The Crew Motorfest is out now, and as you’d expect from an open world game made by Ubisoft, it’s got a lot of content packed into its Hawaiian setting for players to dive into. From side activities and Playlists to multiplayer content and more, there’s a lot going on in the island of O’ahu, and not all of it is instantly clear. As such, to help make your experience a little smoother in your early hours with the game, here, we’ve compiled a few handy pointers that you should keep in mind while you’re racing through the streets, beaches, and jungles of the island.
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.