We Explored the Open World of ‘The Crew Motorfest,’ Complete with Hoonigan Theme

You probably are familiar with Microsoft’s Forza Horizon series. It is one of the most popular car-themed open-world game options, with a free-form environment where the player has their choice of vehicles and places to drive them. On its surface, The Crew Motorfest looks like a Ubisoft-branded alternative to Forza Horizon that can be played on PlayStation. It has the same base format: an open-world environment playing host to a summer-long car festival, a library with hundreds of cars to fill your garage, and races and challenges that allow players to earn rewards. If you just want to cruise around a well-styled open world? Check. Take pictures? Check. Race? Check. Horizon had all of that on offer first.

But as any stroll down a grocery store soda aisle can tell you, shoppers love options, and Ubisoft’s game actually isn’t an exact dupe of Microsoft’s. But of course, we had to find that out for ourselves. With some new content coming down the pipeline, we flew to California to test it out.

Swapping into a Plane

Ubisoft clearly took major inspiration for the third installment of The Crew, but the studio added its own creative touches. After hurtling down a volcano and launching yourself off a jump, Motorfest allows you to quickly hot-swap from your car into a plane. Suddenly, rather than plummeting back towards the earth in a million-dollar supercar, you’re executing a perfect pirouette in a Supermarine Spitfire Mk IX. Then perhaps mid-pirouette you spot a nice-looking river in the distance. Simply fly over and hot-swap yourself into a speedboat and rush down the river like it’s 2004 and you’re playing Hydro Thunder.

Swapping from vehicle to vehicle turned out to be one of the game’s defining features, and also one of the things that pulled us in the most.

So, if we gave you the impression that The Crew Motorfest is a simple knockoff of the name brand, back that up. It’s just a different flavor, the Pepsi to Forza’s Coke. With boats, and a little more structure. In Forza, you load into the game and do what you want when you want. In Motorfest, activities are broken up by themed playlists. Some are based on a specific car, like the Porsche 911–themed story, while others are focused on a specific era or subculture like the Made in Japan playlist, which focuses on Japanese domestic cars from the nineties.

Motorfest also divides events into overarching seasons, like fashion house drops, to bring new content and playlists to the game. The seasons keep the game updated on a regular basis and offer fans a reason to keep returning. The current season, which began in December and spans through February, focuses entirely on the automotive media group Hoonigan.

The campaign features videos from Hoonigan co-founder Brian Scotto giving insight and anecdotes about life at Hoonigan and the cars you’re driving. The objective is straightforward: Hoonigan came to Motorfest to find a new Gymkhana stunt driver, and your job is to prove to Scotto that you have what it takes to be that driver.

The game takes you through a series of driving challenges like drifting or street racing. There’s even a Hoonigan-styled This vs. That like the video matchups featured on the Hoonigan YouTube channel. In that one, you get to pick between Scotto’s gorgeous RWB 911 Turbo or his yet-to-be-completed-in-the-real-world Audi Quattro. When we asked him which Hoonigan car he was most excited to drive in the game, we received an unequivocal “The Audi. One hundred percent the Audi, since I’ve never driven it in real life.”

While in California we had the opportunity to sit down with Scotto for a quick race. In our first attempt (with both of us driving the Quattro), Scotto conveniently caused a glitch in the game joking good-naturedly that he did it on purpose because we were too far ahead. In an effort to get a clean competition in, we restarted the race. The second time around things didn’t go as well for us. Scotto began pulling away around the halfway mark and never looked back, while we instead drove sloppier and sloppier compounding on our mistakes. We, in fact, are not cut out to be the next Gymkhana driver.

Completing playlists in the Motorfest earns you icons from the brand like the Hoonicorn Mustang or the Chevy Big Block 632 Camaro, while other Hoonigan-built or Hoonigan-inspired cars are added to the in-game shop.

Driving in Motorfest feels more arcadey than the more detailed feedback of something like Gran Turismo or even Forza’s Motorsport lineup, but the handling is reasonably realistic and can be altered drastically with driver aids. The cars look fantastic against the scenery, and Ubisoft did a great job with exhaust notes.

One obvious downside of Motorfest is that its list price of $69.99 makes it slightly more expensive than Forza Horizon 5 ($59.99). On the flip side, Horizon is locked to Microsoft consoles like PC and Xbox, while Motorfest is available in both of those places as well as PlayStation 4 and 5, so if it saves you from buying a new console, the extra $10 is well spent.

Motorfest does a great job of taking the core things that make Horizon such a great game with unique features and the added benefit of being available for PlayStation users. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.