The Crew Motorfest: Hands-On with the New Playlists

Swooping into a thriving festival sprawled out over a tropical, summer paradise. Checking in with a hip, young public relations rep for your next step, which is straight into a car and onto the accelerator as firmly as possible. What racing series am I talking about? Well, up until now there was probably only one answer. Now there are two. After experimenting with an illegal, underground street racing premise in the 2014 original and pivoting to a sanctioned, TV show racing format for The Crew 2 in 2018, The Crew Motorfest developer Ivory Tower has flipped the script yet again.

This time the studio has opted for the flamboyance of a flashy festival of speed for the foundation of this third instalment of the franchise. It is said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but if there was any more Forza Horizon DNA in the opening phase of The Crew Motorfest, Playground Games might consider asking for a paternity test.

If there was any more Forza Horizon DNA in the opening phase of The Crew Motorfest, Playground Games might consider asking for a paternity test.

Admittedly, The Crew Motorfest doesn’t stick with being a straight facsimile of Forza Horizon entirely, and after an approximately three-hour hands-on it seems Ivory Tower is working to curate the racing experience a lot more via its themed Playlists.

The Playlists, each of which could be described as a mini-campaign of themed racing and driving challenges, do appear to be loosely similar to Forza Horizon’s ‘Horizon Stories’ (that is, they place players in specific cars to complete certain objectives, and generally teach us trivia about the history of these vehicles in the process). However, Playlists seem a lot more core to the overall Motorfest package, rather than side missions.

There will be 15 of these Playlists available in Motorfest upon launch. Several of these Playlists were available in our initial preview last month. These include Made in Japan, which highlights fan-favourite Japanese sports cars and boasts a late-night neon aesthetic befitting its underground street racing origins. There’s also Off-Roading Addict, which naturally takes place in the most rugged sections of the map, and Motorsports, which introduces tyre wear and pit stops to the equation. Vintage Garage focuses on cars from the ’50s through to the ’80s, and Automobili Lamborghini takes you through the history of the iconic manufacturer.

However, a handful of others were available in this heftier slice of Motorfest, including Hawaii Scenic Tour, which feels like a decent, introductory package to get a better taste of the map following the scripted prologue as it explores O’ahu itself rather than the cars involved. There’s also another with a narrow lens on just one manufacturer: A Porsche Story: 911 Legacy. As you can likely tell, 911 Legacy focuses purely on the history of the 911 and highlights a handful of the most memorable versions of the model, from offshoots like the 911 GT1 to the 959 rally car, and the GT3 RS to the completely cupholder-less Turbo 3.6.

Progress through the Playlists will unlock what Motorfest calls the Main Stage, which is another tier of events that will be changed monthly. As a result, Motorfest seems poised to receive a lengthy campaign of post-release support – just like The Crew 2 enjoyed. I’m particularly interested in the Hoonigan month teased in a recent video. Speaking with Ivory Tower Content Director Julien Hummer after the hands-on, he wouldn’t be drawn into too much detail about what that particular month will involve, but he did note we should expect something different to what Hoonigan has done with its many previous video game partners. Hummer also said that expanding the breadth of where The Crew’s vehicles come from around the globe is another area they’re seeking to grow, so hopefully we’ll see some cars from countries that don’t usually get a lot of love from most racing games.

While the Fast Fav system introduced in The Crew 2 was not active for our demo last month, it was available in this build. This meant we were able to switch between air, sea, and land vehicles with the push of a button. Ivory Tower confirmed that boats and aircraft were making a reappearance in Motorfest during the announcement, but it was nice to get back in the air after tweaking the default flying settings. There’s an aircraft handling assist that automatically locked some of the flight axes, but the flying feels far better with it toggled off. As an unapologetic WWII aircraft dork I certainly enjoyed zooming around Honolulu in Motorfest’s new Vought F4U Corsair, which feels like the perfect Pacific warbird to add to the hangar here.

If I had any concerns, though, it’d be that the flying does expose the significant size difference between The Crew 2’s continental USA map and Motorfest’s more intimate O’ahu. Of course, the benefit of a smaller map is that it does seem to be higher on detail and lower on nonsensical storefronts that appeared to have been generated by some kind of defective AI.

That said, there were a few areas that definitely seemed a little more petite than I’d anticipated. Pearl Harbor’s Ford Island, for perspective, seems to just be four short streets with a battleship moored next to it. However, Ivory Tower has admittedly always been clear that Motorfest’s map is not a 1:1 recreation of the O’ahu. I charted an improvised course anticlockwise around the complete coast in an exceedingly quick Lamborghini Revuelto in a little over 15 minutes – which is a lot quicker than it took in my last high-speed holiday to Hawaii in Test Drive Unlimited – but I’ll need to wait until I get plenty of time to fully explore the entire environment before I can properly appraise Motorfest’s new map philosophy.

With Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown now confirmed to have slipped to 2024, The Crew Motorfest should more or less have the streets to itself this September. We’ll find out how it fares in just a couple of months.

Luke is a Senior Editor on the IGN reviews team. You can chat to him on Twitter @MrLukeReilly.