While I’m not the biggest hardcore fan of car titles, like our wonderful car guru Ben Branscum, I tend to enjoy arcade-type driving experiences. That little passion began years ago with Atari’s Hard Drivin’ and has continued for nearly 30+ years. I like short stints of wild car rides, short-term fun racing goals, and the occasional intense PvE race to fulfill my emotional car driving needs. I’ve never been a huge fan of F1 or NASCAR games, but I have respected them from afar.
Recently and related, we were privy to a Ubisoft sit-down preview of The Crew Motorfest. If you’re not familiar with The Crew series, it covers land, air, and water racing. This means that you will find yourself driving a boat, plane, and car/truck (and other vehicles). And you could switch between them instantly. Having that ability to switch back and forth to change up racing experiences has always been a neat concept and the driving (pun intended) reason to try out the series from developer Ubisoft Ivory Tower. It was a concept that allowed me to enjoy The Crew 2 and its many seasons. At some point, that concept needs more. Regardless of how entertaining switching between vehicles might be, there needed to be a bit more depth and reason to keep revisiting the title. And I think Ivory Tower is certainly onto something with The Crew Motorfest.
The game takes all the best that The Crew series has to offer and has placed it firmly in a bigger world with a helluva lot more options with vehicles, courses, goals, and land to cover. While we only had about five hours with the game, I could see that this series has taken a giant leap forward.
So, sit back, relax, and put your mind on cruise control as I navigate you through the ends and outs of what to expect with The Crew Motorfest.
Plenty to do and playlists galore
The core of The Crew Motorfest runs on playlists. These playlists contain different types of activities within them, so they are big containers with small containers that offer up variety. Each activity relates to the bigger playlist. What you get from this type of gameplay structure is a hodgepodge of a variety of different activities to experience without too much repetition along the way, or so it seemed during this preview. For example, an off-road playlist allows you to participate in a Hawaiian Scenic Tour activity. Within this activity, there are multiple activities, each with a particular style and goal, and each with a certain car that you race with during your time in the activity. For this particular tour, it took me about an hour or so of non-stop gameplay to complete every aspect of that Hawaiian tour. To boot, the tour also had a narrator that provided you with information about the location you were racing on and the history behind it. So much added value to a simple racing scenario.
Now, playlists reside on an enormous open-world island accessible by car, boat, or plane. This world that Ivory Tower has put together is huge. Much like what you would find if you drove around GTA V relentlessly, you have plenty of real estate that contains a specific personality for the playlist that it represents. There’s nothing quite like multiple themes lying within a bigger theme. For those of us with ADHD, it’s a perfect way to keep one’s mind active. Anyway, the open-world island is quite large and that makes the experience feel quite rewarding and grandiose. If you wanted to drive around the island trying out vehicles and goofing around, then you have enough sandbox space to do so. The game encourages you to do so through pieces and parts that make driving around fun. For example, you have the option to go through loop-to-loops, which are everywhere on the island. You have mountains to traverse with small activities associated with them as well. In short, there is plenty to do before you even decide to jump onto a playlist.
Should you finally decide to make that playlist leap, you have a lot of different experiences waiting for you. Here is a breakdown of what to expect from each playlist we tried during our preview:
Made in Japan – What a fascinating playlist that was and by far one of the more difficult of the bunch. You go against Japanese cars, old to new, and ride down treacherous driving courses. What I played from this playlist during my session involved the streets of Tokyo, which were beautifully neon and bustling with high sensation value visuals, and a downhill race through the mountains of Japan at night. The latter of the bunch was a tight-knit street race that was dangerous as it was short. It’s a gorgeous playlist through and through.
Off-Roading Addict – This was my second favorite playlist of the preview session. This is pure off-road fun, as you get into off-road vehicles, such as jeeps, hummers, bikes, four-wheelers, and everything with obnoxious large wheels. This playlist was less restrictive on your creativity as a driver and far more beautiful than any other playlist in the game’s bunch. From what I played during the preview session, the off-road was more tropical and had the occasional ocean backdrop. While the vehicle control was certainly not as tight as you find in the other modes, it was still one fun mud fest. And jumping off a cliff while going over 130mph is simply exhilarating.
Motorsports – This has more of an F1 and professional feel to the racing experience. I found this to be like Codemaster’s F1 series, though on a base level. You won’t get too far into the weeds as you do with Codemaster’s title, but you will feel the speed of the track and still get all the grit that comes with racing a professional race car. This is everything a seasoned F1 racer wants and while it might be an oddity when compared to the personality of the other playlists, it’s still a nice, refined piece that gives some variety to the racing game. In addition to F1, you’re also going to find other types of racing on a professional level with this playlist. I just didn’t experience much beyond F1, and I was fine with that during my session. The game is big, and I wanted to explore.
Vintage Garage – This was my favorite playlist of them all. Hands down, the Vintage Garage brought decades of cars to the forefront for you to race and try out. Mixed with classic music and accurately designed vintage cars, including a variety of DeLorean, I could have spent forever playing this playlist and would have been emotionally satisfied. The first car I tried out in this playlist was a 50s Cadillac that carried weight and style. I drove it through a muddy course and could feel the weight of the car with every turn. It had some giddy-up too, but it raced well off-road. Anyway, you should be excited about this playlist. It’s worth its weight in gold.
Lamborghini – I didn’t play this too much, but the idea of driving Lambos everywhere in a game makes me happy. It was my favorite car back in the 80s, mainly because of Cannonball Run (for the coolness factor, not the passengers), and this playlist seemed to cover decades worth of Lamborghinis. It’s so cool and a playlist that I will certainly check out when the final version of this game arrives. There’s something about a flat car with doors that swing upwards.
Electric Vehicles – While the motors of this playlist weren’t as loud as the others, the fact that EV vehicles were included in a playlist was super cool. The courses that came with this playlist were electrifying (literally) and added a nice bit of flair to the family of playlists. While I didn’t get to spend too much time on this list, I’m anxious to return to it when the final game is released. Until then, it’s a cool addition and it shows that all car-related ‘things’ are picking up on the fact that we must switch to electric sooner rather than later. We just need a better infrastructure for it. Anyway, oil companies don’t want this, blah-blah-blah. I’ll save it for when the news picks me up on a contract.
The playlists are enormous in The Crew Motorfest, and you will find yourself spending quite a few hours just getting through some activities within them. If Ivory Tower wanted to up the ante and release this latest iteration with a bang, then after seeing this preview I’m convinced the final version should come with earplugs because the bang is going to be very loud. There is just so much to do and experience in this game, so I seriously doubt anyone is going to be looking for content after week one of The Crew Motorfest’s release. The fact that you can drive around and try out vehicles makes this an even deeper and richer racing experience. It’s wild that an open-world game looked and worked so well. It’s going to set a new standard for racing games of this type if it maintains this route established in our preview session.
Controlling it all
One issue I had with The Crew 2 is the ease of use when it came to driving, flying, and boating (?). While the last game looked and ran gorgeously in a lot of gameplay design categories, I had a time with the controls along the way. They felt loose, they felt unforgiving at times, and it got to the point where I began to think I just suck at racing games. Honestly, it might be the latter. Who knows? I refuse to admit defeat.
Anyway, the controls for The Crew Motorfest seemed on the mark, even if I was remotely playing this game. They felt tighter and every aspect of the gameplay, airplane, car, boat, and whatnot, felt like I had complete control of the situation. Even if you saw me drive in the game and felt otherwise, I can assure you that this was a better control experience. Going back to my original statement in this preview, I’m not Ben Branscum, who plays these games with a driving wheel and chooses manual the entire time. I’m the driver that wants to have fun and take the moment less seriously, so pulling off insane driving techniques simply isn’t in my wheelhouse. Thankfully, this game also gives a bit when it comes to drifting and other types of fancy driving techniques during a race. I’m grateful for that as well.
Rambling aside, the controls feel so much better than in the previous game. They feel like they have been improved dramatically and they aren’t a distraction. They are friendly as you want them to be and can also be as complicated as you need them. When you’re trying to pull in a bigger audience, you must cater to everyone, including a yahoo like me that just wants to have racing fun.
Not going to be short on vehicles
There are over 500 vehicles in this game…so far. That includes cars, trucks, planes, bikes, and anything that you can race with or drive. There are so many licensed brands as well, and even some that may or may not exist anymore. Each car you acquire, and I couldn’t tell you how hard the grind is because they loaded us up with game currency to purchase vehicles, seems to be customizable from color to adding and adjusting bodies and wheels. I can see someone like Ben Branscum completely getting lost in this game for weeks. There are just so many darn vehicles to choose from in this game and quite frankly I wish I had spent more time trying vehicles out. The time was short and there were hard choices to be made during the preview.
More to come
After my time with The Crew Motorfest, I’m excited about returning to it when the final version gets released. I know there was more to see and experience and I’m almost positive there are modes and activities that I haven’t even sniffed yet.
Until the final release comes out in the coming months, you’ll have to stay tuned and keep that motor running.
