I’ll admit straight off the bat, I’m not the biggest car guy. I’m not even the smallest car guy, if I’m being honest. That said, give me a driving game with arcade-y handling and gorgeous environments to tear through at high speeds and I’m happy for a few hours. Previously, the Forza Horizon games were the titles to scratch that occasional itch, but after spending limited time with The Crew Motorfest I think I’ve found a new short-term motoring fling for 2023.
Ubisoft Ivory Tower’s latest foray into open-world driving launches in exhilarating form with a tutorialised racing sequence not too dissimilar from Forza Horizon’s openers (I promise I’ll try not to make the comparison too many more times), whipping players through a five-way slice of the distinct racing disciplines that make up its core.
Within the first 10 minutes of the game you’ll have sampled five of these Playlist styles in rapid succession from fast and precise Japanese-style street racing to blistering off-road runs, high-octane Formula circuits, sepia-toned vintage classic jaunts and an entire category dedicated to the iconic Lamborghini. It’s an absolute belter of an introduction and cements The Crew Motorfest as a thrilling and incredibly playable celebration of car culture.
Following this first section, while I unfortunately wasn’t able to get a taste of the open world environment of O’ahu, Hawaii, the Ubisoft staff were able to drop me into a few more races within one discipline of my choosing. I decided to dip back into the neon-soaked nights of the street racing playstyle. These were every bit as fun as my first sample, and anyone familiar with the class of accessible racing that Playground Games’ ongoing series has popularised with its on-track guiding lines and instant rewind mechanics will feel right at home here.
Something The Crew Motorfest seems to lean in on a little harder than its Microsoft-exclusive competition though, is characters. The player avatar that the Ubisoft folks had set up for me was among friends and rivals throughout my time, with the pivotal race events featuring plenty of dialogue going back and forth between the NPCs. It’s hard to glean just how much of that there’ll be overall but I do like the idea of having something a little more interesting to work towards than “You’re at a car festival, go faster than all the other cars at the car festival,” which I realise is a silly notion when this game is ostensibly offering the exact same motivation. It’s just a little more characterful, here, I guess.
After landing a couple of striking wins (the game even offered to up the AI difficulty for me) my brief time with The Crew Motorfest was sadly at an end. I still have so many lingering questions about the game’s overall structure and how much motivation will be there for me to stick with it for more than the handful of hours I’ll typically throw at one of these games on release, but the small amount I was able to play has at least assured me that the racing is solid and the varied playstyles with their distinct aesthetics and tyrefeel are a blast to jump between.
It’s also a mighty fine looking little game, although I was playing remotely through a PC server so I imagine it was running on some pretty beefy hardware at the source point. I really appreciate how each driving style is presented with a noticeably different colour grading, at least in the self-contained events that I was able to try. The glaring neon signs reflecting on the rain-slicked roads in the night-time races I played made for some glorious eye candy at 250km/h, which is sometimes all I need out of a game like this.
Again, I’ll be keen to see how this all shakes out in the final product but for now I’m very interested in jumping back into Motorfest as soon as I can.
The Crew Motorfest launches for PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One and PC on September 14th, with three days early access going to those who pre-order the Gold or Ultimate Edition of the game.
