Gamescom 2023: Impressions from The Crew Motorfest

Gamescom featured two highly anticipated AAA racing games. The first was the upcoming Forza Motorsport from Microsoft and Turn 10, which we’ve already brought you some impressions of. The second title was The Crew Motorfest from Ubisoft and Ivory Tower Studios. I got my impressions from playing the new installment of this arcade racing series both at Gamescom itself and through the closed beta that took place before the show.

As part of the closed beta testing, the authors let the player directly into the open world.

Both the Gamescom demo and the aforementioned beta showed the very beginning of the game, in which you find yourself at a racing festival. In terms of atmosphere and style, it doesn’t deny its inspiration from the rival Forza Horizon series. Given the popularity of that brand, Ubisoft’s efforts to offer seemingly the same ingredients in the form of a carefree atmosphere, open-world freedom, and a large number of cars can’t be too surprising. However, I think that in trying to emulate Forza Horizon, Motorfest has gone a bit overboard in some ways. This is already evident in the game’s introductory videos shown at Gamescom.

In the shoes of a homemade competitor, you find yourself at a colorful festival, individual parts of which gradually introduce you to one of the characters. Within the framework of short scenario racing scenes, I gradually got a taste of a night race of Japanese sports cars, filled with glowing neon, which was replaced by an off-road race, followed by a meeting of single-seater formula cars on a closed circuit and a racing veteran at the wheel of the original AC Cobra. Finally, the introductory part ended with a super sports race in which I was able to try out the Lamborghini Revuelto. It was this new product from the famous Italian manufacturer that decorated the game’s stand directly at Gamescom. As in the case of the aforementioned Forza Horizon, the Gamescom demo version has ended.

For example, you will be able to visit the famous Pearl Harbor.

But as part of the closed beta testing, the developers also let the player directly into the open world. The two previous parts of the Crew series in 2014 and 2018 could boast a fully rendered map of the continental United States. It was the ability to move freely across the giant map of the United States of America that was the biggest advantage of the game for me. In Motorfest, the developers decided to change this format and send players to the sunny Hawaiian island of Oahu, where they allow you to visit, for example, the famous Pearl Harbor. Despite the fact that the game world is not rendered at a 1:1 scale, the authors tried to introduce real landmarks into its environment.

As a fan of historical military vehicles, I was interested in, for example, the battleship USS Missouri or the submarine USS Bowfin, which today operate as a museum. So, although the new The Crew will have a smaller area to explore compared to previous parts, in the end it will depend on whether the developers manage to fill it with a sufficiently diverse and interesting set of content. In addition to a large number of licensed cars, the presence of motorcycles, boats and planes could help them in this. In addition to the environment, it is the width of the car park that could distinguish Motofest from the remembered Horizon.

The Crew series, subtitled Motorfest, is building on the Forzy Horizon-style festival theme in its third installment. But the most fundamental change is the move to a smaller, more compact game world, which takes you to Hawaii. Otherwise, The Crew series, even with its third installment, has remained true to its purely arcade gameplay, which, in addition to easy accessibility, relies primarily on a diverse set of races and a large number of vehicles. Crew Motorfest launches on September 11 on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Amazon Luna.