The Crew Motorfest — TestArcade racing game set on a sun-drenched Oahu island featuring significantly improved handling and tight event pacing, hampered by shallow exploration rewards.

A lap around the island goes by faster than you’d think. The plane sweeps over the bay, then you cut to a supercar diving into the city night—this transition feels effortless, like a sharply edited car commercial that plants “Oahu, Hawaii” in your head before talking about anything else. The best part of The Crew Motorfest isn’t that “there are lots of cars,” nor that “there are lots of events.” It’s that it knows how to make you fall in love with this place first. The sunlight, the coastline, the reflections on streets after the rain—the colors are rich, but not so rich that they become cloying; you’ll understand why the media has generally responded so positively to its lighting, because the scenery in this game isn’t just a backdrop, it’s a metronome. It ties together every drive, every car swap, every return to the road.

The problems also show up quickly. Compared with a benchmark of the genre like Forza Horizon 5, the way it borrows the open-world framework is obvious, yet its content density doesn’t keep pace. The early freshness is strong, but before long you begin to realize: in this festival, the most delicious bite is often the one at the very start.

The first time I saw the sunset fall across the road after the rain, I could more or less understand how this title manages to ride its “Oahu vibe” to a strong reputation. It wasn’t the technical specs that won out—it really does know how to pick its moments. A red sports car streaks past on a damp city street, and the reflections on the pavement collide with that warm band of color on the horizon, and suddenly the whole city comes alive. There isn’t a huge amount of hard information, but among the reviews available so far, two points seem to form rare consensus: the lighting looks excellent, and the tropical island scenery is vivid and pleasing. That lines up pretty well with the actual feel of it: bays, mountain roads, coastal circuits, neon-lit city nights—these scenes may not all have top-tier detail everywhere, but they clearly know how to use color and weather to lift the mood. Like a glass of juice served at exactly the right chill. The first sip hits most directly.

Then look at the moment of crossing the line on the track—the sense of speed is solid too. When several supercars sprint side by side along the coast, the motion in the image can really push that “festival” feeling to the surface. It’s not the kind of visual presentation that overwhelms you with extreme realism; it feels more like it’s seriously committed to cultivating the desire of “I want to keep driving.”

The problem is that when it comes to a finer-grained evaluation of the visuals, the evidence currently available is clearly insufficient, so it’s hard to praise it as the very best in its class. The practical effect on the experience is this: you’ll remember the island’s colors and light, but not necessarily many truly one-of-a-kind visual wonders. That’s not a fatal flaw. After all, for a racing game, making people want to keep driving is already important enough.

The early-stage orchestration is smart. The prologue and early activities have been mentioned by quite a few credible sources, for a simple reason—it really does know how to keep people engaged. You won’t be scared off at the very start by some lengthy tutorial on the system; instead, through a rapid series of event switches, you quickly get a feel for this game’s core fun: the vehicle types change, the settings change, and the pacing changes too. More importantly, there’s the handling. Among the current reviews, “the best driving and handling feel in the series so far” is one of the few statements striking enough to stand out. That’s a weighty judgment, and I’m not going to boost it all the way to a perfect score on its behalf—after all, the benchmark in the same lane is right there: Forza Horizon 5 has all but defined the kind of smoothness and feedback an open-world racer of this kind should have. But The Crew Motorfest has at least accomplished something else that matters: it makes actions like carving through corners, overtaking, and crossing the finish line land with a clear sense of exhilaration, rather than simply dropping car models into a big map.

When weaving through city traffic in first person, that split second of slipping past the lane line carries real tension. And that’s enough. In racing games, handling often works like a drumbeat—it doesn’t have to be complicated, but once the rhythm clicks, your body believes it first.

Its shortcomings are just as clear. Structurally, it obviously borrows from the Horizon-style open-event progression, which brings a sense of familiarity, but also another, worse feeling: it’s easy to keep bouncing between “familiar” and “déjà vu.” The effect on the experience is that, in the mid to late game, the sense of freshness isn’t sustained entirely by the gameplay itself. It’s not a fatal flaw, but it does noticeably lower the game’s ceiling.

The most awkward thing about this game is not that the map is small. It’s that sometimes it makes you feel, “It looks like there’s a lot, but when you actually drive around, there isn’t that much.” Reviews from the press have made this point quite clearly: compared with the previous game, the map is smaller; the freedom to choose events is still there, but the open world can feel lively on the surface while actually being rather empty. The fact that you can circle Oahu fairly quickly already says a lot on its own. It’s not that the content lacks sincerity. You can drive cars, and you can switch to other vehicles as well; the way the activities are laid out feels open, and at first glance it even seems quite abundant. But the problem lies in the rewards for exploration. What does an open world fear most? It’s not being big or small, but whether “five more minutes of driving” feels worth it. The Crew Motorfest will occasionally give you beautiful scenery, and now and then offer the novelty of switching between events, but once those rewards become less frequent, the map starts to show its bones.

The vehicle shops and customization browsing are appealing in themselves, and that urge of “just look at one more car, make one more tweak” really does exist. Unfortunately, that mostly caters to car enthusiasts’ emotions and is not enough to fully make up for the lack of world density. It’s like a beautifully presented buffet table: there are plenty of choices, but not that many dishes that truly make you want to go back for a second round.

This directly affects its value in terms of playtime. It’s not that there’s no content, but that some of that content struggles to consistently translate into a desire to explore. Is it fatal? Not really for people who just want to run through the main events and play casually for a while; but for those who hoped it would occupy their hard drive for the long term like the genre’s benchmarks do, this is a clear weakness.

The Crew Motorfest is actually quite honest about its attitude toward story: it would rather be a carnival of car culture than tell a story that stays with you for a long time. The currently available reliable information basically points to the same conclusion—its thematic presentation has style, but its originality and world-building are fairly average, and the campaign pacing is not balanced enough yet.

That is not necessarily a bad thing. Many racing games understand that players come to drive, not to memorize lore. The problem is that once it does give you a layer of campaign framing, you naturally expect that framing to at least not hold things back. But here, it feels more like the host is constantly hyping up the crowd: the atmosphere is there, but the jokes are forgettable. It feels lively while you are driving. A bit empty once you stop.

On the positive side, the carnival vibe and the showcase of car culture do elevate the overall tone, so they do not make the experience feel tedious. The downside lies there as well: because the narrative itself lacks stronger originality, once the pacing slips out of balance, that stretch of “why am I still watching this framing” starts to surface.

Whether this kind of issue is fatal for a racing game depends on the person. If you treat the story as decoration, it is merely ordinary; if you want it to tie O‘ahu, the events, and the characters together like a real motorsport road-trip story, then it is clearly not enough. It is not a disaster. But it is definitely not a pleasant surprise either.

This dimension is the hardest to write about. Not because it is necessarily poor, but because the existing verifiable information offers almost no clear footing: there is not enough evidence to show that the music, sound effects, or voice-over are standout strengths of this title, nor is there sufficient information to prove that they are serious weaknesses.

In this situation, the only option is to return to the level of experience. For a racing game that drives emotion through speed, scenery, and the switching between activities, if the audio were truly outstanding, it would usually be easier to leave behind clear memory anchors such as “a certain song,” “a certain engine sound,” or “the sound cue at a particular finish-line crossing.” In the public information about The Crew, such anchors are missing. That in itself suggests that, at the very least, its audio is not strong enough to overshadow the visuals and driving feel and become a repeatedly cited selling point.

So what is the problem? Its presence feels somewhat weak. The impact on the experience is this: while playing, the audio may not necessarily hold you back, but after you turn off the game, what is more likely to stay in your mind are the coastline and neon lights, rather than a melody or a particular sonic texture. For a racing game, that slightly reduces the memorability of the overall experience.

Is it fatal? No. A racing game ultimately still speaks first through “how it feels to drive.” It is just that when the other dimensions have not already opened up a clear all-around lead, audio failing to step in and fill the gap makes it difficult for the game to push itself into a higher tier.