The Crew Motorfest /REVIEW
Once set in a scaled down version of United States and bogged down with godawful story, laughable “get to the tower to unlock new activities” gameplay loop and a handling model that was unpleasant at best (and plain bad at worst), Ubisoft’s open world racing series The Crew has come a long way since its first outing.
Nowadays, with The Crew Motorfest, it lets you go wild both on and off the roads of the beautiful Oahu island in Hawaii, where you will drive dream cars and participate in various races and activities at the titular festival. And it finally features an improved handling model, that makes driving itself much more fun and pleasant than ever before — even for casual arcade racing fans, who can feel cool while driving Motorfest’s cars at crazy speeds, while instinctively feeling and understanding their behaviour.
Personally, as someone who doesn’t know much about cars, I enjoyed the handling model quite a bit (although with some low level assists) — even when it seemingly oversimplified driving American muscle cars, which I usually find more difficult to control.
Sure, the game now looks, feels and plays like Forza Horizon, but who cares? After all, Forza Horizon is beloved for a reason, and any new game in its image is a welcome one — especially for PlayStation owners without access to Xbox consoles or a PC good enough to run Microsoft’s flagship racing series.
But, while the similarities with Forza Horizon are at every corner — just wait until you see how its stone fences crumble when you drive through them, and try not to picture Scottish countryside from Forza Horizon 4 in your mind — Motorfest actually does some things differently.
First of all, it features not only cars, but also motorcycles, boats and planes (just as The Crew 2), and it lets you use nitro for extra bursts of speed, useful when exiting corners, or when you’re getting ready to overtake an opponent or two.
It also structures its campaign a bit differently — races are grouped in “playlists”, each of which is focused on specific type of racing, from Japan inspired drift competitions and races through neon-lit city streets, to professional racing on proper race tracks — or, for example, more chill boat and plane races. And you will need to use specific vehicles for each one of those, which is a breath of fresh air for Forza Horizon fans, who are used to much more freedom and many more vehicle choices while racing through its campaign.
Along with additional challenges like speed traps or short street slaloms, all of that makes Motorfest’s campaign self contained in a surprisingly old school way, especially considering that the game won’t shower you with gift vehicles like so many other genre contemporaries, instead expecting you to buy them with hard earned in-game money…
…or with special microtransaction currency found in the game’s menu. See, like so many others, The Crew Motorfest is a live service game, in which you can find various weekly challenges and spend a lot of time and money if you succumb to its neverending grind. Which, at least for me, was quite easy to avoid thanks to the already mentioned self contained campaign, and since it feels like you don’t actually need to buy cars very often (the game will loan you specific vehicles for specific races during the campaign, and you’ll only need to buy some of them to be able to participate in certain playlists). But I did mind the overly chatty characters, bad AI and Ubisoft’s stubborn insistency on having hundreds of collectibles strewn all over the game map — here you’ll be collecting different murals and statues, and you’ll be collecting them in a very annoying way, having to stop dead in your tracks so you can hold a button on your controller for like five seconds.
On top of that, the game also features an uninspired green/blue/purple rarity based loot system, that showers you with upgrade parts for your vehicles, which is only made worse by two facts: you have limited inventory space for them, and the game loves to crash while you’re sorting them out in the menu.
But, luckily, none of those issues managed to negatively influence my experience with The Crew Motorfest in any significant way. The game often looks beautiful with its sunny Hawaiian roads, wonderfully green tropical rainforests and magically turquoise ocean — and it makes the act of driving its crazy fast and expensive cars in those picturesque locations quite a pleasure.
The Crew Motorfest | developer: Ubisoft Ivory Tower | publisher: Ubisoft | platforms: PlayStation 5 (played), PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PC
