We recently participated in the closed beta of The Crew Motorfest, which Ubisoft plans to release on September 14th.
The Crew Motorfest first look: First of all, I should say that; I have loved racing games since my childhood, I can say that I have played and experienced almost all of the racing games on the market, from Need for Speed to Midnight Club, from Midnight Club to Project Cars.
We played The Crew Motorfest!
The first two The Crew games were classic open-world racing games of average quality. The maps of both games consisted of the entirety of America. The Crew Motorfest has a much different and richer structure than the previous games. The new game of the series is actually presented to us with the festival theme we are familiar with from the Forza Horizon games.
Motorfest, whose entire map consists of the island of Hawaii, welcomes us racing fans with a map that is quite enjoyable to navigate. The design, content and visuality of the entire island are truly magnificent, and the atmosphere of Hawaii is reflected quite well both during the day and at night.
If I were to briefly mention the game’s driving mechanics, I would say it’s not as good as Forza, but it’s not bad in itself. Even though it’s an arcade game, there are often moments when you don’t feel like you’re driving a vehicle. By the way, if you don’t know, you can drive a motorcycle, a boat, and even a plane in this game, in addition to cars.
Naturally, this increases the richness of the game’s content. The airplane mechanics are not quite arcade-like, but they are still nice. In addition, boat driving is also quite enjoyable. Boat races are especially enjoyable. To sum it all up, the use of the vehicles in the game is neither very good nor very bad, it is average.
If I have to talk about the basic progress of the game, Motorfest consists of a series of events called Playlists. There are usually 6-7 races in these playlists and you win prizes by completing these races. For now, I have encountered 5 Playlists in the closed beta version. I have played all of them except 1. Because I do not like the Porsche brand, it did not interest me much. I have to say that the 4 different Playlists I played were quite different and beautiful from each other. Let’s go from my least favorite to my favorite.
First of all, I want to start with the Playlist called Electric Oddysey. Since this Playlist was made specifically for electric cars, I didn’t find it very enjoyable. We are trying to take our electric car from one point to another without completely depleting the health bar of our car, that is, without crashing into anything, the design of the environment is quite nice with purple light objects and such. But as I said earlier, I don’t like electric cars at all, so I’ll skip this one right away.
Another Playlist called Hawaii Scenic Tour introduces us race lovers to the entire island of Hawaii and offers great races. Since Hawaii is added to the game in a very beautiful and detailed way, the races we do in this mode seriously make us players feel like we are in Hawaii. The landscapes and such are amazing.
On the other hand, another playlist I liked is called Vintage Garage and it takes us back to the past. This playlist based on old cars gave me a lot of fun. The fact that the speedometer on the left has changed to the past and there is no map on the right are nice details, and the addition of a yellowish filter that makes the player feel like they are in Mexico to the visuals of this mode is amazing, it is very enjoyable.
Now let’s come to the Playlist that got me the most excited. In the playlist called Made in Japan, we drift with Japanese cars and earn points, we do 1v1 duels, we do drag races, we do street races, it goes on and on. Since I already love Japanese cars and the Japanese theme, the fact that there is such a Playlist in this game really impressed me.
Besides all this, what really impressed me the most was the visuals in the street races in the Playlist. When I first saw it, I said, “No way!”, the reflections from the neon-style lighting, the environmental design, everything is magnificent. I don’t remember having such a visual pleasure in a racing game before.
Since they offer such playlists in closed beta, who knows what we will see when the game comes out. In fact, in the opening section of the game, the game gave us a little taste of off road, formula and Lamborghini brand special playlists. We are waiting to see.
In my opinion, one of the most important parts of today’s games is of course the graphics. Because we have now moved to new generation consoles and as gamers, we naturally care about visuals. Motorfest’s graphics are unfortunately not exactly at the level of the new generation. However, the reflections in the game are of higher quality than most racing games. However, I cannot say that the graphics are very good in general.
Another thing I should mention in particular is definitely the map in the menu of the game. In other words, it is really flawless and something that has not been seen before. It is a 3D map that you know and in this way, you can zoom in wherever you want and directly observe parts of the entire map live without experiencing any graphical drops. This is possible on PS5, but I don’t know how it will be on PS4. But I must say that I am very impressed.
The music of the game is weak for a racing game, especially after Need for Speed Unbound, it felt really bad, I tried the game on PlayStation 5 and I can say that the Dualsense Support is surprisingly perfect. The feeling of the Haptic feedback feature while driving vehicles, especially while driving a boat, is amazing. On the adaptive trigger side, the use of L2, the brake side, is a lot, but I can’t say the same for the gas side.
To sum up, The Crew Motorfest is a very nice racing game. Although the game is still in closed beta, it is full of unique content. When it is fully released on September 14, a much more full game will be with us. If you like racing games and other racing games on the market do not satisfy you in terms of content.