In The Crew Motorfest, the line between a well-executed drift and a sloppy turn is tiny. It’s minuscule. It’s a series of quick decisions that result in sliding around a corner like melted butter, or bouncing off the track’s edge in humiliation. It’s also, I realise while careening toward yet another guardrail, a line I crossed several milliseconds ago.
My constant failures are even more embarrassing because The Crew Motorfest actively tries to make drifting easier. While most driving games make the corner-turning technique a manual feat, Motorfest is content to assign drifts to a single button — whack it down at the right time, and you’ll clear a curve in the track effortlessly. You even have a generous rewind feature, which lets you undo any slip-ups that may have cost you first pace — in my case, many of them.
It’s a welcome addition for the first Motorfest playlist I’m here to try out: Made In Japan, which is all about keeping up with a crew of street racers through a set of winding neon-lit tracks. Tracks in this playlist are tight, twisty challenges: competing with your fellow racers means knowing which corners you’re confident flooring, and recognising the ones where you’re just as likely to spin out from a poorly-executed drift. In several races, it was challenging just keeping up with other racers, let alone taking the lead, and became extra chaotic when several drivers tried to clear the same turn at once.
However, that chaos paled in comparison to Motorfest’s next playlist: an off-road derby across O’ahu, Hawaii, where the game takes place. Instead of finessing fast bends, hulking 4×4 cars tear through the island’s dirt roads and grassy fields, taking every opportunity to launch from comically-oversized ramps. While this session didn’t include a look at Motorfest‘s open-world segments, tearing through the map off-road felt like a preview in itself — a glimpse at an island that seems vibrant and dense.
The next playlist doubles down on that, swapping O’ahu’s overgrowth and 4x4s for sun-soaked coastal roads and gorgeous retro cars. To match the old-timey theme, these races strip away drivers’ GPS and assisted driving systems for a much more laid-back cruise. A separate playlist, turning O’auhu’s highways into playgrounds for fast-paced Lamborghini races, also sticks to the coast; although you don’t have as much time for sight-seeing considering the ungodly speed you’re cruising at.
Finally, an F1-style playlist felt like Motorfest‘s most realistic offering, tasking players with factoring in pit stops and tire integrity into their race. It’s a completely different beast to any other playlist in the game, and that seems to be the goal with Motorfest: a buffet of action that you can jump straight into between your longer drives across Hawaii.
All of those playlists add up to a wide breadth of vehicles available, as developer Ivory Tower aim to achieve a “car culture celebration”. From the history behind its retro cars to the way that your (slightly too banter-y) rivals in Made In Japan will fill you in about the vehicle you’re driving, that seems to land. Though I know very little about car culture — the engines make the wheels spin fast — I did enjoy Motorfest’s educational tidbits, and liked the game’s arcadey approach to racing even more.
Combined with its lush setting and eclectic mix of playlists, I could see Motorfest as being a brilliant way of onboarding new racers that have been intimidated by the likes of Gran Turismo‘s rigid realism. Will I be one of those newcomers, when Motorfest‘s September launch date rolls around? Tentatively, yes — unless footage of my first race ever makes it to light, at which point I’ll be retiring from the public eye indefinitely.
The Crew Motorfest launches on September 14, 2023, for PC, Xbox, and PlayStation.
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