The Crew Motorfest Review | Racing the Line

I’ve talked about racing games a few times on the site and I always start by saying that I am not a fan of traditional racing sims. I like arcade racers, like Need for Speed or Forza Horizon, that set you loose on a map and let you have fun driving cars in ways that give insurance companies nightmares. So it should come as a surprise that I never played The Crew before. Originally released in 2014, the first game boasted a scaled-down United States for players to street race across. The second game followed four years after that and shifted the focus to American motorsports, giving players the freedom to not just race on the street but through the air and on water too. Now we have The Crew Motorfest, another changing of gears for Ubisoft’s premier racing series, and the first one that I have played.

The Crew Motorfest takes you to Hawaii for a car festival made for car fans. Explore the Frankensteined island of Oahu which brings together areas from all the Hawaiian islands to create a diverse playground for racers. The map is filled with Playlists to take part in, Feats to accomplish, and photos to snap. All while fireworks flash in the sky and other players speed by. In that way, Motorfest seems very inspired by the Forza Horizon games, going as far as to include the obnoxious car-dude-bro characters and dialogue that has become a staple of that series. Any semblance of narrative here can be ignored as it’s not that important in enjoying the game. There’s also the cheekily named car AI assistant, Cara, who switches between stating interesting car facts and not-so-clever quips that can also be ignored. Thankfully, Motorfest mostly borrows the good stuff and, at the same time, it still retains the freedom of choice that The Crew 2 introduced five years prior.

Let’s start with Playlists. These are new types of events that aim to give players a taste of unique car culture experiences. What that means is they give you additional context and history pertaining to the cars you’re driving while also mixing up race types to test your skill. I really like the Playlists in Motorfest because they’re more than just random races. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a racing game and I don’t need much excuse to put the pedal to the metal (or more aptly the finger to the trigger on my controller) but learning about loud American muscle cars before roaring down the road in a Mustang or getting a taste of Japanese street racing while drifting across a neon-lit street at night are a good way of selling the car festival backdrop of the game. And getting a new car for completing each Playlist is a nice touch too I suppose.

But more than just being a chance to learn about and drive different cars, the Playlists are also great tonally unique experiences that prevent the gameplay from getting stale. When driving the premium Porche cars, for example, you have an added meter on your screen that encourages clean racing without damaging your car. The better condition your car is in at the end of the race, the more money you get as a bonus. Meanwhile, the American Muscle Playlist gives you no such clean racing parameters. Then there’s the Vintage Garage Playlist that puts you behind the wheel of a classic American car with no nitro to boost you and no GPS to guide you. Plus, each racing Playlist is also accompanied by a musical playlist that features songs fit for each respective event. With a Year 1 pass promising more Playlists to come, my only wish is that they lean even further into the diverse themes of the Playlists in the future.

There are also races to do against other players too. Grand Race puts up to 28 players in an endurance event across the map. Along the way, switching between three different race types and cars. I find the Grand Race to be an intense and humbling event that frequently has me death-gripping the controller in anticipation while also accepting that I’m competing for 27th place. Demolition Royale similarly puts players against each other, this time in a moving circle where crews destroy one another with offroading vehicles that can turn into monster trucks at the press of a button in hopes of being the last car standing. While Grand Race might be a bit more traditional in nature, Demolition Royale is more light-hearted, if still just as intense.

And if that’s not enough to scratch your competitive itch, the game also has Summit Contests, which are weekly PVE competitions in which players take on a playlist of nine themed activities. Pick the vehicle best for the job and aim for the top spot on the leaderboard to win exclusive rewards. For the more creatively inclined, there are weekly Custom Shows where players can showcase their cars and vote for their favorites. These will be visible on the car meet floor with the top ten most popular vehicles set up on the main podium for players to admire.

Along with the Playlists and multiplayer races, there is a lot more to do in the Motorfest‘s fictional Oahu. You can complete Feats like Speedtraps or Slalom. There are treasures to find, which are indicated by the mini-map blinking on the bottom right corner of the screen. Once you finish Playlists, you also unlock challenges that are like Feats but often require a specific vehicle to be completed. Photo Ops are just that, a reason for you to pause the game and take a photo. These also have various requirements that could be as vague as, taking a photo with a certain car to being in a certain location and doing a certain action while in that certain car. These all act as fun distractions that encourage you to explore the map instead of just blindly following the navigation line toward the next event.

Before we get any further, I want to touch on Crossplay. If you’ve been following the release of Motorfest, you might have seen that it has Crossplay at launch. While this is, technically, the truth, it’s not what you expect and I am warning you now so you don’t waste time on it like I did on release day. Crossplay in Motorfest, at least as of now, is only for the multiplayer events. This simply means that when matchmaking, the game will pull players from all systems to fill the race. This does not mean that you (a player on Xbox) can invite your friend (a player on PlayStation) to join your crew and race around the map. This is really unfortunate and I hope it’s possible with Ubisoft Connect or something in the future. That being said, the game does have Cross-Progression, which does work as advertised. As long as your Ubisoft account is synced, all your progress will carry over to whatever platform you’re playing on.

I am not sure if Ubisoft has access to some proprietary technology to let players change their method of transportation at the press of a button but they sure use that mechanic a lot. It’s in Steep, it’s in Riders Republic, it was in The Crew 2 and it’s back in Motorfest. At any time as you’re racing through the open world, you can press the right thumbstick to change between a car, a plane, and a boat. The transition is pretty seamless and it opens up more of Oahu to the player than just the main landmass. However, despite being fun at the start, it’s a feature I didn’t find myself using all too often. I did occasionally like flying or boating as a means of avoiding fast travel but neither was as much fun to me as driving. There are events for planes and boats specifically for players who feel otherwise.

Speaking of driving, let’s talk about handling. Out of the box, the cars are very arcade-y to drive and a bit loose as a result. For the most part, this is okay. It makes drifting around the open world fun and when you’re flooring it down straight roads, narrowly avoiding NPC vehicles, it’s not a problem at all. But in races, with driving assists turned off, taking turns can sometimes feel like you’re fighting against your car for control. Luckily, with some tweaking beforehand, you can really enjoy the races in Motorfest. These settings can be found under the Difficulty tab in the Options menu. You can turn on/off everything from auto braking to the rewind function. All of which will impact the XP you get as you play. The game also has a suite of accessibility options for both auditory and visual aids for those who need it.

I consider myself to be a car aficionado. I can identify most car brands and even a lot of models but I haven’t the slightest clue as to what is under the hood. I can identify when car designs follow certain trends but I couldn’t tell you what car parts were the same between manufacturers. Consequently, most of my time in the garage in Motorfest was spent customizing how my car looked or browsing the Livery for popular user-created designs. To that end, I like the customization options in the game. There are over 600 vehicles in Motorfest from over 50 different manufacturers and you can tinker with pretty much all of them. For simpletons, you have the basic color and body changes but for the garage artists, there are decals and stickers with which to create wild designs. I did change car parts as I played but it was often done on a “bigger number is better” basic instinct more than an understanding of what I was doing.

On the note of customization, Motorfest starts by letting you pick a character. This was pretty lackluster and so limited that I didn’t even bother making a character that looked like me. There is also customization for that character, which is thankfully a bit better. You can change what the driver wears from gloves to glasses. There are also animations for posing and victory but keep in mind that once you select your initial set at the start of the game, the rest have to be purchased using bucks earned in-game or through credits purchased with real-life money. Regarding monetization, I am over a dozen hours in and have felt no real pressure to pull my wallet out. Something more important than looks though is the Legend Points. These are earned by playing the game and you can use them to unlock perks like increased nitro power or better drift multiplier. The LPs worked as a way to further customize the game to your liking beyond just meaningless clothing options.

The Crew Motorsport isn’t the best looking racing game on the market but it still looks pretty nice. All the vehicles and environments are well-detailed with extra care given to the car models. I want to give a special shoutout to the weather and lighting here. Racing through the Hawaiian mountains during a thunderstorm in a Porche 911 Carrera GS with the headlights only illuminating a few meters in front of me and the red line of the tail light piercing the darkness that covered the screen was when the game really shined for me. When it comes to sound, as I said, I can’t listen to a car and tell you what engine it has, so all I can confidently say is that the vehicles all sound appropriate to their car class. Along with the audio and visuals, Motorfest also has nice haptics to further pull you into the game. Seeing the gears change on the speedometer, hearing the shift in audio, and then feeling the trigger kickback is a great combination. Obviously, PlayStation 5 players will get a better experience here thanks to the DualSense controller’s adaptive triggers, but the Xbox controllers do a good job too.

If you’ve read my reviews in the past, this next point should not come as a surprise: photo mode. I love photo mode and it makes me happy when a game allows me to pause at the press of a button and channel my inner Peter Parker trying to find the right angle for a photo. (Like the one above!) Having just come off of Starfield, where I was impressed with their integration of the photo gallery in the loading screens, I wasn’t expecting to be surprised by Motorfest. But the game has a photo mode feature that I haven’t seen in any racing game before and I have to talk about it. In The Crew Motorfest, you can press left on the d-pad while in the open world to enter photo mode, and then along with the usual lens, filter, and focus options, you can also rewind and forward the game to get the perfect shot. This makes so much sense to have in a game where you often might realize something looked cool seconds after you’ve already done it and I loved the implementation in the game. A few racing games have the rewind function already for the actual races and it’s great to see it bolster the photo mode here.

As we draw near the finish line for the review, I don’t have much else to say. The Crew Motorfest is a confident racing game packed with content. It is very much inspired by games like Forza Horizon, though not always for the better. It has weak writing that seems to be a staple for the genre at this point. That being said, the map is diverse with lots to discover from Feats to Photo Ops. But the highlight of the package is the Playlists which mix up the gameplay in small but meaningful ways. I’ve had a lot of fun with The Crew Motorfest and it’s a game I see myself returning to often in the coming weeks and months. The team at Ubisoft Ivory Tower has promised a lot of content on the horizon and I hope they can deliver it in a timely manner to keep the servers full. The Crew Motorfest is out now on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. A review code was provided by the publisher.