The Crew Motorfest Review

ign.com:

Not many things are better the smaller they get. Mortgages? Certainly. Golf scores? Sure. Kidney stones? Okay, yes. But video games? That’s more of a grey area. For The Crew Motorfest, developer Ivory Tower has chosen to give its chunky interpretation of the entire continental USA the chop in favour of something far more concise: a scaled-down riff of the single island of O’ahu, Hawaii. The result is better in some ways and worse in others, but overall it’s actually an experience that sometimes feels like it’s trying harder to emulate Forza Horizon than its own predecessors. I can’t say I blame them considering how much I loved Horizon 5, and they’ve done a good enough job at it that I’ve had many great moments in Motorfest over the past several days. It has the best handling in the series so far, and it does boast some incredibly strong lighting. However, while Motorfest is a mostly earnest romp for car lovers in a vibrant, tropical paradise, it definitely loses some momentum due to its confusingly dead world and slightly uneven campaign, and its omnipresent, baked-in microtransactions are a constant bugbear.

After its handbrake turn from an illegal, underground street racer in the 2014 original to the sanctioned motorsport TV show format of The Crew 2 in 2018, The Crew Motorfest has peeled away in yet another new direction: that is, it’s now based around a bustling summer car culture festival. Let’s admit it’s not exactly original, though: the Forza Horizon series has had this patch accounted for since 2012.

However, it really does get off to a very positive start, with a confident and well-curated prologue segment that gives us an effective taste of Motorfest’s varied racing action and – immediately after that – the