The Crew was already an interesting series thanks to the way it approached an open world, compressing huge swathes of countryside down into a playable map – but it’s just taken a hard turn at a crossroad.

Ubisoft has re-tooled things completely for its latest outing, and the main source of inspiration is pretty obvious – the mega-successful Forza Horizon series. Can The Crew Motorfest do enough to stand out from its competition, though?

Play it again, Sam

There’s no pretending that Motorfest’s premise is original – a massive motoring festival that has touched down in a new host location to tear up the streets (and skies) with races and showpiece events.

It is transparently the same as Forza Horizon’s formula, right down to the introductory sequence that swaps between a few race disciplines in turn to give you a glitzy look at all you can expect.

Motorfest is set on O’ahu in Hawaii and makes the most of the island’s stunning beauty for some impressively varied terrain (no one mention the similarities to Forza Horizon 5’s version of Mexico, though).

You’ll soon pick an avatar from a list of new arrivals to the festival and customise them a little to get your look before jumping into your first race.

From there, Motorfest arranges its singleplayer mode mostly through what it calls Playlists – these are sort of like racing disciplines. As their name implies, though, things are a little looser in Motorfest.

Take the Rule The Streets playlist made in collaboration with YouTube channel Donut – you’ll race odd pairs of cars and explore the world of custom builds, but it’s all nice and harem-scarem.

Similarly, while the Made In Japan playlist does feature plenty of drifting, it also showcases amazing Japanese mods and neon-soaked night races to give a really vibrant set of events.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from Playlists, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the way they briskly swap up your expectations and offer relatively diverse races. They’re also a good way of dragging you around O’ahu to explore and find more locations and terrain to get over.

Make your way

The Crew Motorfest has a more eclectic approach to racing than recent Horizon games, then, in a surprising power play – and it also goes all out where vehicle variety is concerned.

There are more than 600 vehicles in Motorfest at launch, a dizzying roster that includes planes and boats, quad bikes and bikes, and absolutely loads of cars.

The game is perhaps a little less obsessed by the idea of your own collection growing as the end goal of all your work (although you will obviously earn money to buy new rides) – loads of races deposit you in loaner vehicles as the game progresses, rather than insisting you buy them first.

Some Playlists are locked behind purchased rides (such as the excellent vintage-tinted Vintage Garage series) but these don’t tend to present massively high barriers to entry.

This variety of vehicles is backed up by fairly distinctive handling differences – the skiddy twitchiness of a supercar (or even an F1 racer) compares pretty massively to the heft of a 4×4, all the more so when terrain comes into play.

In free roam and also in generously laid-out races, you’re free to ignore the racing line and set out over fields in even the most unsuitable car, after all, and it isn’t too long before you’ll be able to swap into a plane or boat at will, too.

It all makes for the fun sort of playground feeling that Horizon games have traded on for years – a feeling that has maybe started to stultify for that series, but impressively feels borderline fresh here.

Originality is great – but if you can’t be original be polished, a broad idea that Motorfest appears to have taken to heart.

That said, the tone of it all can become grating quickly – an AI assistant that guides you to your destinations with more than just turnings almost immediately becomes annoying, and the upbeat “bro”-ness of it all is a bit tiring if you just fancy a drive.

The island is also absolutely full of ghost racers in free-roam, semi-transparent cars that seem to have a knack for steering directly into your path without any collision – testing your nerve all the time and, again, getting pretty annoying.

Honolulu City Lights

O’ahu is a stunner and no mistake. Setting your game in a real-life location demands a smart choice of locale, one that the first Forza Horizon nailed with Colorado’s varied sights.

This island packs in volcanic heights, city streets, winding mountain roads and verdant jungles, making for a really nicely balanced set of options.

It’s not full-scale, though – driving from one side of the island to the other is something achieved in minutes, which pales in comparison to the massive fake United States offered up by The Crew 2.

This does mean that truly long drives aren’t really on the menu unless you’re setting out to cover every inch of tarmac out there. It also feels a decent chunk smaller than Forza Horizon 5, for context.

That doesn’t have to be a bad thing, though – it makes Motorfest a little more digestible in my experience (further helped by the Playlist structure), without the sense of endless geography full of tick-box activities waiting for me.

All of this geography, and the cars zipping around it, is presented really quite nicely, in some ways eclipsing Forza and in others not quite matching it.

Motorfest is happier to suspend your disbelief and present giant roadside statues and sights that aren’t physically possible, but look amazing – like giant neon-lit dragons in Made In Japan races, or huge signage in Vintage Garage races.

This makes for a visual flair that should have Horizon devs looking on with envy – unshackled by already tenuous concerns around realism, this has made for some seriously pretty moments.

That said, hitches and loading times are a bit less seamless than in Forza’s case, with the map screen clearly demanding a lot from your console, and while the 30FPS quality mode looks sumptuous, the far smoother 60FPS performance option does cut back on resolution in a noticeable way.

Verdict

Motorfest is an interesting step for The Crew – on the one hand, its interesting approach to compressed real-world locations has been upended a little bit – O’ahu is big, but its ambition is scaled right back. The lack of originality in Motorfest’s core concept is also almost impressive.

Sitting and playing it, though, things do a bit of a J-turn. With countless vehicles to try, fun playlists that play with the game’s visuals to great effect, and a commitment to fun over realism, it’s a really solid package for those looking to fill a Horizon-shaped hole in their lives.