It’s part of the Season 9 Playground Island update dropping on March 4, which also includes a track creator. There’s also a bit of NASCAR Circuit racing to look forward to, and, of course, some new cars. The new island seemingly offers multiple distinct biomes, with tropical forests making way for mountains and even an underwater viewing gallery, complete with a shark. We’re definitely making a pit stop there! It’s a lot to take in, if we’re being honest.

All in all, it’s looking like a solid addition to Ubisoft’s open-world racer, and a timely one, considering that Forza Horizon 6 isn’t too far away. Ubisoft Ivory Tower is going to have a hard road ahead, but if the Playground Island is any indication, it’s going to be an interesting one.

The Crew Motorfest is available for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. Check out our review for the base game here.

Though it’s still receiving post-launch support, Ubisoft has reportedly greenlit a new title in the series, according to Insider Gaming’s Tom Henderson. It’s also allegedly a brand-new title rather than a follow-up to Motorfest, which is interesting since the latter was rumored to have started development as DLC for The Crew 2.

Whether it’s greenlighting is a recent development or not, it will likely be some time before The Crew 4’s announcement, so stay tuned. The Crew Motorfest is out now on Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, PS5, and PC. Check out our review of the launch version here.

Developer Ivory Tower is also working to add an offline mode to The Crew 2 after legal controversies arising from the delisting of the original game.

The island of Maui will be depicted in The Crew Motorfest as having more than 100 square kilometers to explorer and race through. Players will be able to race through Kahului, Haleakalā National Park, and Ohe’o Gulch Sacred Pools.

Part of the game’s fifth season, Maui will be available for all players of The Crew Motorfest to explore and race through for free. The island also serves as one of the settings for The Chase Squad, which will have players join and compete against elite driving teams.

The Crew Motorfest is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. Earlier this year, the PC version also made its way on to Steam, rather than only being available on Ubisoft Connect and Epic Games Store.

For more details on The Crew Motorfest, check out our review.

Ubisoft recently shut down all servers for 2014’s The Crew, which rendered the always-online game effectively unplayable. But though there was some hope of community-made patches making the game playable again in some capacity, Ubisoft is all but nuking those hopes by revoking licenses from players who’ve purchased the game, which means they no longer have access to it at all.

Shared by users on Reddit, a message on the game’s library page reads, “You no longer have access to this game. Why not check the store to pursue your adventures?”

Ubisoft has yet to officially comment on the matter, but as you’d expect, there’s been considerable backlash from the community- which is understandable enough. When you buy a game with your money, you expect to own it forever, even if servers have been taken down. By revoking licenses, Ubisoft has essentially set precedent for purchases being temporary, which is unlikely to go down well with audiences.

The Crew Motorfest, which has been available on PC only via Epic Games Store and Ubisoft Connect since its launch last September, will be releasing for Steam on April 18, Ubisoft recently announced. The game’s Steam page is also up, and it can be wishlisted now.

In our review of The Crew Motorfest, we awarded it a score of 8/10, saying, “The Crew Motorfest embodies the spirit of the Forza Horizon franchise in more ways than one, and though it doesn’t ever quite touch the same heights, it does deliver what is easily the most enjoyable game in Ubisoft’s open world racing franchise.” Read the full review through here.

The Crew Motorfest is available on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, Xbox One, and PC. Shortly after its release, Ubisoft announced that it had set a new record for first-week sales for the franchise.

https://twitter.com/TheCrewGame/status/1772307538983129562

Leaving behind the mainland United States setting of the first two games in the series, The Crew Motorfest takes players to the Hawaiian island of O’ahu, a gorgeous, vibrant, and diverse open world that also takes a leaf out of Forza Horizon’s book with its heavily festive vibe. In addition to a core experience revolving around varied Playlists focusing on different aspects of car culture, the game also features PvP offerings, while developer Ubisoft Ivory Tower is also promising sustained post-launch support.

In our review of The Crew Motorfest, we awarded it a score of 8/10, saying, “The Crew Motorfest embodies the spirit of the Forza Horizon franchise in more ways than one, and though it doesn’t ever quite touch the same heights, it does deliver what is easily the most enjoyable game in Ubisoft’s open world racing franchise.” Read the full review through here.

Ubisoft recently also announced that The Crew Motorfest enjoyed the best first-week sales for the franchise to date.

Meanwhile, Hogwarts Legacy has climbed back into pole position, thanks in large part to a price promotion for its Xbox Series X version, leading to a 214% week-on-week increase in sales. Starfield, meanwhile, drops down to eighth place, seeing an 87% decrease in sales from last week. 

Beyond that, plenty of the usual suspects can be found in the top 10, including the likes of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Grand Theft Auto 5, LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, and Minecraft. Red Dead Redemption 2 has also re-entered the top 10, sitting in tenth place. 

You can check out the full top 10 for the week ending September 16 below.

HAWAIIAN SCENIC TOUR

The Crew Motorfest has over a dozen Playlists on offer at launch, and chances are this is where you’ll be spending a great deal of your time, seeing as they form the backbone of the experience, especially where its solo content is concerned. Initially, the game will have a handful of Playlists that you can play through, and while there really isn’t a wrong choice here, there is one that we’d recommend getting out of the way first. The Hawaiian Scenic Tour Playlist is an excellent choice for your first Playlist in The Crew Motorfest, not only because it gives you a pretty thorough tour of the game’s open world map (as its name suggests), but also because, upon completing it, you instantly add a free car, plane, and boat to your collection.

TAKE TO THE SKIES

Like The Crew 2, Motorfest allows you to seamlessly switch back and forth between cars, planes, and boats while you’re exploring the open world, and though the game heavily de-emphasizes the latter two compared to its predecessor, taking to the skies in particular can be particularly useful, especially in the early hours. That’s because the game’s fast travel system is quite eccentric- in that you need to finish 10 Playlists before you unlock the ability to fast travel. That, as you can imagine, takes a bit of time, which means in those initial hours, you’ll have no option but to manually go from point to point for all your races and events. Thankfully, to significantly cut down on the travel time, you can simply switch to your plane and fly straight to wherever it is you’re headed.

MAIN STAGE

The Crew Motorfest is being billed as an ongoing live service experience that will keep refreshing its content offerings on a regular basis. A bulk of that will come through the Main Stage, which will give you new themes and sub-themes to tackle from month to month and week to week respectively. There’s a catch here, however, because the Main Stage isn’t available right off the bat. You need to finish three Playlists before being able to get to the Main Stage events, so we’d recommend knocking that out as quickly as possible. One of the three Playlists that you prioritize should ideally be 911 Legacy: A Porsche Story, since it only has six races and can be completed pretty quickly.

MAKE MONEY QUICKLY

There are several events in The Crew Motorfest that’ll need you to buy specific cars or bundles to be unlocked, and those, as you might imagine, aren’t exactly cheap. Thankfully, there’s ways to make money pretty quickly in the game. For starters, every race you finish nets you a healthy amount of cash, while completing an event gives you an even larger sum. Beyond that, however, once you’ve finished a Playlist, you unlock its own set of challenges and side activities. As you might expect, these are bite sized activities that you can blow through pretty quickly, and each of them gives you a decent amount of money and XP, which adds up pretty quickly.

FEATS

The Crew Motorfest’s open world has a variety of different smaller side activities for you to tackle, from speed traps and slaloms to more unique ones like racing through series of small gates at high speeds. They’re fun, and they give out small amounts of money and XP, so our advice is to do them anytime you chance across one. The thing is, they’re not all available right off the bat. These activities, called Feats, are unlocked bit by bit as you start new Playlists, which means initially, there won’t be much for you to do by way of side content. Our advice would be to start as many Playlists as you can as soon as you start playing the game, even if you don’t intend to finish them just yet, so that you’ll at least have plenty of Feats populating your map.

PHOTO OPS

The Crew Motorfest’s island setting of O’ahu is one of its biggest strengths, and the game sure knows it. Scattered throughout the island, you’ll find plenty of photo ops, and they’re definitely worth seeking out. You do, of course, get cash and XP rewards for each photo op, but unlike most of what we’ve spoken about here so far, in our book, the main reason for tracking these activities down is less to do with the mechanics and more about the fact that they serve as a great way to highlight the beauty and diversity of the open world map and its many gorgeous environments.

CUSTOMIZATION

The Crew Motorfest has a solid suite of customization and upgrade tools on offer, and it doesn’t take too long to build up a healthy collection of useful parts that you can equip to your cars. However, while you’re driving through the beautiful open world and going from one Playlist and event to the next, it can be easy to forget that there’s plenty of upgrades just waiting for you. Keep making sure you’re heading into your menu from time to time to check out how (or if) you can best upgrade your favourite vehicles in your ever-growing collection.

RACING LINE

Ubisoft Ivory Tower has introduced a racing line with The Crew Motofest, which is always a useful tool, for beginners in particular- though it’s fair to say that Motorfest’s racing line is decidedly less useful than the racing lines in, say Forza Horizon. Beyond a certain point, it can actually get in the way of how well you’re performing. Though it’s a useful tool to help you get to grips with the game’s mechanics in the early hours, we’d recommend not relying on it too much once beyond that point, because that can lead to everything from unnecessary braking to missing shortcuts during some of the longer races, among other things.

NITROUS

A bit of an obvious one here, but one worth mentioning nonetheless. The Crew Motorfest is pretty generous with how it hands out nitrous, so you definitely shouldn’t be too worried about saving it up for when you might really need it. Anytime you’re on a straight (or straightish) stretch of road, punch that boost button- because your opponents will certainly be doing that very thing.

REWIND

Another new mechanic that The Crew Motorfest has added to bring it even closer to the experience that Forza Horizon offers is a rewind mechanic- and unlike the racing line, this one is really useful, and remains useful as long as you continue to play. Anytime you mistime a drift, or misjudge a corner, or crash into a tree or something, remember that you have the ability to rewind. The Crew’s Motorfest’s rewind is pretty generous too, letting you turn back the clock by over a dozen seconds if you want to, so use it as often as you need to.

That, by the way, is a great thing in my book, because I adore Forza Horizon. It’s a good direction for Ubisoft’s series to head in after its previous two instalments, and though I don’t think The Crew Motorfest touched quite the same heights as the games it borrows so liberally from, it does come across as a solid and suitably close approximation, delivering a lot of the same thrills and charms, even if it doesn’t deliver on the same scale.

More than almost anything else, The Crew Motorfest’s change in direction benefits the atmosphere of the whole experience. The first two instalments in Ubisoft Ivory Tower’s franchise were solid enough in their own right, but their recreations of the United States mainland felt a bit too bland, a bit too lacking in personality. Motorfest doesn’t have that problem in the slightest. The Hawaiian island of O’ahu is a stellar setting for the racer, and simply existing in it and driving through its beautifully realized environments feels significantly more enjoyable than anything Motorfest’s predecessors had on offer.

"Though The Crew Motorfest touched quite the same heights as the games it borrows so liberally from, it does come across as a solid and suitably close approximation, delivering a lot of the same thrills and charms, even if it doesn’t deliver on the same scale."

It helps, of course, that there’s an impressive amount of variety to be found across all of O’ahu. From dense rainforests and pristine beaches to urban locales and the slopes of a volcano, The Crew Motorfest’s world is brimming boasts incredible environmental diversity, and it has the visual and technical chops to back it up as well as it deserves to be backed up. Regardless of where you find yourself on the island, regardless of what time of day it is, regardless of whether the sun is shining brightly or if you’re caught in the middle of a downpour, Motofest always looks gorgeous, and nearly every road you drive through is a joy to behold. Better yet, in my experience, the game has had next to no performance issues. I played on an Xbox Series X on performance mode, and very rarely did I notice any meaningful dips in frame rate, with the game largely sticking to a smooth 60 FPS.

As for what you do in the open world, the game is much less inventive on that front, though still sufficiently enjoyable. A lot of that is down to the fact that the moment-to-moment gameplay here has seen significant improvements over The Crew 2. The driving feels much more satisfying, handling feels much more responsive, and vehicles feel meaningfully different from each other as soon as you get behind the wheel, in a way they did not in previous games. Admittedly, the game has an annoying knack for bombarding you with awfully written dialogue from NPCs, all of whom are little more than caricatures, and peppering in cutscenes before the beginning of an event or a Playlist. As annoying as that is though, when you’re actually behind the wheel – which, of course, is where you are for the bulk of the game – it’s hard not to have fun.

The primary activities in the game come in the form of Playlists, each of which is a curated collection of races designed around a specific theme. Ubisoft Ivory Tower is billing The Crew Motorfest as a celebration of car culture, and it’s with these Playlists that it puts that facet on display for all to see. One might put all of its attention on American muscle cars, while another might turn the spotlight on Japanese street racing. One might be designed around taking you on a scenic tour through the open world, while others still might be focused on specific car manufacturers, like Porsche and Lamborghini.

"The moment-to-moment gameplay here has seen significant improvements over The Crew 2. The driving feels much more satisfying, handling feels much more responsive, and vehicles feel meaningfully different from each other as soon as you get behind the wheel, in a way they did not in previous games."

Each Playlist also comes with unique elements to go along with their themes. For instance, in the Vintage Garage Playlist, you’re not only being put behind the wheels of old school vehicles, the game also takes away your GPS and driving line to align with that theme. Similarly, when you’re blazing through the races of the Made in Japan Playlist, you’ll be doing so at nighttime through neon-lit streets, with Japanese decorations adorning the environments in glorious fashion. I do feel that the game could have leveraged the themed nature of its Playlists better than it does – a lot of the events end up being regular races, which I found a little disappointing – but there’s still enough variety on offer here that going from one Playlist to the next does bring about enough of a change in style for the gameplay experience.

Meanwhile, outside of the Playlists, you can participate in a healthy selection of open world activities that provide their own brand of bite-sized fun, including slaloms, speed traps, and more. A couple of these activities actually end up being quite different from what you’d ordinarily expect to see in an open world game, like being tasked with driving through a series of small gates at high speeds, or escaping an ever-growing danger zone. Beyond that, there are challenges to tackle in the Playlists you’ve completed and the game’s multiplayer offerings to dive into. Ubisoft Ivory Tower has, of course, promised healthy post-launch support for The Crew Motorfest in the months and years to come, and if it follows in the footsteps of what we saw with The Crew 2, there’s going to be no shortage of new content in the future- but even in its current form, Motorfest has no shortage of things to do.

One aspect of the game that’s a bit disappointing is how heavily it de-emphasizes planes and boats. Like The Crew 2, you can seamlessly switch between cars, planes, and boats at any time, and doing so while you’re zooming through the open world is as fun as ever. But the actual, authored content in the game almost completely sidelines the latter two. Yes, the addition of new vehicle types like bikes and ATVs does inject more variety into the experience, and yes, they’re a lot of fun to drive- but the fact that there’s just a single Playlist that combines events for both planes and boats is definitely a bit of a bummer.

"I do feel that the game could have leveraged the themed nature of its Playlists better than it does – a lot of the events end up being regular races, which I found a little disappointing – but there’s still enough variety on offer here that going from one Playlist to the next does bring about enough of a change in style for the gameplay experience."

Another sticking point I’ve had with The Crew Motorfest is how its progression is structured. When the game begins, you only have access to a handful of Playlists, with all the rest being locked behind certain requirements. Side activities, like open world activities and photo opportunities, are also only gradually added to the open world as you unlock and initiate more Playlists, which means that in its opening hours, its open world can feel a bit sparse. That problem does start going away as you unlock more Playlists, but the slow progression definitely holds back the first few hours of the experience. What doesn’t help is the fact that fast travel isn’t available right off the bat either, which means you’ll be frequently forced to drive from point A to point B- though thankfully, in these situations, you can just hop into a plane and significantly cut down on the time it takes to get to your objective.

The Crew Motorfest is a solid step forward for Ubisoft Ivory Tower’s open world racing franchise. It’s a better game than any of its predecessors were, not only because the moment-to-moment driving is more fun, but also because it’s got a much stronger personality, and because it’s an open world setting is an absolute joy to behold, even after you’ve spent hours driving through it. Does it ascend to the heights of the Forza Horizon games it’s so clearly trying to emulate? No, not quite. But it does succeed in a lot of the same ways, delivering a racing game that’s well worth checking out for all fans of the genre.

This game was reviewed on the Xbox Series X.

It’s just… well… it’s all a bit derivative, isn’t it? The festival setting, one in which a rabble of motorsport enthusiasts occupy beautiful lands in celebration of car culture is lifted straight out of Forza Horizon’s playbook. Motorfest’s verdant, lush, beachside setting – whilst indeed beautiful – is more than reminiscent of Forza Horizon 3’s Australia with a touch of Forza Horizon 5’s Mexico thrown in for good measure. The choice of Hawaiian island is even derivative of Test Drive Unlimited too. Surely there are other worldwide locations with esteemed, challenging driving roads which the developer could have chosen? Iceland perhaps? South Africa maybe? Alpine Italy and Switzerland? Hunan Province, China? Morocco’s Mediterranean coast? The list could go on – unique, unexplored locales of winding road, rugged terrain, aquatic beauty, and dense metropolises exist all over the world, so it feels a bit of misstep for the developer to tread such familiar ground in The Crew Motorfest’s setting.

From watching closed beta gameplay though, the infrastructure design of Oahu appears a carefully planned network of roads and side streets – highways connect rural towns, perimeter motorways orbit urban cityscapes, country roads wind believably through mountains. It’s a far cry from Forza Horizon’s wild highways oftentimes resembling dropped spaghetti and should result in some satisfying road trips between events. Sure, there are those that’ll lament the loss of hours-long drives through gorgeous, unfathomably vast American scenery as per the first two The Crew games, but in Motorfest’s miniaturised Hawaiian island a sensibly designed road network on a truncated map will at least alleviate some of the tedium felt when driving between events in Forza Horizon.

There’s always the somewhat unique option to switch on the fly between car to airplane to boat in Motorfest, granting players chance to glimpse the Hawaiian splendour from the sky or sea. And what’s more, the island’s waterways and airspace are as well designed as its motorways. Three tiers of traversal are a definite pat on the back for the devs at Ivory Tower; their ability to craft an environment that’s penned in compared to its forebearers yet feels larger than the play space’s square mileage suggests is a feat that can only be commended.

There are only flashes of these alternative modes of transport visible in The Crew Motorfest’s official trailers up to now but have a look through some of the closed beta gameplay to get a feel for how the transitions between vehicle types works. In short: it’s seamless. And, as a bonus, switching back to car mid-air above an event on terra firma below looks to be hella fun for some unconventional target practice.

Planes and sea vessels aren’t exempt from Motorfest’s Playlists either, which is a good addition by Ivory Tower. Just to explain, these Playlists are a collection of tailored events which aim to celebrate a specific car culture. So, in addition to challenges related specifically to air and sea, there’s a smorgasbord of mini campaigns tied to explicit motor vehicle subcultures. Of course, there’s an off-road speciality with a garage stocked full of rally and motocross vehicles primed to plough through muddy country roads, classic car races (authentically complete without the availability of nitro boost, which seems a given on pretty much every other vehicle type in Motorfest), elite motorsport in the form of F1 and Indy Cars, drifty Japanese street racing (which comes with a neon-soaked Honolulu set-dressed as if a tropical Shinjuku), Lamborghini and Porsche specific championships cycling through different eras of these esteemed manufacturer’s legacies… the list goes on.

An advantage these Playlists have over, say, Forza Horizon’s Horizon Stories is whereas Playground Games’ MO is to lean heavily on vehicle and manufacturer info with car missions light on story, The Crew Motorfest really does try to educate players on the specificities of whatever culture their Playlist is inspired by. The specifics of the Playlist extend to gameplay mechanics too. Those nitro-less classic cars? Well, if you’re getting behind the wheel of a 1961 Jaguar E-Type, a 1963 Chevrolet Corvette, or 1969 Ford Mustang prepare to be without map or sat nav. With the task being to get from point A to point B on disparate locations on the island the thrill of racing off the beaten track using dusty old photos of landmarks as your only guide is something Forza Horizon in its current guise cannot replicate.

The Playlists in The Crew Motorfest appear tied to the core driving experience, rather than side missions as per Forza Horizon. On launch, there will be 15 Playlists available, but undoubtedly more will arrive throughout Motorfest’s life cycle. The developer appears to be aiming for a live service feel with Motorfest, with monthly challenges accessible from what the developer calls the Main Stage.

If this feature started out too downbeat on The Crew Motorfest, well, that wasn’t intentional. Sure, there’s a lot of same-same here, but peel back the veneer and Motorfest is genuinely attempting to provide something different. Sure, it looks the same, and it starts out kind of the same with a rabble of trendy millennials gushing over fast shiny supercars, but as evidenced in this feature there are points of differentiation too. Whether these warrant Motorfest to be upheld as its own thing is debatable, but inarguably these bespoke features Motorfest is attempting will be good for the player. Fans of the Forza Horizon formula will benefit as Playground will undoubtedly up their game for their next open-world motoring instalment.

And, above all else, if you are indeed one of those fans of the Horizon formula then there’s no reason not to dive into The Crew Motorfest, whether it’s more of the same or not. And for those that always fancied Horizon but are exclusively PlayStation players, well… this game is for you too.

Surpassing Forza Horizon will be a tall order for The Crew Motorfest given the former’s longevity and popularity but coming second place to the best in the business isn’t necessarily bad in this case. Or, rather, perhaps these games should be thought of as siblings, and for anyone that has two or more kids choosing your favourite is a pointless, fruitless task.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.