The Crew Motorfest video game review

If you looked at the header image and think you’ve just clicked on a review of a new Forza Horizon game, we don’t blame you.

This is The Crew Motorfest, the third entry in the open-world racing game series developed by French gaming giant Ubisoft and its Ivory Tower outfit – available for the PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox Series X, Series S and Xbox One, and Windows PCs.

In the genre of open-world, car-themed video games, The Crew has always done things a little bit differently.

Whereas the likes of Forza Horizon and Need for Speed have focused on small but diverse and relatively detailed maps – the former usually set in a scenic location, and the latter adding its signature police chases and illegal street races –  the first two The Crew games let players loose on the entire United States mainland.

The concept of spending half an hour blasting across the continent – a Cannonball Run from your living room – while passing through big cities, deserts, forests, plains and snowy mountains akin to real-life locations was unique in its category, and created new experiences you couldn’t get in Forza or Need for Speed’s smaller worlds.

The first game focused on illegal car and motorcycle racing and escaping the police – while its sequel brought a more light-hearted feel, and added boats and planes to the mix.

But for The Crew Motorfest, the mainland US setting – the unique selling point (USP) of the earlier games – has been scrapped in favour of a motoring-themed “festival” taking place in a much smaller setting: O’ahu, the Hawaiian island home to state capital Honolulu.

Obvious comparisons will be drawn to the Forza Horizon games, which have delivered players motoring festivals in scaled-down versions of scenic locations – usually in sunny places with gorgeous beaches and forests – for more than a decade.

However – in theory – the narrower focus should deliver the final layer of polish previous The Crew games lacked, with graphics that were never class leading, cities that looked good on the surface but lacked depth, low-detail traffic cars roaming the streets, and smaller car lists than rival games. Let’s find out.

Boot up the game for the first time and players are taken through a very Forza Horizon-like introduction sequence previewing of the types of racing available in the game, from circuit racing in an open-wheel car and off-roading in a Ford Bronco, to cruising along the coast in a classic Shelby Cobra, and driving flat-out in the game’s ‘cover car’, the new Lamborghini Revuelto V12 hybrid supercar.

After the initial 15-minute ‘tutorial’ players are asked to choose from three first cars – including the new Ford Mustang – and are thrown into the open world to begin competition.

The game’s campaign centres around the Motorfest, a vehicle-themed festival of all things cars, bikes, boats and planes comprised of 15 “Playlists” at launch, sets of themed races that span an array of car types and driving styles, including road racing, off-roading, drifting, flying and boat racing.

A few of the Playlists are star personalities from the motoring world, from US automotive YouTube creators Donut Media – spliced with cutscenes and videos pre-recorded by Donut’s charismatic lead presented, James Pumphrey – to Wataru Kato, the founder of Japanese car-tuning company Liberty Walk.

It’s an interesting concept, and allows players to explore a range of vehicle types in a short span of time. More Playlists will (and have begun to) be added over time.

But there is no escaping this is much of what Forza Horizon has been doing for a long time – with racing championships across three to five races, and one-off Showcase events themed around a particular car.

Some of the Playlists are better than others. The Donut Media events are fun – assuming you find the pre-recorded cutscenes funny, rather than cringe-worthy – as is a showcase of various Porsche 911s, but the drifting event set feels oddly structured, and the boat and plane events have been scaled down significantly compared to The Crew 2.

As with previous games, the races – at least in the first few hours of the game – don’t pay generously, so it will take time to build up a collection of high-end cars.

Perhaps it’s lucky then that, at least for your first playthrough of the game, your personal vehicles are little more than shuttles to drive from event to event.

You can deliberate at the start of the game (as we did) on what to pick for your first car, but enter the first event and you’re immediately swapped into a loan car to match the theme of the Playlist you’ve started.

Even if you purchase the exact make and model vehicle used in a Playlist, the game will swap you into an identical ‘loaner’ version for use in the races.

After a Playlist is completed it can be replayed with your personal vehicles, but the whole system feels oddly thought out, and takes much of the satisfaction out of building a garage of cool cars, only to barely use them for your first playthrough of the game's campaign mode.

The Crew Motorfest’s developers claim there are more than 600 vehicles on offer, but many are just duplicate “special editions” with unique decals or visual upgrades to justify branding them as separate cars.

As an example there are 22 BMW cars to choose from – but only 12 are distinctly different models. There are no fewer than four versions of the latest M8 super coupe, three versions of the latest 'G29' Z4 roadster, and drift and off-road variations of the older 'E89' Z4.

The car list can't match the scale of Forza but there is still decent variety, from new releases such as the latest Mustang, Revuelto and new electric Hummer, and the iconic Japanese, European and American sports cars you’d expect, to oddballs such as the Volkswagen ID Buggy electric concept.

Also on offer is reasonable selection of new and old motorcycles, planes and boats, a range of monster trucks based on normal road cars, and even a few Red Bull Formula One cars, including last year's championship-winning RB18.

The smaller car list allows for a lot more vehicle customisation than most vehicles available in Forza, though it's disappointing that while some cars offer hundreds of customisation options, some newer or niche cars – including the Hummer and ID Buggy – offer none beyond alloy wheel designs.

Driving physics are not a copy and paste from The Crew 2. It has by no means become a hardcore simulator – and retains an ‘arcade’ feel – but the cars are noticeably heavier in their feel, and it is easier to predict what they will do next in a corner, whether that’s run wide or break into a drift.

However through our fingertips – when trying the game on a keyboard – the extra weight seems to have introduced some instability to the cars. Quick, repeated left and right manoeuvres at high speed can more easily unsettle the vehicle than in prior games, and may be hard to recover for a new player that is experimenting with turning off the driving assists.

Speaking of assists, the AI racers in the game’s pre-set Playlists seem to run with many of them on, given how cleanly they launch off the line at the start of each race – while the player sits spinning their wheels with traction control off.

The cars do look and sound better than before, and as a whole the game has taken the step up aesthetically it needed to be competitive in 2023 – though there remain some rough edges, particularly evident in some of the shadows when flying over the map.

One highlight of the driving experience is the cockpit-view camera. In a Forza Horizon game the driver’s hands never move past 90 degrees left or right – even in a drift or low-speed manoeuvre – but here players can watch the driver perform hand-over-hand moves, and delicately shuffle the wheel at high speeds as the car dances on the limit of grip.

For this reason we spend most of our time behind the wheel in the interior view. It’s a mystery why all racing games can’t do the same.

In contrast, the AI assistant that recommends race routes and the next event to the player gets irritating quickly, and seems to mispronounce a surprising number of words.

Now for the biggest change of all: the map.

The Crew Motorfest’s rendition of O’ahu is generally a good one. It’s a lot smaller than the maps in previous games, but it is more densely packed, loaded with more detail, and maintains good variety in its environments, from sandy beaches and built-up cities to forests and rocky mountains.

However none of it feels particularly unique, or markedly better than similar interpretations of sandy beaches, built-up cities, forests and rocky mountains in Forza Horizon, Need for Speed, or even the last iconic open-world driving game set in Hawaii, Test Drive Unlimited.

The cities are more detailed than before, but with no pedestrians on the footpath, few cars on the road, and incredibly wide streets in the capital Honololu, they don’t feel ‘alive’.

One frustrating design choice: the traffic cars – which seem more detailed and diverse than before – can’t be driven (or 'ghosted') through by the player, but other computer-driven racers and ‘players’ in the world can. Discerning which is which is not an easy task at high speed.

You also aren’t able to fast travel freely across the world until you’ve completed a number of Playlists, though that’s not such an issue given the smaller map – and that driving across it gives you the rare opportunity to enjoy your personal cars.

Overall, The Crew Motorfest offers scope for enjoyment. There are attractive visuals, a reasonable mix of cars, plenty of variety in the races, updated handling that some players may enjoy, and in general a greater sense of polish than the previous two games.

But in trying to be a more focused offering, it has abandoned its unique selling point – the map. O’ahu is fun to explore but it cannot replace the unique experiences that could be had in the much larger rendition of the US mainland of its predecessors.

At best it’s a picturesque and relatively diverse setting to drive the latest and greatest sports cars; at worst it comes across as a not-entirely-convincing imitation of a Forza Horizon game.

It hasn’t made up for it in other areas, with a single-player campaign that can grate, a deceivingly small car list, and some generally frustrating game mechanics.

It’s a bit like watching Tom Cruise attempt to put on a British accent to play James Bond. The ingredients are there – but sometimes it’s better to stick to what you do best.

If you’re an Xbox or PC player that is bored of the Forza Horizon franchise – or a PlayStation gamer that never had access to it – The Crew Motorfest is worth a look. However if you enjoyed the previous games in The Crew series, keep in mind: this is a very different type of game.