2028. It may now be genuinely cool to sim race. Case in point: I went on a date to the F1 Arcade (her idea!) in Boston's hyper-trendy Seaport District on a frigid January night, and the wait for a pair of seats was so long that we bailed and went to a mini golf nightclub instead (did I mention trendy?).

It's not surprising that SimRacing Expo is only now landing on US shores. Outside of NASCAR and IndyCar, motorsports have only ever had a niche foothold in the US market. Which is fine—we don't need to have everything here—but I imagine industry leaders felt a bit pained at missing out on the world's most lucrative market.

I spoke with expo communications manager and sim/real racing veteran Danny Giusa on the group's first stateside affair. He attributes sim racing's growth to a few factors.

One is the takeover of F1 by an American company (Liberty Media Company), and the associated Netflix documentary Drive to Survive that got everyone and their grandparents into the sport a few years ago. And, of course, 2025's blockbuster F1 movie with Brad Pitt.

Even more impactful, though, was something else that happened a few years ago: the global pandemic, which Giusa identified as perhaps the single most important factor in the popularization of this once highly specialized hobby.

That's in part because, during the pandemic, most professional racing drivers took up sim racing out of necessity. Giusa reflected, "I was racing in the virtual Le Mans against Charles Leclerc, which was actually crazy."

"If you think about that, we both sat down at our home and raced digitally, 1000 miles away," he continued. "That helped a lot, because the younger audience was going over to livestream platforms, picking up from their favorite racing driver that they're doing at-home racing by themselves."

In an age of massive accessibility issues across all sports—how many different subscriptions do you need just to watch the NBA or the Premier League?—participating directly in the Twitch chat of your favorite motorsports superstar was a revolution.

I also asked Giusa about growth opportunities for the industry. After all, there are plenty of enthusiasts with more interest in the culture of cars—or, per the stats below, transnational shipping logistics vis a vis Euro Truck Simulator—than in motorsports.

And the story of the sim industry may just be beginning in trucking games, automotive sandboxes like BeamNG, and more. Giusa argued: "FIA also shows now, with the investment into the FIA Rally Global eSports Championship, that there is a market to unlock". Great news for us off-the-tarmac enthusiasts.

Captain Ahab had his white whale, Inspector Javert had Jean Valjean, and Forza Horizon 6 players have Bowie Knife99—an AI drivatar that has pushed players to breaking point with its erratic and borderline murderous driving.

If you're not familiar with the legend of Bowie Knife99, let me shed some light on the situation. You see, in Forza Horizon 6 lobbies can be filled with AI drivatars, many of which have names based on existing players, devs, or other influential accounts. You can then race against these at different difficulties. The only problem is that some of these drivatars are pretty aggressive and will go to any lengths to beat players in a race. Enter Bowie Knife99.

bowie knife99 just sent me back to Mexico from r/ForzaHorizon

This drivatar in particular has been wreaking havoc in races, hunting players down through the woods, crashing down on players from the sky, and just generally being a right pain in the ass and a really hard car to beat. "It's always Bowie," one player says. "The fucker always makes me repeat races."

In response to the torment some players have decided to fight back, and thus ensues the unending and perhaps unattainable quest to hunt Bowie down and beat it at its own game: "He can't keep getting away with this."

Justice for all the Bowieknife victims from r/ForzaHorizon6

Anything's game. Players have been knocking Bowie Knife99 off course, ramming it into barriers, pushing it off the road, doing pretty much anything to make sure the drivatar doesn't win, even if it costs them the race. The war cry "justice for all the Bowie Knife victims" rings throughout the rolling roads of Japan.

But on the brightside, all of this Bowie Knife99 mayhem has managed to not only unite the playerbase but has also proved just how fun NPCs are when they're full of character, even if its defining character trait is evil.

Forza Horizon 6 might be more of the same—in his 84% review, PC Gamer EIC Phil Savage said it was "riding a well-worn track"—but throw in some giant mechs, kei trucks, and Babymetal, and it turns out the world's biggest open world racing series still sells like hotcakes.

As I write this, it's sailing comfortably past the 300,000 concurrent players mark on Steam, according to SteamDB. That brings it into the top 5 most played games right now, past big dogs like Apex Legends and Slay the Spire 2 and only beat out by Dota 2, PUBG, and the eternal champion, Counter-Strike 2.

It was only a matter of time given that it was breaking series records on PC before it was even out. Forza's simcade formula has made it a juggernaut among racing games and no amount of pre-release leaks seem able to slow it down. Maybe those 8,000-year bans helped with that last bit.

All this success makes it easier to predict Horizon may indeed be the future of Forza writ large. Last year, former Turn 10 employee Fred Russell said the main Motorsport series was dead after a monsoon of layoffs by Micosoft—one which cut Turn 10 in half, according to Jason Schreier. The more approachable spinoff appears to have left its forebear in the dust.

This success is in spite of the fact that Microsoft is currently listed as a pressure target, and Xbox a priority target, of the BDS movement protesting the tech giant's contracts with Israel amid the ongoing genocide of Palestinians.

This has been a source of turmoil within the company: employees have led protests, developers at Microsoft-owned game studio Arkane have spoken out on the issue, and the company fired the head of an Israeli subsidiary over surveillance of Palestinians just earlier this month.

As for what's next on FH6's docket, developer Playground Games released a blog post Friday where it went over the first issues plans to address: drivatar AI difficulty, crash bugs, and optimization. In the meantime, check out our breakdown of the whopping 618 vehicles you can crash through billboards in the game right now.

Welcome to the Party, Pal! is the most frustrating challenge to kick off Series 1 of the Festival Playlist in Forza Horizon 6. It's the first daily challenge, so at least you've got up to a week to beat it, and you might need it, since you've got to finish round three of a Horizon Stunt Party event.

Chances are, you've not done one of these yet, especially if you only joined in at the full launch, which coincided with the start of the live service schedule. So here's what you need to do.

How to find a Stunt Party event in Forza Horizon 6

Stunt Party events spawn periodically, marked by a pink circle on the map. Frustratingly, there is no way to force the event to spawn, though in my experience, when they do spawn, it tends to be at the top of the hour.

You'll get an alert at the top of your screen when it's active, then you've got 10 minutes to reach the location marked on the map (you can fast travel there), where you can accept the prompt to start matchmaking. You'll be thrown into it in whatever car you're currently driving, so I recommend swapping to one of the best cars first.

This will place you in a multiplayer lobby where you need to work with other players to complete mini-game activities, such as reaching checkpoints within a time limit, breaking objects to get high scores, or throwing yourself off ramps.

For the Welcome to the Party, Pal! challenge specifically, you'll need to reach the third round. This basically just means participating in all the activities until you reach the end, which typically takes around 10-15 minutes. And it's pretty rewarding, too—I earned 11,000 credits for completing a Horizon Stunt Party. And for beating this challenge, you'll bag an extra 5,000 credits, plus one point towards the Festival Playlist season progress.

My least favourite challenge in Forza Horizon 6 right now is by far the Floor It! task, which requires you to earn three Great Speed Skills in Horizon Racing. There's a similar challenge in the Gazoo Racer weekly challenge, where you need to earn six Speed Skills in the 2022 Toyota GR86.

As annoying as these tasks are, completing them is necessary if you want to progress through the Series 1: Welcome to Japan Festival Playlist and bag all the exclusive rewards, including some fancy new cars too.

How to earn Speed Skills in Forza Horizon 6

You need to drive fast to get Speed Skills, at least 100mph, and maintain speed for at least a few seconds. Like other skills, there are various ascending tiers, consecutively increasing in points awarded, too.

• Speed (100 points): Maintain a speed of over 100 mph/161 kmph
• Great Speed (150 points): Maintain a speed of over 150 mph/241 kmph
• Awesome Speed (250 points): Maintain a speed of over 175 mph/282 kmph
• Ultimate Speed (1,000 points): Maintain a speed of over 200 mph/322 kmph

However, it's not as simple as that when it comes to beating the Floor It! and Gazoo Racer challenges, so here's what I recommend you do.

How to complete Floor It! in Forza Horizon 6

This challenge requires you to earn three Great Speed Skills in Horizon Play races, which you can access either by clicking on the challenge or heading to the 'Online' tab of the pause menu.

This will matchmake you into a series of three multiplayer races. However, the car ranking and tricks will be random. Since you need to reach at least 150 mph to earn Great Speed Skills, it's not ideal to get stuck in a B-class or below race, where reaching this speed is a real struggle.

Here are a few tips that helped me complete it:

• If you matchmake into a playlist rated B-rank or below, leave as soon as you can and try again. Repeat this until, ideally, you get an S or R-class event, where you can use supercars. This only took me two attempts, but it could take you much longer.
• You don't need to win the race, and crashing (thus breaking your score streak before banking it) won't disrupt your challenge. In other words, once you reach a straight road, put the pedal down to go as fast as you can.
• Pick a car with a high top speed and acceleration. Related to both of the above, this'll be at least an S-rank car, and since you don't need to worry about winning, you don't necessarily need to have good handling or braking.

Completing the Floor It! challenge will reward you with the Ford Lightning and three points towards the Festival Playlist rewards.

How to complete Gazoo Racer in Forza Horizon 6

This is the third step of the Summer weekly challenge, where you need to earn six Speed Skills using the 2022 Toyota GR86. This can be done in the open world or during a race. While the stock version of this car is more than capable of reaching 100mph, I recommend you upgrade the speed and acceleration to make this challenge easier.

Then, pick any relatively long, straight road (such as the highways around Tokyo) and slam the pedal down to max out your speed. It's technically possible to earn all six in one go if you can maintain your speed for long enough, but you'll most likely need to accelerate to 100 mph multiple times.

Beating this challenge and the subsequent Hakone Nanamagari touge race to wrap up the weekly challenge will reward you with 25,000 credits and five points towards the Festival Playlist.

One of Forza Horizon 6's most annoying Festival Playlist challenges this week is to not just complete, but win the Hakone Nanamagari touge race using the 2022 Toyota GR86. This is one hell of a track, and the AI is far from fair. But even finding this race will be your first hurdle.

Completing this event is necessary if you want all the reward cars in the Series 1: Welcome to Japan Festival Playlist, including this week's exclusive items. I'll go over where to find it and my tips for getting first place below so you can move on to the next challenge.

Where to find the Hakone Nanamagari touge race in Forza Horizon 6

You can find the Hakone Nanamagari touge race near the centre of the Nangan region in the southwest corner of the map. You can spot the winding mountain road pretty easily from the map once you know what you're looking for, but it's not far from the Nissan Skyline GT-2000 Barn Find and Coastline Sprint event to the west and the Irokawa Circuit to the southwest.

My tips to win the Hakone Nanamagari touge race

To complete the Festival Challenge, you actually need to win Hakone Nanamagari using the 2022 Toyota GR86, which won't be easy if you're not a fan of touge racing (I'm not.) It's a B-class event, capping your vehicle at a maximum 600 power rating, so upgrading your GR86 to go faster isn't necessarily the answer. In fact, if you can't access the race when you approach it, then it's because your car is too high-rated.

Here's what I recommend:

• You can lower the difficulty level, which will make your opponent slower and easier to pass, especially at the end of the race.
• Use a properly tuned 2022 Toyota GR86 with good braking and turning. I actually used an AWD road racing tune. Here's the share code: 302 087 287.
• Ram your opponent off the road on the first corner, as this will cause them to have to return to the checkpoint, which basically means they're out of the race.

This task is the final step in the Gazoo Racer weekly challenge, so ticking it off will reward you with 25,000 credits, and most importantly, five points towards the Festival Playlist. Honestly, it's not that much money, but the points are necessary if you want all the rewards this week and for the month-long series.

Forza Horizon 6's first live-service update, Series 1: Welcome to Japan, has just arrived, giving us a bunch of odds and ends to complete. One such task is the Ohtani region Treasure Hunt challenge in the Festival Playlist, in which you need to use a photo clue to track down a chest.

The hint in question is a picture of the chest outside a temple, which isn't much to go on given how big the map is and how many temples there are. Below, I'll explain where to find the Treasure Chest this week so you can get back to racing.

Where to find the Ohtani region Treasure Hunt in Forza Horizon 6

The Festival Playlist's Treasure Hunt chest this week is in Ohtani, across the lake outside the Kinkaku-Ji Temple near the centre of the region. It's just slightly to the northwest of the Honda NSX-R GT Barn Find location for reference. Simply:

1. Drive over to the Kinkaku-Ji Temple and follow the path around the lake to the west side.
2. Crash into the Treasure Hunt chest there to smash it, completing the challenge.

You'll earn three points towards your Festival Playlist progression and 100,000 credits for your trouble, which is pretty good for a quick five-minute detour at most.

There will be a new Treasure Hunt location each week, so it's a good idea to get to know the map a bit more to pick up on the clue you're given. Or you can always check back here, of course.

Series 1 has a handful of great rewards up for grabs, so completing challenges like the Treasure Hunt is worthwhile. For example, earning 20 and 40 points during the Summer season will earn you the 1999 Toyota Altezza RS200 Z Edition and 2006 Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution IX MR respectively. You'll also be progressing towards the 60 and 120 point milestones with the 2008 Mazda Furai and 2010 Nissan 370Z respectively.

Now that Forza Horizon 6 is available for everyone, Series 1 is officially kicking off. Series are basically Forza's versions of live service seasons in other games: You'll need to enter the Festival Playlist to score points and hopefully get the keys to your very own Mazda Furai and many more exclusive rides.

Despite how straightforward Forza Horizon 6 usually is (that's a good thing), the Festival Playlist and Series are anything but. Don't worry though, below I'll go over everything you can unlock in Series 1: Welcome to Japan, and exactly what you need to do to get it.

Forza Horizon 6 Series 1 explained

Series 1: Welcome to Japan runs from May 21 until June 18, when it'll be replaced by Series 2: Horizon Decades. During this time, you need to complete tasks and events in the Festival Playlist each week—this has only just become available if you've been playing during early access, and you can find it on the right side of the pause menu or your garage.

Festival Playlist this week

The Festival Playlist is a set of challenges and events—races, PR stunts, and so on—that you need to progress by earning points to unlock weekly, time-gated rewards (mainly two reward cars each week, which are bound to be some of the best cars available). This weekly schedule corresponds to the seasonal weather changes, too.

You need to earn your first Wristband to unlock the Festival Playlist, which should only take you an hour or so.

Here's what's going on this week (June 4-June 11, Winter):

Series 1 reward cars

These are all the reward cars that you can earn from the Festival Playlist during Series 1, and what you need to do to get them:

There are over 550 vehicles in Forza Horizon 6, which unsurprisingly makes knowing which are the best cars quite a challenge. And some of these vehicles are very expensive. But money isn't everything. In fact, lots of the best cars are actually pretty cheap, even with some tuning done under the hood.

Best cars in Forza Horizon 6

As you'd expect, there's no single vehicle that'll do everything in Forza Horizon 6. It's more based on what type of event you're competing in, namely, whether you're driving on tarmac, bounding over dirt paths, or trying to drift around corners in style. That's why I'll be breaking down what rides you should be using based on the type of activity you're doing.

However, if all you care about is speed, then the fastest car is the 1985 Toyota Sprinter Trueno AE86 'Forza Edition'. You wouldn't guess it by looking at it, but this little coupe can be kitted out with 1,600 horsepower to reach 325mph—the fastest vehicle in any Forza Horizon game.

Here's an overview of what cars I recommend for each race type:

Best cars for this week's Festival Playlist

It's Series 2 week 2, Autumn, so you've got a heap of new challenges to complete. Keeping in the theme of this Series, decades, this week, most of these challenges require you to drive cars from the 1990s. There's a little less crossover between events compared to last week, though.

Here's what I recommend for each of the major objectives this week:

Best cars for road/street races in Forza Horizon 6

Now, you might be a little confused as to what the difference is between road and street racing. Road races are typically on specialised race tracks, so expect lots of tight or tricky corners, some nice straights, and no traffic. Meanwhile, street races take place on standard roads, including around Tokyo. These track layouts demand a bit more versatility from your car. I generally prefer using top-range R-rank cars for road racing, but slower (relatively, obviously) S-rank cars for street races.

Best cars for dirt races in Forza Horizon 6

Dirt races are fully off-road affairs, where you'll be rocking off-road or rally tyres for extra grip on the rough terrain. Given that it feels like most of Forza Horizon 6's main events are dirt races, you'll want a dedicated car for this race type.

Best cars for cross-country races in Forza Horizon 6

Cross-country races are a bit of a red herring in Forza Horizon 6, as most of these tracks are actually just off-road, with only a small stretch on tarmac. Still, you'll need a car that can handle both dirt and tarmac.

Best drift cars in Forza Horizon 6

Drifting is the game's most unique event, where you'll need a very specialised car to do basically anything at all. Without the proper tuning, you'll tend to just spin out. It's all about weight distribution—you want the engine in the front, and rear-wheel drive. However, since drift cars are designed to glide around bends with ease, they're not all that useful outside of these situations.

If you want to master drifting, I really recommend watching AR12Gaming's detailed video on the topic.

Best drag cars in Forza Horizon 6

When looking for the best drag cars, you're basically looking for rides with a great launch and top speed. Cornering? Who cares—you're driving in a straight line. These vehicles rely on top-end tuning, so I recommend downloading others' kits if you're unsure of how to upgrade any given drag car yourself.

I guess we can call Forza Horizon 6 letting players go to Japan and race against a mech a success then. The incarnation of Forza Horizon with kei trucks and indestructible cherry blossom trees in it is available four days early for people who buy the premium edition, and they have turned up in droves. It hit a peak of 178,009 players on Steam alone according to SteamDB, which puts it well ahead of Forza Horizon 5, the previous entry peaking at 81,096 players on Steam four-and-a-half years ago.

Racing games really have become one of those genres where a single competitor ends up streets ahead of everyone else, to the point where it's the only option for serious heads. Word is that Motorsport was killed off in Microsoft's cuts, and Need for Speed's been put on hold so Criterion can focus on Battlefield. Even Lego 2K Drive is being delisted.

It does seem like Forza Horizon 6 has earned that dominance, though. Our Phil Savage gave it an 84 in his review, saying, "There is a staggering amount to do, and an absurd number of cars to do it all in. No other racing series operates on this scale, with this much sandbox freedom."

Those players forking out $120 for the premium edition (or £110 in the UK, or $190 in Australian dollarydoos), aren't just doing it for the privilege of playing four days early, though. That outlay also nets you two expansions, a car pass and two car packs, as well as a welcome pack and a VIP membership. If you know you're going to be buying the DLC anyway, I can see why you'd put your money down ahead of time. As the kind of person who bought a lot of Total War DLC the piecemeal way, I can understand why you'd rather take the hit to your budget all at once, in advance.

Out with the old, in with the new—Forza Horizon 6 has hit the scene, but a different open world online racer is getting scrubbed from digital storefronts just three years after its initial release. Lego 2K Drive, an open-world kart racer where you can build your own vehicles, announced on its Steam page (via IGN) that the game will no longer be available for purchase starting May 19.

If you already own the game or snag it before its exit, you can still use its multiplayer features until May 31 of next year. "After that time, all game functions requiring online servers will no longer function," the update reads. Given that a major feature of the game is sharing your custom Lego creations with other players, it seems like this coming year is your chance to experience the game as intended.

That's if you're so inclined, anyway. PC Gamer's Lewis Parker wasn't exactly head over heels for the game in his 59% review, where he called it "a solid kart racer" blemished by "greedy microtransactions." Indeed, a $50 digital currency bundle in a racing game aimed at children isn't a great look—though I'll admit the in-game kart creator using real-life Lego brick specifications is a nice touch.

Still, it seems like a relatively competent kart racer outside of that, so it's a shame that it's disappearing so soon after its release. It's a big year for sudden delistings so far—nearly 30 Disney games have vanished from digital storefronts since January and Stark Trek: Resurgence just announced its license ran out last month.

It's unclear what specifically prompted 2K Drive's exit, but the game did feature vehicles like the real-world McLaren Solus GT, so it seems likely that a licensing issue is at play.

One of my favourite memories of the old Forza Horizon and Motorsport games is that satisfying feeling of progression you get moving from your first crappy ride and eventually splashing the cash on a supercar. It's been absent in recent games in both the open world and track racing genres of Forza, but things were looking up when Playground Games confirmed that wristband progression would be returning in Forza Horizon 6.

In the Developer Direct at the start of the year, Torben Ellert, design director of FH6, said, "You'll start out as just a tourist in Japan", requiring you to earn a place in the Festival first. "After that, you'll rise through the ranks, unlocking wristbands as you complete races in faster, more exciting cars," Ellert explained.

And that's not untrue. For about five seconds, you are a tourist. Technically. I mean, you're best friends with the Horizon Festival organisers, and you're given a handful of free cars almost immediately, so take that newbie badge with a grain of salt. I don't know about you, but I'm yet to receive a fleet of cars on a holiday. That's nepotism, baby.

After that, you'll rise through the ranks of the Festival, earning higher-tier wristbands as you complete events across Japan. These wristbands dictate the performance cap of the vehicles you can use. The opening qualifiers restrict you to C-rank vehicles, but each successive wristband raises the floor. You'll quickly be racing B and A-rank cars in the Festival events. At face value, it's got the career progression I've been craving, and it's certainly a step up over its predecessor which gave out the Corvette C8 as a starter car.

But Forza Horizon is, ultimately, an open-world racer that wants you to drive around in whatever you want whenever you want. These restrictions in the main events don't actually prevent you from driving more powerful cars in the open world or Discover Japan events, like street races.

But my main gripe is that it's just too damn easy to climb up that ladder. My garage was immediately overflowing with cars as a reward for playing previous games. It's even more noticeable if you have the Premium edition, which includes a bunch of bonus rides across its different packs. And it only snowballed from there.

Once again, Wheelspins are a car crash for progression, handing out expensive cars and bucketloads of cash like it's candy. You rarely ever need to buy or tune a car for an event because you'll already have earned at least one applicable ride for free. This is quite a feat considering Wheelspins have intentionally been made rarer in Forza Horizon 6 explicitly to encourage more satisfying, linear progression.

Similarly, there are two new progression paths—Horizon Festival (the wristband races) and Discover Japan. They're a fantastic way to house all the different activities you can do, but you'll get rewards like cars or thick wads of cash all the time for completing tasks, like races, stories, and even food delivery missions.

All of this is to say that I don't have any connection or fond memories of my starter car. In fact, I don't even remember which one I picked because I've not actually used it past the first race, and you're given all three anyway. Just a few hours into your holiday in Japan, you've got multiple houses with garages stocked with cars. The progression mandated by the Festival races begins and ends there.

Alas, I must admit that half the fun of Forza Horizon is to drive around in fast cars, but there's no ignoring that it loses most of the satisfaction without the build-up. And it's hard to force yourself into that career progression when you're presented with a stacked list of cars before every race and repeatedly handed new ones just for breathing.

Forza Horizon 6's tug of war between complete, free-wheeling freedom and linear, rags-to-riches progression isn't a replacement for a proper career mode. It's a compromise at best.

And frankly, part of me thinks I wouldn't actually like more forced progression if my wish came true anyhow. I'd probably be missing my supercars if I couldn't use them at all until 30 hours later, once I'd paid my dues. Especially given how slow collecting all 550 cars in the Forza Horizon 6 car list would be. I had a blast turning a crappy kei truck into a super-powered S2 rank beast, or tuning it to do backflips and handstands.

Perhaps Playground Games' approach of encouraging more linear progression in the main races, but letting you complete side content however you'd like, really is the best of both worlds after all.

Forza Horizon 6's Japan is absolutely massive, which is great and all, but when you're asked to find a very specific location to uncover Treasure Cars, searching the whole map is a monumental task. Sometimes it's a house, other times it's a wind turbine, a radio tower, or a waterfall. Point is, the hints you're given aren't great at narrowing down the location. They're like Barn Finds, except you're not even given a search area.

All Forza Horizon 6 Treasure Car locations

There are nine Treasure Cars in Forza Horizon 6, hidden throughout the map of Japan—one per region. You don't need to do anything before you can find the car, unlike Barn Finds, which require you to increase your Discover Japan level first. So you can visit the locations below to add a unique car to your collection, free of charge. Check out our Forza Horizon 6 cars list to find out what other vehicles you can drive, and our guide to the best cars for each race type.

These are all the available Treasure cars:

You can watch the video above, or read on below to find all the Treasure Car locations, sorted by region in the order you're likely to encounter them:

1969 Dodge Charger R/T

• Region: Minamino
• Clue: 'This American classic has been spotted out the back of the Minamino region's golf course clubhouse.'

The Dodge Charger is the first Treasure Car you'll get a clue for after earning your first Horizon Festival wristband. You can find it behind the buildings on the side of the road by the golf course in the centre of the Minamino region, next to the Airfield Trail dirt racing event.

1991 Nissan Figaro

• Region: Tokyo City
• Clue: 'A classic Nissan Figaro, forgotten in one of the city's car parks near the iconic Rainbow Bridge.'

The Figaro is in a car park near a crossing along the southern coast of Tokyo City, where you'll see the Rainbow Bridge on your right—the westernmost bridge of the few in the city.

1985 Mazda RX-7 GSL-SE

• Region: Ohtani
• Clue: 'This RX-7 has been spotted near some radio towers in the Ohtani region.'

Ohtani is a very large region with lots of radio towers, but the specific one you're looking for is in the mountain range far west of the region, on the border with Shimanoyama, west of the Horizon Festival Site in Ohtani. There will be multiple red radio towers nearby, but it's the one next to the large wooden house and the white tower, too, so it sticks out from the rest.

1985 Nissan Safari Turbo

• Region: Ito
• Clue: 'Perfect for the Ito region's rough terrain, this Nissan Safari has been left to weather the elements near the Wind Farm.'

Ito is also one of the largest regions, and it's very mountainous, making it hard to find the Wind Farm mentioned in the clue. You need to head to the mountain at the northmost point of the region, past the Toyota 2000GT Barn Find and Minka House.

Take the winding dirt path up the hill where you'll find the Safari Turbo at the base of a wind turbine, next to some railings and boxes on the road on the west side of the mountain. It's about halfway up the path and hard to miss.

1987 Porsche 959

• Region: Shimanoyama
• Clue: 'Spotted outside a corner shop in the Shimanoyama region is a Porsche 959 in need of a loving new owner.'

The Porsche 959 is one of the easier Treasure Cars to find, mainly because Shimanoyama doesn't have many buildings, and the hint you're given shows a shop. What you're looking for is the corner shop near the car park along the southernmost road in Narai-Juku, a town in the north of Shimanoyama. It's east of the Narai-Juku Circuit road race, west of the Fuji Unkai House.

This Treasure Car actually overlaps with the Mitsubishi #1 Sierra Sierra Enterprises Lancer Evolution Time Attack Barn Find (hell of a name), so grab this if you've reached Discover Japan level Adventurer (6/7, the purple stamp) or take note and return later.

2005 Ford GT

• Region: Nangan
• Clue: 'Spotted down one of the Nangan region's coastal trails, this Ford GT is in need of some TLC.'

The Ford GT gave me the most trouble of any Treasure Car, as there's a long stretch of coastline to search. You're looking for the coastal trail overlooking Tokyo City in the east of Nangan, which you'll find on the easternmost main road going along the coastline. Here, there's a narrow dirt path in the hills, closer to the coast—you can just about make it out on the map.

1981 BMW M1

• Region: Hokubu
• Clue: 'This classic BMW M1 has been left under one of the railway bridges in the Hokubu region.'

The hint you're given for the BMW M1 points you towards a railway, which isn't much to go on in a big region with a railway running the whole way through. You need to go to the large railway bridge cutting through the open fields in the middle north of the Hokubu region, where you'll see the Treasure Car parked next to some scaffolding. It's not far from the Hokubu Ascent street race event, and you'll see the railway tunnel to the south.

1995 Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution III GSR

• Region: Takashiro
• Clue: 'An abandoned Lancer has been spotted below a waterfall in the Takashiro region, near one of the temples.'

The Lancer Evolution can be found on the dirt road leading to the waterfall in the western corner of the Takashiro region, not far from a temple. Take the dirt path by the bridge leading along the river.

This Treasure Car more or less overlaps with the Nissan #23 Pennzoil NISMO Skyline GT-R Barn Find, which you might have unlocked by the time you enter this region if you've been increasing your Discover Japan rank.

1974 Lancia Stratos HF Stradale

• Region: Sotoyama
• Clue: 'A legendary Lancia Stratos has been spotted abandoned near Tateyama Kurobe Alpine Route in the Sotoyama region.'

You can find the Lancia Stratos behind the wooden lodge on the snowy path up to Tateyama Kurobe Alpine Route, near the centre of the Sotoyama region. The nearby main road (which leads towards Hakusan Mountain Lodge) cuts through the snow-covered mountain pass like a ravine, making it a good landmark—you can just about see it in the background of the clue photograph, too. Given the deep snow, it's not exactly the best area to test drive the Lancia Stratos.

Everyone's favourite tradition continues yet again in Forza Horizon 6 with Barn Finds, iconic cars you'll have to track down before you can add them to your garage. Like previous games in the series, you'll need to search a designated area for the barn—only this time around, you unlock new finds by increasing your Discover Japan stamp level.

All Forza Horizon 6 Barn Find locations

There are 15 Barn Finds in Forza Horizon 6, unlocked in batches (generally two at a time) as you increase your Discover Japan level from Visitor to Master Explorer. Improving your Discover Japan ranking and getting new stamps boils down to breaking mascots, beating food delivery jobs, street and touge races, and, most importantly, completing stories (the activities with yellow badges). There are more than enough activities to increase your Discover Japan level without beating absolutely everything, though it's still a time-consuming process.

Each time you uncover a Barn Find car, you will need to wait for it to be repaired, so you can't use it right away like you can with Treasure Cars—unless you want to pay a large chunk of credits, though I'd not recommend it. You're best off just completing some races and biding your time. Plus, you'll also be earning money to put towards some of the best cars in the game.

These are all the Barn Finds you can unlock at each Discover Japan rank:

You can watch the video version above, or look below for all the Barn Find locations in the exact order you'll unlock them:

Honda NSX-R GT

• Unlocked at Discover Japan: Visitor (yellow stamp, 1/7)
• Region: Ohtani

This Barn Find is located in the woods in the hills along the northwest edge of the search area, close to where the two nearby roads pincer together. It's rough terrain, so don't use a slow city car like the Nissan Figaro as I did.

Toyota 2000GT

• Unlocked at Discover Japan: Sightseer (green stamp, 2/7)
• Region: Ito

The Toyota 2000GT is in the north of the Ito region, not far from the Minka House. More specifically, it's in the small patch of trees near the seawall on the southeastern edge of the search area, between the two paths down to the beach.

It's also just a short drive from the 1985 Nissan Safari Turbo Treasure Car further north, so why not grab that while you're in the area?

Ford Sierra Cosworth RS500

• Unlocked at Discover Japan: Sightseer (green stamp, 2/7)
• Region: Ito

The Ford Sierra Cosworth RS500 Barn Find sits near the borders of three regions overlapping the search area, but it's located in southern Ito. It's up the small wooded hill south of the crossroads junction on the southern edge of the search area. You can just about see it from the road.

Nissan Skyline 2000GT-R

• Unlocked at Discover Japan: Traveller (blue stamp, 3/7)
• Region: Nangan

You can find the Nissan Skyline 2000GT-R in the far south of the search area in Nangan, past the houses on the main road, where you'll see a dirt path leading off towards the barn.

Nissan Pao

• Unlocked at Discover Japan: Traveller (blue stamp, 3/7)
• Region: Minamino

You'll find the Nissan Pao in the woods to the northeast edge of the search area, in a barn down a dirt path leading off the main road.

I recommend grabbing the 1969 Dodge Charger R/T Treasure Car further to the east while you're in the area, as well. Remember, you can grab these without needed specific progression.

Porsche 911 Turbo 3.3

• Unlocked at Discover Japan: Pathfinder (pink stamp, 4/7)
• Region: Ohtani/Tokyo City

The Porsche 911 Turbo 3.3 is located in the bamboo forest next to the dirt road between the two main roads (which lead to Mei's house) in the Ohtani section of the search area to the north.

Peugeot 205 Turbo 16

• Unlocked at Discover Japan: Pathfinder (pink stamp, 4/7)
• Region: Shimanoyama

You can find the Peugeot 205 Turbo 16 in the barn at the end of the wide dirt road leading up the short hill from the main road in the northeast of the search area. It's hard to miss in this rather quiet area, and you can just about see it from the main road, in fact.

Lincoln Continental

• Unlocked at Discover Japan: Pathfinder (pink stamp, 4/7)
• Region: Hokubu

The Lincoln Continental is nice and easy to locate, found in the patch of trees next to the colourful flower fields/farmland just south of the centre of the search area.

Nissan #23 Pennzoil NISMO Skyline GT-R

• Unlocked at Discover Japan: Pathfinder (pink stamp, 4/7)
• Region: Takashiro

You'll find the Nissan Pennzoil Skyline in the woods on the eastern edge of the search area, between where the road curves in a 'u' shape.

You can also collect the 1995 Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution III GSR Treasure Car by the waterfall not far from here, so I recommend grabbing it while you're in the area.

Mitsubishi Montero Evolution

• Unlocked at Discover Japan: Navigator (orange stamp, 5/7)
• Region: Shimanoyama

The Mitsubishi Montero Evolution is in the forest on the southwest edge of the search area. If you zoom into the map, you can actually see the dirt path leading to it from the main road, not far from the Bandai Azuma Skyline Drift Zone challenge.

Lamborghini Diablo SV

• Unlocked at Discover Japan: Navigator (orange stamp, 5/7)
• Region: Ito

The easiest way to reach the Lamborghini Diablo SV is to follow the main road cutting through the search area until you reach the long, deforested strip in the centre of the location, near a three-way junction. The barn is on the eastern edge of the search area, so go down the hill with the chopped trees opposite the blue digger, and around the bend on your right. It's my favourite of the Barn Finds since it's very practical in road races (and looks amazing).

Nissan R390 (GT1)

• Unlocked at Discover Japan: Adventurer (purple stamp, 6/7)
• Region: Ohtani

You can find the Nissan R390 along the dirt path cutting through the northeastern edge of the search location, near the border between Ohtani and Shimanoyama. You can also reach it from the main road outside of the search area to the northeast, near the Bridge Underpass Trailblazer start gate.

Mitsubishi #1 Sierra Sierra Enterprises Lancer Evolution Time Attack

• Unlocked at Discover Japan: Adventurer (purple stamp, 6/7)
• Region: Shimanoyama

The Mitsubishi #1 Sierra Sierra Enterprises Lancer Evolution Time Attack (rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?) is in the woods almost directly in the centre of the search area, overlooking Narai-Juku town to its south. Take the high dirt road leading from the Narai-Juku Circuit road race event, then go down the path on your right where you'll see the barn over the hill.

It's just up the road from the Peugeot 205 Turbo 16 Barn Find, and very close to the 1987 Porsche 959 Treasure Car.

Nissan #11 Tomica Skyline Turbo Super Silhouette

• Unlocked at Discover Japan: Master Explorer (gold stamp, 7/7)
• Region: Ito

You'll find the Tomica Skyline in the southwestern edge of the search area. Near where the main road enters the zone to the west, there's a wide dirt path leading south towards the barn between some oddly skinny trees. You can actually see it quite easily on the map, which is rare for Barn Finds.

Mazda #55 Mazda 787B

• Unlocked at Discover Japan: Master Explorer (gold stamp, 7/7)
• Region: Takashiro

The last Barn Find, the Mazda #55 Mazda 787B, is one of the hardest to track down, despite most of the surrounding area being open fields. It's located in the woods directly north of the search area, past the buildings, walking trails, and farmland in the region. There's a dirt path coming off the main road in the northwest edge of the zone. Similar to the Lamborghini Diablo, the Mazda 787B is a great pick-up for a little leg-work (does it count if you're in a car?), performing very well in road races.

Speeding through Shibuya Crossing in a souped up kei truck, Babymetal blaring out of the stereo, it's easy to fall in love with the fantasy that Forza Horizon is selling. Recognisable locations stitched together across a large open world, a huge number of cars picked from multiple eras and disciplines, and a seemingly endless suite of events and races to help you make the most of your ever-expanding garage.

It's slick. It's polished. It's consistently fun. It's also a continuation of what the series has been doing for over a decade.

Forza Horizon 6, like every Forza Horizon before it, is another big, bombastic racing festival, featuring mostly the same event icons but on a different map. It's a game of small, marginal changes; sometimes meaningful, but always subtle. If you have played any of the previous games, you inherently know how this one will feel. It's the same, only now it's in Japan.

Fortunately the setting makes for one of the better locations in the series' history. As a collection of biomes it's less varied and dramatic than Forza Horizon 5's Mexico, instead feeling more reminiscent of Forza Horizon 4's version of the UK. It turns out that island nations with a rich automotive legacy are a great fit for what the series is trying to do—giving plenty of opportunities for Playground Games to express its deep love of car culture.

As with the previous games, the map is highly interpretive—a patchwork of real-world Japanese locations strewn across the map. Here, Hokkaido's flower gardens are south of Toyama's snow walls. Irabu Bridge—in reality part of the Okinawa prefecture—lives northeast of Tokyo, which itself is truncated down to its most recognisable sites and expressways.

Big in Japan

The point isn't realism, it's vibes. The various points of interest—be it the multi-story spiral of the Kawazu-Nanadaru Loop Bridge or the scenic view of Mt. Fuji from the Izu Skyline—are all in service of a memorable driving experience; something pretty to look at as you build skill chains across the open world, or something challenging to master as you race. And while there's still many miles of generic country roads, there's enough flavour throughout to do justice to the setting.

One small but somewhat notable change for Forza Horizon 6 is the splitting of campaign progression into two separate ranking systems: One for the festival itself, and another for extracurricular activities dotted around the map. This second collection, Discover Japan, contains everything from street races to sidequest stories—things more directly tied to the setting and open world exploration.

As you tick things off from its checklist, you earn points and rank up to unlock new barn find rumours. I actually like this as a way to stop the general shape of the campaign from feeling so homogeneous. It's not revelatory by any means, but as a small nudge towards a more purposeful reward path, it works.

The best activities in the Discover Japan path are the new touge events—head-to-head races down narrow, winding mountain roads. These are tight, technical routes that make for an enjoyable challenge, and limiting the competition to just a single opponent keeps the action focused more on the driving than on fighting against the pack.

As for the sidequests, they range from day trips to notable locations to a whistlestop tour of Japan's drifting scene. Thematically they're all fine, but they suffer from repetition. Most involve driving to a place, watching a short cutscene, and then completing some concluding challenge for a rating out of three stars. Do a big jump. Get to the checkpoint before the time runs out. Go fast through a speed trap. Get to the checkpoint before the time runs out while also keeping your speed above 80mph.

If you have played any of the previous games, you will have done all of this many times before. And while it's not a major issue—going fast in cars is, after all, why we're here—it's made worse by how bland the dialogue is. It's all trite platitudes and empty positivity. Everyone's having an amazing time, which they are constantly explaining to you with the same superficial tone that my local supermarket's in-store radio uses to tell me about the latest deal on tinned tomatoes.

My favourite series of quests focuses more on the cars, and a local mechanic who's been asked to custom tune a fleet of iconic Japanese vehicles for a festival parade. It's the same rotation of basic challenges, but with the added twist of driving the car both before and after it's been tuned. It's an effective showcase for the potential of the game's own tuning options, which let you dramatically alter the feel of a car—for instance turning a usually quite skittish Mazda MX-5 into something that better holds traction for fast cornering.

It attempts to use dialogue to explain the specific tweaks being made and the reasons behind them, but the amount of information imparted is dwarfed by the constant reinforcement of what a gosh darn privilege it is to be here. It's peak second-screen gaming, words that simply wash over you in all their banal triviality. We're all having so much fun! Are you having fun? Well? Are you?

Yes, I am having fun. As always, the driving is peerless—an arcade sensibility given just enough realism to trick you into thinking you are good at handling these vehicles. Even with limited assists, the cars, by and large, do what you want them to do. For the vast majority of my time in the game—in a race or just driving across the world—I'm still loving what Forza Horizon offers. It's just that, eventually, a character will open their mouth to pull me out of the moment.

Maybe I'm the problem for expecting more from a team that seemingly has no interest in improving its unconvincing dialogue. Except Forza Horizon 6 clearly cares about the lore because it features driving cameos from characters pulled from previous Horizon games, which I only know because a) the game told me, and b) I double checked a wiki. I recognised none of these people because this series does not have characters, only delivery mechanisms for insipid chat.

Back to basics

At least this time there is an arc to your main progression through the festival proper. Rather than entering as a returning superstar, immediately given the best and coolest things to do, you start out as a nobody—traveling to Japan with your pals to make a name for yourself. After completing a series of qualifying events, you're invited to compete in the festival—competing to earn points to gain entry to a capstone event that unlocks a new tier of wristband and the new races that it brings.

Those opening qualifiers restrict you to C-rank vehicles, with each successive wristband increasing the performance cap. It's an obvious move—it's how basically every other racing game works—but this is the first time since the earliest Horizons that the series is even attempting any sort of progression curve. And yeah, obviously it works; it's tried and true. It's also nice to have a proper excuse to wheel out some modestly priced classics, better utilising the full scope of Horizon's roster of vehicles.

Not that these restrictions actually prevent you from earning or driving more powerful cars. As a reward for playing the previous games, my garage was instantly gifted a small collection of higher-tier vehicles, and between wheelspin rewards, collection completion rewards and the cars you buy from the credits you earn, your available selection will quickly balloon. The game is constantly throwing new (and old) cars your way.

I think that's fine, as is the fact that the Discover Japan street races feature no class restrictions. After all, Horizon in its totality is more about the sandbox than the campaign. With its pokedex style approach to cars—550 available at launch—there's no sense in holding back. It also means that, by the time you unlock the highest tier wristbands, you'll have plenty of S1 and S2 performance options to let loose with.

In terms of Horizon's races, the action is firmly in familiar territory. Road, dirt and cross-country races once again make up the bulk of the action, and play out much like they do in any other game in the series. Courses are, for the most part, constructed from the game's open world—courdoned off to limit the action to the 12 racers on the track. That makes their quality pretty variable throughout. Some have enough personality to stand out, but many blend together across the hours you spend with the game.

It's another reason the touge races shine so brightly—those feel constructed for their purpose, with the winding paths to support them. The broader, more general races struggle to match that clarity of vision.

Nevertheless, the racing feels good once you've tuned the difficulty a bit. The AI opponents are generally clean racers, but not afraid to fight for their position or trade paint during an overtake—a level of aggression that suits the type of racing Horizon prioritises. I found a good level of challenge on road and drift races particularly, with some quality mid-race jostling eventually leading into an exciting fight for first place.

That's the ideal, at least, although it can be inconsistent—with difficulty spikes in both directions depending on race type and track restrictions. AI drivers in cross country events have an annoying tendency to clump together in the mid-pack, leaving first and second position free to forge ahead. Spend too long fighting through the crowd, and that distance becomes insurmountable given the lack of technical corners to make up time.

The sandbox nature of Horizon at least means that even the most punishing conditions and harder difficulties can be overcome with the right car choice. After struggling with a series of A-class cross country buggy races, I eventually found a modified Subaru BRZ that instantly chewed through all competition. Even if you don't want to splash the cash for a new ride, new upgrades and tuning set-ups are relatively cheap, and offer a significant boost to your race capabilities.

In fact, Horizon 6 does more than any previous game to get you in the right car for the job. Sure, you can head to the festival site or one of your purchased houses to browse the extensive showroom. But you'll also find plenty of cars for sale parked out in the open world. Drive up to one, and you're given the option to buy it at a discount, and many of the cars you'll find will come with upgrades pre-installed. Inevitably these cars are placed right next to race events that they're perfectly suited for. That Subaru? It was sitting next to the very event I'd been struggling with.

It all fits together into an experience that offers an incredible sense of forward momentum, to the point where I had to turn off the automated event recommendations that pop up after you finish a race. With them on, I entered a sort of hypnotic flow state of progression, always on the move towards the next thing on the checklist—the game constantly pushing me towards more as if it was scared I might stop for a second and lose interest. But Forza Horizon is just as much a game about dicking around—doing a big slide in a field through trees that split apart under the smallest amount of pressure. A big silly world where everything that isn't relevant to having fun in a car is exorcised from existence.

Don't mech me laugh

On the topic of silly, let me derail this review to gripe about the bit of the game where you race a mech. As in other Horizon events, new campaign tiers are placed behind big showcase events—usually a race against something that isn't a car. Hot air balloons in Horizon 1, for example, or a steam train in Horizon 4. There's a lot of potential here for a game set in Japan. I was looking forward to racing the bullet train or the Shonan Monorail or, you know, something real. Instead, I get a mech.

It is, by some distance, my least favourite moment of the game. An incredible opportunity squandered for some sci-fi nonsense. For a series that, underneath its inherent ridiculousness, displays such a deep love of engineering and craft to waste fully half of its showcase races—there are only two, the second against some stunt planes—is such a missed opportunity. I'd almost understand it if this was some big crossover, like Horizon 4's Halo race. It certainly has the soul and execution of a brand deal. But no, it's an unlicensed knock-off Gundam. They did this because they wanted to. Maybe you think mechs are cool, I won't begrudge you that, but my disappointment was profound.

The reason there are only two showcases this time around is because they've been intermixed with a new capstone event type, Rush. These are time trials on custom built courses that have a little visual flair to them but are mostly focused on technical driving. I loved them. What they lack in spectacle they make up for by being some of the most interesting routes in the game. I'm starting to realise I might just be a freak for precise cornering, but still I'd love to see Playground expand this concept more.

None of Forza Horizon 6's weaker points are particularly new things for the series—if anything, many are born from just how resistant these games are to change. But its lack of ambition around reinventing itself is more than offset by just how absurd a proposition it remains at a basic level. There is a staggering amount to do, and an absurd number of cars to do it all in. No other racing series operates on this scale, with this much sandbox freedom.

It's a fantasy that travels from the sublime to the ridiculous. From the sheer thrill of tearing down the expressway in a souped up hypercar, to the nostalgic joy of the unspectacular but iconic. As a kid, my dad drove a Mini Cooper S. At university, my flatmate had a beat down Subaru Impreza that bravely soldiered through the last undignified miles of its life. As an adult, I got to ride in a Radical track car as it did laps around Castle Combe circuit. That there's a racing game—not just a dry sim, but something so big and audacious and approachable—that can bring together all these disparate memories is nothing short of miraculous. There's simply nothing else like it.

Ultimately, Forza Horizon 6's only competitor is the previous Forza Horizon games—itself a scary thought given the regularity with which Microsoft removes them from sale. While I'd love for the series to flex its creativity a bit more, that desire doesn't dampen my deep appreciation for what Forza Horizon 6 does achieve.

After years of fan requests, over a decade even, Forza Horizon 6 finally takes us to Japan with a new Horizon Festival that'll have you falling in love with street races, drifting, and kei trucks. But you'll have to wait just a bit longer for the Forza Horizon 6 launch time and release date. Sorry.

Importantly, there are two dates to be aware of, which I'll go over below. There's the advanced access period if you purchase the $120 Premium edition, or the standard release date for everyone else.

Oh, plus the console and PC versions launch at different times, including the Xbox App on PC. Just to make things more complicated.

When is the Forza Horizon 6 unlock time?

Forza Horizon 6 launches on Tuesday, May 19, with different times for PC and console. On Xbox or the Xbox App on PC, it's 12:01 am your local time—except US Pacific players, where it's 9:01 pm PDT. However, on Steam the game releases globally at 4:01 am UTC, which works out to the following times across the globe:

• US Pacific: 9:01 pm PDT (Monday, May 18)
• US Eastern: 12:01 am EDT
• UK: 5:01 am GMT
• Europe: 6:01 am CEST
• Australia: 2:01 pm AEST
• New Zealand: 4:01 pm NZST
• Japan: 1:01 pm JST

Forza Horizon 6 is also coming to PS5 later this year, though Microsoft is yet to give a solid release date.

Forza Horizon 6 early access unlock times

As mentioned, avid race festival goers who purchased the Forza Horizon 6 Premium edition got four days of advanced access starting Friday, May 15. And yes, you read that right—it was only for the $120 edition, not even the $100 Deluxe one. But if you bought this edition before launch or now, you'll also get access to the full Forza Horizon 6 car list thanks to the included DLC packs.

Like the full launch, this exclusive early access launch time differed based on your platform. It was 12:01 local time on Xbox or the Xbox App on PC—again, except US Pacific players, where it was 9:01 pm PDT. Those on Steam had to wait until the game released at 4:01 am UTC, which worked out to the following times across the globe:

• US Pacific: 9:01 pm PDT (Thursday, May 14)
• US Eastern: 12:01 am EDT
• UK: 5:01 am GMT
• Europe: 6:01 am CEST
• Australia: 2:01 pm AEST
• New Zealand: 4:01 pm NZST
• Japan: 1:01 pm JST

Can you preload Forza Horizon 6?

Yes, you can preload Forza Horizon 6 on PC and Xbox. Downloading the game requires 160 GB on PC and upwards of 135 GB on Xbox, so it's certainly a relief to get that massive download out of the way ahead of the lights turning green if you're waiting on the full launch.

It's worth noting that PC players (whether through Steam or the Xbox App) are required to update Gaming Services to play the game. If you've ever opened the Microsoft Store before, you'll know it's not exactly a reliable service. It's a good thing that you can also update your Gaming Services in advance too.

The upcoming Forza Horizon 6 has been leaked, apparently through mistake rather than malfeasance, with a Steam upload that contained the full build of the game.

"Big shout-out to the homies at Microsoft for accidentally publishing Forza Horizon 6 on Steam early," says notorious malware website VX-Underground on X. "Microsoft corrected the issue but it was too late. Stinky internet nerds yanked it and now it's all over piracy sites. Very cool, Microsoft."

It does, indeed, appear in all the usual places: but I won't be downloading it. Both because I am pure as the driven snow (driven, get it), but also because I don't want developer Playground Games banning me from its works until checks notes December 31, year 9,999. Take it away folks:

"HAPPY FORZA WEEK...to all those with premium edition who will be joining us this week," Fan site ForzaHorizon5UK writes on X. "Standard edition players, we can't wait to see you next week!!

"To those who got a little overexcited and decided to play a few days early, we can't wait to see you on 31st December 9,999!!!"

Developer Playground Games confirmed the heavy hammer drop for people logging in early in its own message, although it said the preload process wasn't to blame: "We are aware of reports that a build of Forza Horizon 6 has been obtained prior to its release and can confirm this is not the result of a pre-load issue. We are taking strict enforcement action against any individuals found accessing this build including franchise-wide and hardware bans. We encourage fans to sit tight for the game’s release on May 19."

The weird thing is that Forza Horizon is one of those games where pirating it and having no access to the online side removes most of what makes the game great, which in my opinion would be the weekly and seasonal events that function as the endgame. Forza Horizon 6 without those… yeah, I'd rather just pay the ticket price and actually enjoy myself.

As for the leak itself, the now-yoinked build's listing can still be seen on SteamDB as a "public branch" so, yeah, it looks like someone just pressed the wrong button and uploaded the full-fat 155GB release version in a bootable state. It was just a week early.

Lest ye be tempted to download… I'd say it's not worth it, but if you fancy a 7,973 year ban then rock on. Forza Horizon 6 releases on May 19, with preorders getting early access on May 15. PCG's review will be here Thursday and I can exclusively reveal from our insider source, who will hopefully not be banned for such leakage until the year 9,999, that "it gud."

Unsurprisingly, Forza Horizon 6 has a metric truckload of cars—even more than the last game, would you believe it? In fact, the car list is over 600 vehicles long. Set in Japan, FH6 leans into even more Japanese icons, though you'll still have the usual manufacturers spanning decades of automotive history, from Ford to Ferrari. Oh, and the Warthog from Halo is back as well.

The vast majority of these cars are available through the in-game garage, Barn Finds, or the new Treasure Car locations. However, even at launch there are a number of cars that are exclusive to different car packs, passes, and pre-order bonuses.

Forza Horizon 6 car list

Right now, there are 618 cars in Forza Horizon 6, with more coming in future updates and DLCs. I've listed each and every one of them below, including how to get them to complete your collection.

Because there are a lot of vehicles, I'll note that the list is sorted alphabetically based on manufacturer. Remember that you can press Control + F on your keyboard to search, too, if you're looking for something specific.