Today, that game is The Crew Motorfest from developer Ubisoft Ivory Tower and published by Ubisoft. This is a fairly complex modern racer and if you spend most of your racing time on 50cc Mario Kart (raises hand), things are a bit more exciting than you might expect. This is more than just a car racing game, but if you’re familiar with The Crew series, you already know that. The Crew Motorfest is an open world racing game which focuses on a variety of car races around the island of Oahu in Hawaii. This isn’t a simple racing simulator though, as there are hundreds of car variants, parts, and colors to choose from, all at a cost of course.
The Crew Motorfest is presented as a major competition, almost like a motorized X-Games. You’ve got a PR person who narrates the open world portions of the game and the racing sections are broken down into 15 Playlists which treat you to a curated series of related races on various parts of the island. Some races are locked until you complete several playlists so it’s best to work your way through, starting with the Hawaiian Scenic Tour which gives you a rundown of the island and some of the locations you’ll be racing through. Winning each race nets you in-game cash that you can spend on cosmetic modifications and cart parts to trick out your favorite vehicles. I was partial to the Beamer while playing in free mode but there are tons of vehicles to choose from including vintage and modern, EVs, boats, motorcycles, and even planes. There’s a lot going on here!
While you’re working your way through Playlists, you’re treated to a rotating group of narrators providing facts and history about the cars, making comments on your driving skills (mostly negative in my case) and generally filling your speakers with a lot of chatter. It’s a lot of talking when you’re trying to focus on driving, especially if your skill level is low, but sometimes there are some interesting facts as well. It is kind of frustrating for the guide to point out scenic areas when you’re trying to make a sharp turn however! There is a heck of a lot of chatter overall in The Crew Motorfest and while most of it isn’t bad, your AI companion is particularly repetitive and somewhat irritating. Honestly, it would be fine to just turn off all the chatter and listen to some tunes while racing, but that’s not how Motorfest is designed.
The entire vibe of the game is to constantly amp you up and slowly push you to get better and faster as you continue to race. The narrators are consistently pushing you to be the best and please the fans and so on and so forth. Honestly, as a casual player, it’s kind of a lot. Thankfully you can turn all that off but when you do, it also feels like The Crew Motorfest is kind of empty. It’s weird but the filler chatter is almost necessary to bridge the gaps between all the driving and the music in the game. Either way, it’s nice to have the option to turn it all down or off if you’d like to.
Regarding options, this is a game that has so many it’s hard to even quantify them all. In addition to sound options, you can play Playlists or parts of Playlists in any order you’d like, drive any car you’d like in free mode, fly or boat around whenever you feel like it from a quick menu, and even adjust the driving controls to suit your needs. It turns out some of us have a bit too tight of a grip on the shoulder buttons for driving so switching to button mode was a good solution to avoid finger pain. It’s a shame that controls aren’t mappable, but with the complexity of the buttons, that’s an understandable choice.
Chances are you’re already familiar with racing in some aspects and in general, it never changes. There’s either a course or a circuit, you drive, you try to get first. Most cars in Motorfest have nitro boosting as well, and you can use the handbrake to jam your car around turns if you get the hang of it. While the game defaults to Intermediate, Amateur is definitely the place to start for casuals and provides a convenient HUD road path for optimum racing speeds. Once you win a few races, the game asks you if you’d like to raise the difficulty. You know, in case you like losing. There’s also an option to turn off the request system which is nice. Winning is fun. There are a ton of various assistance options available like this. There’s also a mini-map that helps you to find things but much like Google Maps, it doesn’t always give you the optimum pathway. Just watch out for other cars and ghost AI racers that make you swerve out of the way all the time because they’re absolutely everywhere. Fortunately, even a head-on collision doesn’t really stop you for long!
In The Crew Motorfest, physics are sort of an afterthought. Sure the cars drive with somewhat realistic physics but let’s be honest, this is a game and you’re going to crash into stuff. It seems the devs over at Ubisoft though the same thing and you can pretty much drive anywhere your wheels can touch. Don’t want to take all those switchbacks down the volcano? Just drive straight down and jump your way to the bottom of the mountain. Your car might have a few scuffs but it’ll drive just fine and works pretty good as an airplane substitute besides. Got lost? Just drive through the river to get to an embankment to put yourself back on track. Pesky lampposts, trees and rock walls getting in your way? Drive through them! Free mode is kind of like a demolition derby, which is awesome because there’s also an actual demolition derby included in The Crew Motorfest.
That’s right, there’s a built-in online demolition derby with 32 players built right into the game. Unlike major races, you don’t need Playstation Plus to play it either so as long as you’re online (and you’ll need to be with The Crew Motorfest because it requires an active internet connection to play and loads through online servers exclusively), you can smash up other players to your heart’s content and earn some XP to boot. That’s a pretty neat bonus mode, especially when it works without paying for premium services! You can do some serious damage to other cars too, and last car driving is a fun way to play. This is one race mode where you honestly don’t care if you lose and the camera drops into chase mode when you do so you can still check things out.
All of this has legitimately only scratched the surface of The Crew Motorfest. Each car has unique physics and they feel different on the road. Tricking out my favorite Beamer made it handle differently and I could tell that my tires weren’t cutting it. Driving around a new Bronco was fun and all but it just didn’t hug the road enough for me so it was back to something a bit lower to the ground like the Mustang I won in the American Muscle Playlist. I hated the spoiler though, so it was time to trick it out. Driving along, the mini-map starts beeping. Turns out there is some hidden treasure close by! I pull into an abandoned farm and lo and behold, treasure in the form of new parts for my car and some much needed cash to further decorate my rides.
There are plenty of other things to do too, including slalom, top speed, and chase feats, flight path feats and more, seven types in all. There are even some photo quests to enjoy the beauty of Oahu if some more leisurely fun is your style. You can experience some extra races with online celebrities too. If you’ve heard of Donut Media, they’ve got a Playlist where you pit classic car rivalries against each other in a one-on-one test of speed and power. There is a drifting Playlist too (drifting is hard!) and plenty of off-road racing too. Honestly, there’s something for everyone here and with the audio, control, and skin customization options, you can make the game into whatever you’d like. That also includes your driver as there’s a rudimentary character creation menu that lets you customize your driver. It’s nothing compared to some of the modern RPG character creation menus, but it’s nice to have the option at least!
Speaking of RPGs, you gain experience in The Crew Motorfest too. XP allows you to unlock rewards and slowly ups your status to Legend with level 4. This lets you try new challenges as well, so it’s worth your time to grind through races. A fair bit of Motorfest is locked behind soft paywalls. Either you need to earn enough XP or scrounge up enough cash to buy the right cars to unlock certain playlists and challenges and it’s definitely not a fast process. Those players that really want to drive specific cars might find themselves frustrated by these artificial barriers but if you’re in no hurry, it doesn’t take long to rack up a million bucks or more by blowing through some races and playlists in first place.
The music and visuals are of course key to The Crew Motorfest and the visuals in particular are stunning. Cars look outstanding and damage shows up (even if it’s not proportional to the amount of damage you do to your car) noticeably as you drive. The island of Oahu is beautiful as well and just driving around looking is a treat in itself. There aren’t any people walking around though so it does feel like a bit of an empty landscape, but you’d probably run them all down by accident anyway so that’s fine. The weather and lighting effects are very cool and the terrain effects with mud, water and more seem quite realistic as well. The whole island just looks pretty, even at high speed and driving around Hawaii is way more fun than it sounds. This is a big island too and it can take you a good 15-20 minutes to get from one side to another. You can drive all the way around from the start and there are a ton of roads, cutoffs, dirt tracks and even sailing areas to explore.
The music on the other hand is a bit weaker than one might like. Just like the narrators, the music is designed to amp you up but a lot of it is just constant thumping that I wanted to turn off after a while. Unlike other games, it’s a bit of a hassle to change songs too, so if something you don’t like comes on, you can take the time to fiddle through and change it, but you’re still stuck in that genre. It would be great if you had a radio that let you pick the style of music you like here because the tracks definitely aren’t for everyone. They aren’t bad in and of themselves and there are plenty of good tunes here, but a bit more control and some simple song hotkeys would have drastically improved the experience. This shortcoming is accentuated when you turn the voices off and all you here is music and your car’s engine.
The Crew Motorfest has something for everyone. My 8 year old son just loves driving around bashing into the trees, walls, cars, and everything else and flying planes. I had to earn some money back for mods when I let him play a little too long but it turns out that’s no big deal. For me, it’s the visual smorgasbord of Oahu and some nice grippy street racing. For you it might be offroading, a leisurely flight (though the flight controls are definitely a bit finicky), or even some fast and furious dirt biking. Or you might want to work your way up to some high speed exotic racing if that’s your thing. The a bit of everything approach that Ivory Tower has taken here means that this might not be a fine-tuned Gran Turismo style experience but at the same time, you can always find something to do. There are challenges that unlock with every Playlist and a ton of smaller tasks and hidden things to find all over the island. Add in a bunch of online races (which I didn’t really get to try because I don’t have Playstation Plus) and you’ve got enough to suit all but the most serious racing fanatics.
When you buy a game like The Crew Motorfest, there’s an expectation of a certain level of quality, especially when your game is only playable as long as the servers are up. Ubisoft absolutely nails it here and really provides and all-around racing and motorsports game that truly demonstrates that variety is the spice of life. Even if you don’t like a particular race or car, it doesn’t matter because you won’t be using it for long and there’s something to be said about every single style of race that’s available to players. Toss in some beautiful visuals, some celebrity appearances, some solid dialogue, a ton of music, and some excellent options for both tuning and accessibility and you’ve got yourself one winner of a game.
If you’re looking for bang for your buck, you’re going to get it with The Crew Motorfest, regardless of whether you buy the standard edition for $70, the Gold Edition which includes the Year One Pass (several new Playlists and cars) for $99, or the $119 Ultimate Edition which includes a number of extra cars and vanity features as well as the Year One Pass. So far there are two additional cars coming per month for the next couple of months too and with the number of players online at any given time, you can bet that The Crew Motorfest is going to be brimming with content. This is one race you’re definitely not going to want to miss out on!
This review is based on a digital copy of The Crew Motorfest Ultimate Edition provided by the publisher. It was played on a PS5 using a 1080p Sony 55” TV. The Crew Motorfest is also available on Xbox One, Xbox Series X, PS4, PC on Epic and direct from Ubisoft in their launcher.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.