Forza Horizon 6 Is 2026's Best-Reviewed Game. The PS5 Version Still Has No Date.

Forza Horizon 6 arrived on May 19 and settled the question of 2026's best-reviewed game almost immediately. Four months later, nothing has taken the crown.

It sits at 92 on Metacritic, rated "universally acclaimed," and is the highest-scoring game of the year so far. Playground Games moved the series to Japan, shipped more than 550 cars, and built the largest Horizon map yet.

That is the easy part of the story. The more interesting part is where the game is — and, four months on, still is not.

The setting does what the series needed

Horizon has always been a tourism game as much as a racing one, and Japan solves a problem the series had been circling.

Mexico in Horizon 5 was visually spectacular but structurally familiar: wide roads, open desert, long sightlines. Japan offers something Horizon had never properly had — genuine verticality and genuine tightness in the same map. Mountain passes that demand actual line discipline, dense neon-lit urban sections where the car has to be small, and coastal stretches between them.

It also brings a car culture the franchise had been borrowing from for a decade without ever setting a game inside. The 550-car roster is the headline number, but the meaningful change is that the location and the collection finally agree with each other.

What 550 cars actually changes

Roster size is the easiest number for a racing game to inflate, so it is worth being precise about what it buys here.

Past a certain point, additional cars stop being content and start being curation problems — most players settle into a handful of favourites and never touch the rest. The 550-car figure matters less as a quantity than as a claim about coverage: a Japan-set Horizon needs the full breadth of JDM history to be credible, from eighties homologation specials through nineties touring cars to modern hybrids, and it needs them alongside the European and American machinery the series has always carried.

Getting that wrong would have been conspicuous. A Japanese map with a thin Japanese roster is the kind of mismatch players notice within an hour. The number is best read as evidence that Playground understood the assignment rather than as a feature in itself.

Day one on Game Pass, which is the actual business model

Forza Horizon 6 launched into Game Pass on day one, on Xbox Series X/S and PC, with a staggered entry — May 15 for premium buyers, May 19 for everyone else.

It is worth stating plainly what that means. The best-reviewed game of 2026 was available at no additional cost to every existing Game Pass subscriber on the day it launched. Microsoft did not treat a 92-rated flagship as a $70 event. It treated it as subscription content.

That is a deliberate trade — forgoing a large chunk of launch revenue to make the subscription harder to cancel — and it is the clearest expression yet of how differently the two console platforms now think about what a first-party release is for. Sony sells copies. Microsoft sells months.

The PlayStation version nobody will date

Here is the part that has gone quiet, and it deserves attention.

Forza Horizon 6 was announced as coming to PlayStation 5 "later in 2026." The PlayStation Store page is live and players can wishlist it. What does not exist, four months after the Xbox launch, is a date.

Precedent suggests patience. Forza Horizon 5 launched in November 2021 on Xbox and PC and did not reach PS5 until April 2025 — roughly three and a half years. Measured against that, "later in 2026" would be a dramatic acceleration, compressing a multi-year gap into months.

But "later in 2026" is now a promise with about three months left to run, and no date attached. Either an announcement is imminent or the window slips. Given what we know about the release calendar either side of November 19, dropping a PS5 port into the GTA 6 blast zone would be an odd choice — which makes early 2027 look more plausible than the stated window, whatever the official line says.

What Playground Games is now carrying

Step back and the studio's position is remarkable. Playground shipped the best-reviewed game of 2026 in May, and is also the team behind Fable, which Xbox has dated to February 23, 2027 on Xbox Series, PS5 and PC with day-one Game Pass.

One studio holds both Microsoft's strongest 2026 release and its biggest 2027 one. That is an unusual concentration of expectation, and Fable is a far riskier proposition than Horizon — a reboot of a beloved but dormant RPG franchise, in a genre Playground has never shipped in, against a February window that is filling up fast with displaced blockbusters.

Horizon 6 at 92 is the best possible evidence that the studio can execute. It is not evidence that it can execute in a different genre.

Should you play it?

If you have Game Pass, there is no decision to make — it is included, and it is the best-reviewed game of the year.

If you are buying it outright on Xbox or PC, the 92 is well earned. This is the most complete version of a formula Playground has been refining for over a decade, in the setting the series most obviously wanted.

If you are on PlayStation, the honest advice is to wishlist it and wait, but not to plan around 2026. The stated window has months left and no date in it, and the studio's own history with Horizon 5 suggests these ports arrive when they arrive.

The takeaway

Forza Horizon 6 is exactly what the reviews say — a 92, the year's best-reviewed game, and Horizon's strongest setting yet.

But the detail worth remembering is structural rather than critical. Microsoft put its highest-scoring release of the year into a subscription on day one, and simultaneously promised it to the competing console. Neither of those things describes a traditional platform exclusive. Whatever Xbox is now, Forza Horizon 6 is the clearest example of it yet — and the missing PS5 date is the one loose thread.