The Crew Motorfest wants to take you on a holiday. Your destination is O’ahu and your itinerary is attending the Motorfest – piloting all sorts of cars, planes, boats and bikes across the incredible Hawaiian landscapes. The festival even has tour guides! Like any trip away you’ll be tempted to spend more money than you expected, and not every attraction you check out will blow you away, but you’ll try some new things and have a good time at the end of it.
Motorfest is an open-world racing game that gives you a fairly massive island to drive, boat and fly around. Think Forza Horizon in Hawaii and you’re part of the way there. It’s a fantastic choice of setting with picturesque beaches, volcanic valleys and muddy off-road tracks to explore. While it’s a downsize compared to the entire map of the USA from previous games, the focus on a smaller area has allowed for more intricate, handcrafted detail. The island can look rather gorgeous at times. Driving detailed cars with the sun high against a blue sky, it can be quite impressive to look at.
Moving around this setting is the most important part of a driving game, and I’m happy to report that Motorfest controls fantastically. Each car, and especially each category of car, feels quite distinct in how it drives. EVs are fast in a straight line but are harder to corner at speed given their weight. Supercars somehow combine ridiculous speed with great handling. Off-road driving is wonderfully slip-slidey. Even though different vehicles handle so differently, they all have a pick-up-and-play feel that means you can have fun with them immediately. There’s certainly some depth to the handling. Learning and improving your technique will net you improved results to a point. This isn’t a simulation though, it’s all about hanging out and enjoying the drive.
Motorfest structures its core gameplay around a series of Playlists. These are sets of themed races usually with a short storyline, designed to show you around different aspects of motor culture. There’s likely something here for any kind of car enjoyer, and the way the Playlists welcome you to explore new aspects of cars you might not have known about makes them really fun to check out. I loved one particular Playlist that took me on a journey through cars and culture throughout the decades from the 1950s to today – complete with vehicles, challenges and music appropriate to the time period. Collaborations with real-life car culture personalities like Donut Media and Liberty Walk add some character to the game as well.
In addition to the Playlists, there is a series of rotating events on what’s called the Main Stage. These are again groups of activities around a theme, but are available for a limited time and being constantly added to. This is the ongoing service aspect of Motorfest, and where the online community part of the game comes in.
Main Stage offers race events like the Playlists, and also gives you the option to show off a car you’ve customised. Participating in these car shows and events contributes to a limited-time progress bar that can earn you exclusive unlocks, extra XP and things of that nature. I found the events lacked some of the personality that the Playlists have, but they should be a way to make sure the game keeps on offering new and fresh things to do long into the future.
Having new fresh things to do should serve Motorfest well, since it’s a game I enjoyed simply hanging out in. It’s as difficult as you want it to be with a smart system that suggests upping the skill requirement if you’re winning races consistently, or offers to drop things slightly if you’re not doing great. The difficulty system is granular, so it’s easy to find a level to your preference. I found myself having the most fun with the difficulty set to give me enough of a challenge to be interesting, but not so much that it was ever frustrating. It made it easy to just hang out, have a good time and have some fun races in a cool environment.
Though I had a great time hanging out in O’ahu, Motorfest isn’t without some issues that took away from the fun. There are boats and planes to pilot in addition to cars but they really felt like an afterthought, mostly confined to one Playlist later in the game. I found the Plane events quite dull overall. Simply flying through floating rings and never having a real sense of speed doesn’t make for a particularly thrilling time.
And then there are the ever-present microtransactions. To the game’s credit, I never felt like it was withholding rewards to goad me into spending real money, but the fact the option is always there while searching through the vehicle store feels a bit gross. Making things worse is the fact that many Playlists require you to purchase a specific vehicle to enter, but you don’t actually use that vehicle in the Playlist since you get loaned vehicles for every event anyway. I had enough money through regular play to buy the required vehicles until late game, but at a certain point I was faced with either throwing real money at the game or going back and grinding challenges on Playlists I’d already completed. That feels crummy in a full-priced title, and really killed the game’s otherwise pleasant vibe.
Motorfest’s online play can be fun, but is a bit of a double edged sword. I enjoyed the Grand Races and Demolition Derbies, on the occasions I could find enough players to start one. The always-online nature of the game allows it to get fresh new content over time like I mentioned, but it comes at the cost of it being entirely unplayable without an internet connection. One time while playing I got a notice that the server was entering maintenance in 10 minutes. The moment that maintenance started, I got kicked from my race and just couldn’t play anymore. Considering a large portion of the game is played against AI opponents, it’s a shame that there’s no way to play when servers are unavailable.
