The Crew Motorfest (PC)

Developer:

Ivory Tower

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Release Date:

2023

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Systems:

PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm finally back after a five month break and I'm writing about a racing game! The fifth racing game in a row! This wasn't my original plan, but a free trial came along and to be honest I didn't really have an original plan so I figured I might as well put some words underneath the screenshots I was taking.

Everyone calls this The Crew Motorfest, not The Crew: Motorfest, so I'll be skipping the colon too. In fact, I'll probably just call it Motorfest. Or MOTORFEST  if I feel like adding a bit more style to it.

The game was originally going to be called Motorcamp. In fact, it wasn't originally going to be its own game at all, it was going to be DLC for The Crew 2, but the ideas they had were incompatible with the game's capabilities so they just made it its own thing. With an upgraded engine and shinier graphics.

Okay, I usually play through the first hour or so of a game and write down what's happening as I experiencing it, but for racing games I give them more of a regular review, so this is going to be something a little different. Except I just reviewed four other racing games, so this is actually extremely normal now, I guess.

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The first thing you see when you start up the game is a long intro sequence which lets you jump into a bunch of different races for a bit to show off the game's variety.

But after that, the first thing you see is this road with the Motorfest M logo right there as a giant double loop that you can drive around. So yeah of course I drove right for it, obviously, despite the theoretical possibility that it gave away how much of a noob I am to some other player somewhere. And I made it around without falling off!

It seems like there were a handful of real people sharing my world, judging by the names over their heads, though after Forza Horizon decided to populate races with names from your friend's list, who can even be sure? I also spotted the ghosts of racers from another dimension hurtling around the roads, along with ordinary AI cars doing regular motorist things. You don't want to get the two mixed up or you'll risk slamming your BMW into oncoming traffic at 150 mph.

Anyway, the original The Crew was a very modern Need for Speed-inspired crime drama, while Motorfest is a Forza Horizon-inspired car festival. So they've shifted gears a bit there.

The open world map is much much smaller, as instead of the entire US, all I got was O'ahu, one of the islands in Hawaii. On the plus side, this meant I got to view the whole thing as a 3D map and when I fast travelled places the camera just zoomed in and I was there. Extremely slick; thumbs up to everyone who got that feature working.

Unfortunately I didn't actually do a whole lot of fast travelling, as it's not really an option at first. You can jump to a few places, but it's only properly unlocked once you've completed 10 playlists... or two-thirds of the game.

Motorfest has other modes, but the single player is basically all about the playlists, which are sets of around 9 races and other events based around a certain theme. Like there's a muscle car playlist and a Porsche playlist. And the first thing you have to do when you choose a playlist is drive all the way to the starting point.

Actually, the first thing you have to do is make sure you own the required car, and some of them ain't cheap. Fortunately you can get the money you need just by playing through the other playlists, there's no grinding needed. I expected the worst, seeing as the game lets you buy things with real world money, but this bit wasn't so bad.

The funny thing is though, you don't even drive you own car during playlist races! Every playlist loans you an appropriate vehicle for each race, so this car requirement is basically just an entry fee.

So once you've driven to the right location with the right car in your garage you can activate your chosen playlist and fill the map with icons, each one a separate chapter, challenge, or photo op. Also, the event's prize container becomes a fast travel point, which is cool if you can remember where it is. To get anywhere else however, you've got to start your engine.

This is kind of a small map for a racing game and forcing you to drive to each race makes the scenery start to get very familiar. But it's a beautiful place and presumably a lot more hand-crafted and detailed than the absurdly gigantic maps in previous games, so I didn't mind so much that the island started to feel more like home than a vast mysterious wilderness to explore.

Though there is wilderness and there is a point to exploration as there are these stylish treasure boxes hidden around. You've got to follow the beeping to find them, and then the box gives you some car parts.

If you stick to the roads you'll run into challenges that have you doing things like slaloming between posts or outrunning an explosion etc.

I hated these back in The Crew because the rewards screen you get for winning took up my whole monitor while I was in the middle of driving and I had to press buttons to get rid of it. It really interrupted my flow. Here though it just gives you a message at the side of the screen afterwards, making success so much less frustrating!

I tried to skip the roads whenever possible however. What I mean is, I skipped driving altogether.

You're just a couple of button presses away from instantly switching to a car, a plane or a boat at any time, and as soon as I got a clear stretch of road I was flying.

Sometimes I even tried taking off when the road wasn't clear and got my plane tangled up in something, but mostly I was flying, and that never got old. I also loved swooping down to a road, switching to a car in the air, and then handbrake-turning to a halt... even if I never once got the bloody car to stop where I wanted it to. It's fine though, it's not like there are any pedestrians to run over, and I don't think I was ever at any risk of impressing other players.

This plane I'm flying here was actually automatically imported from the previous game, The Crew 2... which came as a bit of a surprise to me, as I didn't own The Crew 2 and I had no recollection of ever playing The Crew 2, never mind getting far enough in it to own a plane. For a moment I misread the screen and thought it was giving me my cars from The Crew 1, which I did spend a lot of time playing, but nope. They're all gone forever, presumably.

The actual races in this are so much like the ones you get in the Forza Horizon games that they even have the checkpoint flags, racing line and rewinds. But complaining about that would be like complaining that it gave me a Dodge Challenger to drive again.

Though there is one issue with the rewind feature: it doesn't seem to rewind the clock during timed races. That had me so confused, as I couldn't figure out why the time limit sometimes seemed outright impossible. I mean it's not like I'm playing Sega Rally.

One difference that Motorfest has to Forza Horizon, is that it really goes all-out with redressing the map for each playlist. The same roads can end up looking very different and man they look pretty with all the reflections and laser shows. This might be the most visually impressive game I've ever written about... mostly because it only came out last year. Of course it doesn't hurt that it features some amazing looking cars.

Motorfest also has a habit of making you driving directly into the sun so the whole track becomes obscured by the glare and lens flare, but it looks so pretty that I wasn't complaining. Even if my goal on this race was "clean driving", ie. don't get blinded and slam the car into a wall.

It features a whole bunch of modern driving assists to help you avoid disaster, but even the antique cars are fairly easy to keep on track. There's no need for a steering wheel to make progress in this game. Sure it's possible to end up skidding out of control due to a single mistake, these ain't Ridge Racer physics, but it feels like less of a realistic sim than Forza Horizon. Though maybe I'm just saying that because it features a recharging nitro.

The nitro's even in those bloody drift races that I hate.

I don't know what it is about drifting, but I seem to be incapable of getting the hang of it, in any racing game. The goal on this difficulty was 63,000 points, but it wasn't long before the game started asking if I wanted to drop the difficulty down and make it easier. And easier. I think in the end I made it through by beating a 5000 point goal. This is not the game's fault, this is just me.

When it came to the drag races I decided to cut to the chase and put the difficulty down to 'one' before I even started. I appreciate it when games add a bit of variety to their gameplay, but it sucks when you can't get back to the racing because you've hit a (figurative) roadblock in some other mandatory activity. I think that's why I never beat Need for Speed: Underground.

The trouble with the automatic difficulty adjustment is that it doesn't take into account how your races actually went. There are five difficulty levels (not counting assists), and I found that I was most comfortable on level three. I was consistently coming first in races, but I really had to work for it and sometimes I was trailing behind until a dramatic comeback at the last moment. But the game only sees the first place wins, so it thought that I wasn't getting challenged enough.

Then difficulty level four would humble me and the game would ask if I wanted it lowered again.

Not every event is about driving skill however. Like, there's the one where you have to follow photo clues to find the correct route... which got even better when it had me driving around in the fog to a spooky John Carpenter track.

The game also features folks talking over the radio, giving you a bit of info as you're driving, and they actually help to give each of the playlists a different feel. Sometimes you're listening to someone taking it very seriously and giving you infomation about the car you're driving, sometimes you're listening to a comedy YouTuber making jokes, etc. The Forza Horizon games had a bit of this themselves with things like the LaRacer and Top Gear Horizon stories, but here it's the core of the game.

Sometimes there are even cutscenes. Like here where a Porsche executive came to meet me! And then something else probably happened, I dunno. I got into the habit of skipping the cutscenes whenever the game let me, as they were mostly just videos showing off cars. Every time you start a new chapter of a playlist there's another bloody video of cars.

My own character didn't get to participate in cutscenes at all, beyond cheering at the victory podium, but I did get to customise them a bit.

You basically just pick your face, hair, eye colour and clothes, but that's very slightly better than the last Horizon game I played at least!

In the Forza Horizon games I played the clothes were rewards that had to be acquired through gameplay, but here you have to buy them with your winnings. Or spend real-world money on Crew Credits and use them, I suppose. You can also use that real-world money to buy real-world jackets in the real world instead, though to be fair you're unlikely to beat these in-game prices.

There's a good variety here, better than the variety of hair styles at least, but nothing all that wild.

The game also features some live action cutscenes, which I love. They don't fit with the 3D cutscenes at all, but whatever! This is the guy in the action movie playlist, who is a like a Michael Bay wannabe director who cares more about the condition of his coffee than he does about actually directing you.

Fortunately he's joined on the radio by a woman who's a bit more helpful... and sounds exactly like the car's AI assistant voice putting on an American accent. In fact, the accent was so strange that I was honestly wondering if my car's AI had tricked her way into joining a film crew without anyone ever realising that they'd never met her in person.

Sadly it turned out that she was a real human woman. But it the fact that it was plausible says a lot about your car's AI. She's called Cara and she sounds like a cross between a TV presenter and a GPS: all relentless cheerfulness no matter what she's talking about, and she talks quite a lot. Some of her lines had me wondering if the writers had forgotten she's just an AI assistant, but then she'd say something like "The view is spectacular... at least, that's what I've been told. I'm just a robot, so I don't have opinions!"

The action movie playlist mixes up the standard gameplay with things like speed zones you need to drive through to recharge your nitro, and a level that switches between different vehicles. Oh plus there are the henchmen shooting at you. That doesn't usually happen.

One thing I liked about the action playlist is that it takes clips of your stunt driving and edits it together into a movie trailer at the end.

Or at least that's what it claimed to be doing. Then when I finally watched the trailer it didn't have my character in it at all! It did have a woman with my character's haircut, but she was the love interest of the actor I was doubling.

Sometimes when I was feeling brave and adventurous I'd check out the activities page and try to decipher what it is I was seeing. It doesn't help that sometimes when you select a playlist for information the top half of the screen is replaced with a video.

As far as I can tell the live competition events are multiplayer events, though it doesn't really go out of its way to make it obvious. Also it took me a while to notice it had been giving me rewards... and a number of those rewards had been accumulating in my mailbox as I'd already filled my garage's space.

You can actually play with a lot of people online, with "Grand Race" putting you against 27 other players and "Demolition Royale" letting you destroy 31 of them. I would've tried these races myself to see how that works out, but I didn't want to.

Do races and challenges and you'll collect parts, colour coded to indicate their rareness I believe. It's all a bit Diablo. I'm not sure it's possible to buy upgrades, but I wouldn't have even if I could've done as I was accumulating plenty of the things.

I couldn't find an auto-equip button, so every now and then I'd go through the list and equip the highest number piece of gear for each part. For every car I owned. You have to buy a certain car to get into a lot of the playlists and then they give you another car as a reward for completing them, so I had a fair amount of vehicles in my garage to upgrade and it took bloody forever.

I'm not sure why I bothered though. I mean, the playlists loan you cars to race with, so I never raced with my own cars! I've heard that you can bring your own cars out when replaying playlist races but I never reached a point where I had to.

You can also dress your car up a bit and then show it off for people to vote on!

This seems to be the only place in the game you get to walk around in, but that's a step up from all the other racing games I've been playing lately as they never let you out of the car. One of them (Undercover) didn't even really let you in the car as it didn't have a cockpit view!

Motorfest has a proper cockpit for every single car, even the weird concept cars like the Lamborghini Egoista, and I really appreciate the effort they went to. They even gave this one authentic yellow-tinted windows! It's not sunset out there, it's just the glass.

There you go, there's a proper sunset.

I mentioned earlier that the small map size makes the island get very familiar very quickly, but that's not always a bad thing. It's cool to look out at all the places you've been driving around in other playlists. There are even balloons tied above them so you can spot them from a distance.

No regular hot air balloons though, not that I saw anyway, which is kind of weird considering that they're the third most common sight in racing games behind roads and cars.

Motorfest doesn't ask you to fly a plane often, but you'd better be good at it when it does as it doesn't just want you to make it through the gates, you also have to tilt the plane correctly when you do! I'm way better at this than I am at drifting, but it was still a close call more often than not.

And yeah I also flew through that balloon's mouth, obviously. One thing that's cool about the shared world is that you can see other players doing the same thing, just to amuse themselves. In fact, that might be the only thing that's cool about the shared world, as I didn't really get any other benefit from seeing ghosts driving around.

You can recruit other players into your crew and take on races together, and it's so fundamentally crucial to the entire experience that it's literally the name of the game series. I never bothered with it though, so I was stuck with a council of creepy shadow mannequins lurking in my menu screen, judging me.

The game really does encourage you to get involved in the multiplayer side of it, but you don't have to. You can just treat it like a single player game if that's what you're in the mood for.

The best reward from completing playlists is that you eventually unlock the ability to fast travel to any of the races, skipping the drive and getting straight to the gameplay... which is also driving. Though I've mentioned that already.

Well, I'd love keep sharing my holiday photos with you but I'm running out of island to show off so I'll have to end this here.

Oh hang on, there's a whole new island now?

Maui was added to the game last month, basically doubling the size of the game. And it's actually available for every player, you don't have to buy the Year 2 Pass to unlock it. You just drive across the giant new bridge and you're there.

That means I can go drive on all of its new roads, fly under all of its new bridges, and take part in all the... playlists... huh, where are all the icons?

There was at least one new playlist for me to try as they've added a sequel to 'Made in Japan', which features a team of Japanese street racers. I earned the Pack's respect last time (all without my character ever saying a word), so now I'm part of their crew as we take on their cat-themed rivals in races taking place all over the new island.

Their banter can be a bit... cringy perhaps, but in a good way. Kind of. I get why some people turn the voices right down, but the game has a fun vibe to it and I find the awkwardness in their dialogue more endearing than annoying. Even if they made my AI assistant sad by interrupting her too much when she was trying to tell me about an upcoming race. She sent them an email complaining about it.

I even like how they teach me about the history of Japanese racing as we're all hurtling around mountain roads above a 200ft drop, even if it feels like some of their lines were copied from a press release. I get that they're not going to send me out racing in something unexceptional, but everything turns out to be 'the most _____ car in the world in its day,' and they sure love promoting Liberty Walk. Fortunately I have no clue about any of this, so I'm never going to know or care when they get their information wrong.

After racing against the cats with the Pack, I decided to go chasing them with the dogs of Chase Squad.

The Chase Squad playlist is a hot pursuit mode where you have to hold back and tail a cat for a minute or so before taking them down with car violence.

The thing is, Made In Japan Volume 2 was a free update, but Chase Squad isn't. To play this new content you will need the Year 2 Pass DLC. That's fair enough I reckon, though it does help illustrate that getting twice the roads for free doesn't mean you're getting double the races. They are adding stuff over time however.

And views like this come free of charge. After you've bought the base game for money I mean.

It probably looks even better if you buy a better GPU than mine, my PC isn't exactly a beast, but these graphics work okay for me!


CONCLUSION

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I'm a big fan of the Forza Horizon games. I think the idea of taking the serious Gran Turismo-style Forza Motorsport series and adding a bit of that classic Need for Speed energy along with modern features like rewinds worked well the first time, and it worked even better when they iterated on it.

But with the Horizon games already doing the joyful car festival party thing, can The Crew franchise do a sharp turn and head down the same road without appearing like they're blatantly copying them? The answer is "no". But, I can think of two very good reasons why The Crew MOTORFEST  deserves to escape from their shadow.

First reason: Forza is a Microsoft franchise, so PlayStation owners never even got to play the Horizon games. With Motorfest it's only Nintendo fans that are missing out on the festival!

Second reason: the playlists! Racing games tend to pick a look and stick to it while offering a similar selection of challenges from start to finish, but Motorfest has separate blocks of races with their own themes to keep things interesting. Even for a guy who just wrote about four other racing games and should be entirely sick of them by now. You can tell the neon blue 'Made in Japan' races apart from HUD-less 'Vintage Garage' and the dramatic 'Hollywood, Action!' races at a glance, and the different approaches to cutscenes and radio conversations gives them even more of a distinct tone.

Okay to be honest, I was skipping most of the cutscenes and I know that some people turn the voices off, this wasn't a contender for 'Best Narrative' in the 2023 Game Awards, but personally I liked the dialogue. Cara's comedy never annoyed me at all, I was mostly just a bit confused why my modern day racing game had a self-aware AI assistant in it. (Incidentally it was a contender for 'Best Sports/Racing Game', but it lost to Forza).

And I definitely wasn't going to mute the soundtrack, when it's got artists like John Carpenter, Carpenter Brut and... a whole bunch of other people I've never heard of, who do a good job regardless. It's intense tropical island car festival driving synth music and it's great. The game doesn't really try too hard to immerse you in the fantasy of actually being at a car festival, in fact it straight up breaks the fourth wall a couple of times and it's certainly not above having you do stunts and drive up over rooftops for a bit, but it cares a lot about its vibe.

The game is currently always-online, which means that you're basically getting a rental that'll disappear from your library whenever Ubisoft decides to shut down the servers. This isn't a hypothetical situation at all, considering they just did exactly that to The Crew. Fortunately players have made a fair bit of noise about Ubisoft just un-owning something they bought and enjoyed playing, and the company has actually promised to eventually add an offline mode to both Motorfest and The Crew 2 (but not The Crew).

I'm sure I've whined about always-online games a few times now and I might have even mentioned that I don't buy them. I don't intend to give these publishers any encouragement, I don't like getting booted out of a game because of server issues, none of this benefits me at all. But if they're actually going to fix the games then I can meet them halfway. So I've just bought The Crew 2 and if the fabled offline mode actually materialises I can definitely see myself handing over cash for Motorfest as well. If you're into semi-arcady racing across beautiful scenery while someone on the radio tells you car facts with as much enthusiasm as they can force, this may be the game for you too.


Oh, don't worry, I'm not going to review The Crew 2 next, I just like driving games is all.

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Reminder, this is your very last chance to buy a digital copy of Forza Horizon 4 before it gets delisted! Here's a link to it on Steam, where it's currently 80% off. Don't forget to grab the Mitsubishi Car Pack, the 1967 Sunbeam Tiger and the 1979 Talbot Sunbeam Lotus DLC for free if they're available too.

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Next on Super Adventures, I thought I'd take another five month break, but then I realised that I need to do the Screenshots of the Year article, where I share some of my favourite screenshots from the many games I've written about in 2024.

Wait, don't laugh, I did write about some games this year! Like Loadstar: The Legend of Tully Bodine and Model Builder and maybe something else, I'll have to check. Anyway, while I'm busy doing that, why not leave a comment?