Forza Horizon 6 sits at #1 on Steam’s global top sellers chart. It’s already broken the series’ concurrent player record with a peak of 128,157 players on PC — and the game doesn’t officially launch until May 19. By every commercial measure, Playground Games has a smash hit on its hands.

Open the Steam reviews, and the picture gets more complicated. “Mostly Positive” — 77% from 1,601 reviews. That’s the grade you’d expect from a competent mid-tier release, not the highest-rated game of 2026.

A Tale of Two Scores

The disconnect is stark. On Metacritic, Forza Horizon 6 holds a 92 from 62 professional reviews — tied for the best score in franchise history alongside Forza Horizon 4 and 5, according to Forbes. IGN gave it a perfect 10, calling it “the best-looking and best-sounding game Playground has produced to date.” Eurogamer matched that score.

Then there’s the Steam user review graph: 1,232 positive, 369 negative. “Mostly Positive.” Not “Very Positive.” Not “Overwhelmingly Positive.” Just mostly.

The people writing those reviews paid $120 for the privilege. The Premium Edition — the only way to play before the May 19 street date — grants four days of early access alongside all future DLC. These are the franchise’s most committed players, the ones willing to drop triple-digit money before reading a single review. And nearly a quarter of them walked away unimpressed.

Beautiful But Empty

The most consistent criticism echoes Digital Foundry’s assessment, as reported by Notebookcheck: Forza Horizon 6 is “beautiful but empty.” Playground’s recreation of Japan is visually stunning — the countryside towns, the shrines tucked into forests, the dense streets of Tokyo — but the roads themselves feel oddly vacant. Wider streets with minimal traffic. Tokyo rendered in impressive detail, then left feeling like a diorama with the cars removed.

The Japan festival hub appears to reuse the exact same presentation as Forza Horizon 5’s Mexico setup. For players who spent hundreds of hours in the last game, the déjà vu is hard to ignore.

Multiple professional reviewers acknowledged that Forza Horizon 6 doesn’t attempt anything revolutionary — it refines an established template with exceptional craft. The BBC noted that critics “generally” agreed the game had “successfully refined” its formula rather than reinvented it. When you’re paying $69.99 for a standard edition, “more of the same, but prettier” lands differently than it does in a compressed review period.

The Hardware Toll

On consoles, both the Xbox Series X and S reportedly run the game well, though pop-in remains an issue — improved over Forza Horizon 5, but still present, per Notebookcheck. Console players also miss out on the full ray tracing feature set available on PC.

On PC, the experience depends heavily on your hardware. Notebookcheck found that the 8GB variant of the RTX 5060 Ti struggled to hit 60 FPS at 1080p with ray tracing enabled, while the 16GB variant managed frame rates in the low 70s. The game demands roughly 12GB of VRAM at the highest settings — a steep ask for mid-range hardware in a series that has historically been well-optimized.

The Juggernaut Keeps Rolling

None of this seems to be slowing sales. Forza Horizon 6 had already surpassed 500,000 pre-purchases by mid-April, according to BigGo Finance, and analysts estimate that figure has nearly doubled since. It’s been a fixture on Steam’s revenue charts for 16 consecutive weeks.

The broader context matters. Xbox’s first-party lineup has been criticized for years — studio closures, layoffs, price hikes — and Forza Horizon has been the consistent exception. “Well, except Forza,” as Forbes put it. The pressure on this franchise to deliver is enormous simply because almost nothing else in the Xbox stable does.

A PlayStation 5 release is planned for later this year, which will broaden the audience considerably. If the early Steam numbers are any indication — already well above Forza Horizon 5’s peak of 81,096 and Forza Horizon 4’s 75,689, per VG247 — Playground’s latest could end up as the best-selling entry in series history.

But the Steam reviews tell a story the Metacritic aggregate doesn’t. The golden franchise hasn’t lost its shine, exactly. It’s just that the shine is starting to feel familiar.

Sources