Obviously, you’ve all come here today anxiously awaiting the news, the official confirmation as to whether Travis thinks The Crew: Motorfest is a solid knockoff of Forza Horizon, so let’s dive into it with an answer that likely won’t be too satisfying. Yes and no. The Crew: Motorfest basically does what The Crew franchise has always been about, car culture, exploration, and just having fun. And while this mirrors a lot of the style and basic design elements from Horizon it also adds so much more. This is the first standalone sequel that wasn’t a seasonal content drop, so I was excited to see what The Crew was up to.
I admit, I haven’t played a Crew game in several years, but I had been playing Forza Horizon 5 after their most recent DLC drop, so that was fresh on my mind, and I have to say, The Crew: Motorfest does an almost scary job of mimicking its competition right up to the point where it totally blows past it. You have some fun core game modes starting with The Playlists, the mode I spent the most time with mostly because you have to complete ten lists to unlock fast travel. Playlists are basically a set of races all designed around a theme like a location or a car brand, etc. Live Competition allows you to challenge any of the other hundreds of players cruising around your shared open-world map. And then you have the Main Stage, which gives you intuitive access to all the game’s content in this clever Netflix-style interface.
Drivers from the previous game can import their current garage into Motorfest and then it’s off to the mean streets of…err…Hawaii? It’s been over 15 years since I drove around the islands in Test Drive Unlimited, and that was nothing like the level of detail found here. The first thing that blew my mind was the map screen isn’t a map but rather a sky-high view of the world in real-time. You can see clusters of cars driving around in actual races or zero in on the plane of another player flying between islands. With the squeeze of a trigger, you can go from 20,000 feet to the surface of the road in just a second.
The game opens with a nice sampler race involving racing cars, planes, and boats. These multi-discipline events will pop-up later in the game giving you some cool Transformer-like moments where you can drive off a cliff and turn into a speedboat before you hit the water. The Playlists prove to be most beneficial for new players as you are always given loaner cars for each event. Sure, you can buy and drive other vehicles, but in Playlist mode you are only using your own rides to get to the next event. This allows you to accumulate great wealth and a garage full of upgrade parts before you even dive into the other parts of the game.
All of your favorite manufacturers are here including some fun new electric vehicles; there is even a dedicated EV Playlist. No matter what you’re driving there is plenty to see and do in Hawaii. Just driving around between main events, you can trigger Feats, mini challenges that often take place along your GPS route like speed traps, escape, and slalom gates with unique variations for planes and boats. There are also photo challenges that require you to be in the right spot with the right vehicle, perhaps at a certain time of day doing a certain action. Since these are so conditional it can be hard to do them during the normal course of free driving. The game will also take auto-snaps of key moments during a race and show them to you at the end of the race – kind of like those rollercoaster photos they take at theme parks. Sadly, I found no way to view these photos outside of the 10-20 seconds they are displayed after the race.
The Crew: Motorfest is not short on content, and once you do complete those Playlists, they can all be replayed as Custom Events where you can tweak all the elements of that race just how you want. The open world design is vast and exciting, but I did find the other players, even in their ghost cars, were distracting and even dangerous. At 200mph it can be hard to tell the difference between an oncoming pack of ghost cars and the real AI traffic that will make contact with your car. I don’t mind having other players visible in Freeride but once you are in an event you should vanish from the shared game world.
There is plenty of multiplayer and community content with Grand Race where 28 drivers all face off on a track with changing checkpoints, Demolition Royale, a massive 32-player game with eight crews using vehicles and planes to dominate the battlefield, and the weekly Summit Contest with nine pre-selected activities. There are medals to earn and cool parts to unlock so you can build your own dream car and take it to the Car Show where everyone can vote for their favorite cars in weekly events. There are no boards to smash, but you can take plenty of discovery photos for statues and graffiti and there are also hidden treasure boxes you can find using your built-in range finder.
The overall presentation does seem a bit familiar, but it seems that these big racing festivals are the only theme that seems to work for these big discovery racing titles. There is so much content and when you factor in planes, boats, motorcycles, and even monster trucks, combined with night and day events in variable weather conditions, there is just no end in sight to this game. You have eight distinct biomes which allow you to race from downtown through the rainforest and to the top of a volcano before descending down to the plantation fields and sandy beaches, all with seamless transitions, and remember, at any time you can switch to a plane or a boat for even more adventures in the skies or the surrounding ocean and waterways.
I was impressed with the settings and overall performance of the game. The PS5 offered up a 60fps performance mode which was pretty solid, and the quality mode definitely gave the game that next-gen shine but at half the framerate. If you can stand the shaky graphics The Crew: Motorfest is a real stunner, but you’ll likely want to stick with the performance mode. I am curious to see this on PC with everything running at 60fps max settings, but console racers will need to make some choices. The menus and interface are excellent with great descriptors for the various choices.
The Crew: Motorfest offers a variety of camera views for all the vehicles, some work better than others, and while I almost always prefer a cockpit or hood cam, the boats and planes seem to control a bit better using external cam views. It’s more of a situational awareness thing since you aren’t racing on an actual roadway. You also have full control over the difficulty of the game and each event, with a smooth progression of increasing AI challenge that will have you grateful for a podium finish.
The audio design is fantastic with great engine noises for all the planes, boats, cars, and trucks. There are a handful of radio stations with an eclectic sampling of music ranging from classic rock to EDM and hip-hop. While there is some conversation about Motorfest and the various events, the radio DJs don’t seem as in-tune to the festival, leaving most of your instruction and updates coming from Cara, the annoying AI. At first, I had her talking from my DualSense speaker until my battery started draining in under two hours. Having her speak through the regular speakers tripled my battery life but turning her down may save your sanity.
The game does have microtransactions, mostly buying in-game money with your real money to buy stuff in the game, but as previously mentioned, if you complete The Playlists first, you’ll finish with several millions in credits and a warehouse of car parts. Everything in the game can be bought with earned prize money, so using real money is just lazy. In addition to customizing your vehicles you also have a department store-sized wardrobe of unlockable and purchasable gear for your driver avatar. I normally don’t care about this kind of superficial stuff, but for some reason this time it managed to hook me. Must be all those cool Hawaiian shirts and sexy sunglasses.
The Crew: Motorfest does borrow some of the best elements from Forza Horizon, but then it goes so much further beyond in scope and overall vision. As much fun as I had tearing up Mexico, I think I’m going to have so much more fun in Hawaii, especially with all the events and challenges in the sky and ocean. This is a triumphant initial launch that I pray doesn’t get mired down in endless seasonal content. There is just so much fun waiting to happen and so many ways to experience some intense racing action on land, air, and sea. Hope to see you there…
