The Crew Motorfest takes place in Hawaii. After two games set across a crunched-down United States, the developer, Ubisoft Ivory Tower, has given up trying to drive a whole country and settled on a small island. It’s like trading in a stretch Hummer and going for a cool little convertible hatchback. The result is a breeze – a tour of tapered-down Oʻahu, a decent facsimile of Forza Horizon, and a dose of thought-free driving. Every turn is a chance to squeeze the hand-brake; so grippy and slippy are the corners, kicking up clouds of rubbery smoke, it’s as if someone had crept out and sprayed every bend with glue. The only thing that may cause you to come unstuck is if you have any niggling desires to play something new, challenging, deep, substantial, surprising, or innovative. But those desires are, on occasion, better off banished. Aloha!
The shape of the campaign is shuffled into playlists, groups of races clustered around an abiding theme. The Made in Japan challenges have you drifting through downtown Honolulu, newly encrusted with neon, in Toyota Supras and Nissan Skylines. It’s a nice homage to Need For Speed: Underground and Midnight Club, with their cornea-frying colours. And then it’s gone. Once you’ve finished the playlist, it plinks off, like one of those neon signs, and the glow fades fast from your memory. There’s a disposable feel to each list, to the game as a whole. The Hawaii Scenic Tour has you hurtling between fields of sugar cane and zipping along foamy coasts. You are accompanied by a local guide, named Keola, who explains the region’s history and culture. Intriguing though Keola’s asides are (at one point, he describes wind turbines as “inspiring”), Hawaii’s ridiculous beauty is so abundant it starts to lose its flavour – all that sweetness, rolling out on the surf.
The Crew Motorfest could almost be an ode to absent-minded driving: drifting, in the truest sense. The problem is that the best games to do that are the ones that demand discipline, that only let you slip into a reverie once you’ve mastered their tricks, and which provide exquisite, unbroken atmosphere. Think of WipEout, which threw gravity out the window and made you desperate to stay on the ground; only after you had learned the curves of each track could you really rise above them, and float into a daydream. The grail of this rarefied genre is R4: Ridge Racer Type 4, with its hazard-yellow menus and yawing powerslides. Ten minutes with that game always turns into an hour, as time folds like a hairpin, and you’ve no idea where you went.
