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While Forza Horizon 6 plays it safe, The Crew Motorfest is leaning into its weirdness

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While Forza Horizon 6 plays it safe, The Crew Motorfest is leaning into its weirdness | Top Gear

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The battle of the open world racers is a far closer affair than it used to be

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While Forza Horizon 6 plays it safe, The Crew Motorfest is leaning into its weirdness

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The battle of the open world racers is a far closer affair than it used to be

# data.attributes.metatag[].attributes.content
The battle of the open world racers is a far closer affair than it used to be

# data.attributes.metatag[].attributes.content
While Forza Horizon 6 plays it safe, The Crew Motorfest is leaning into its weirdness

# data.attributes.metatag[].attributes.content
While Forza Horizon 6 plays it safe, The Crew Motorfest is leaning into its weirdness

# data.attributes.metatag[].attributes.content
While Forza Horizon 6 plays it safe, The Crew Motorfest is leaning into its weirdness

# data.attributes.metatag[].attributes.content
The battle of the open world racers is a far closer affair than it used to be

# data.attributes.body.value
You might have spotted that a little game called Forza Horizon 6 has arrived. Signs of its arrival include eerily quiet comments sections beneath the latest garish restomod reveal, the conspicuous absence of aftermarket exhaust sounds in the late night air, and, er, a massive marketing campaign for said game. Oh well, that’s it then. The Crew Motorfest had its moment in the Oahu sun. Right?

Well, we popped back over to Ubisoft Ivory Tower’s lunatic depiction of Hawaiian tourism, and found a playground of remote control cars, NASCAR, custom tracks with stomach-troubling loops and an overriding sense of strangeness that is, frankly, missing in Horizon.

Sure, Playground Games’ series has obviously been a major inspiration to The Crew Motorfest, but since its launch in 2023 Motorfest has been taking all sorts of creative chances, looking for ways to discern itself from the formula. And three years later, it’s done just that. So with Horizon 6’s arrival, it isn’t an either/or question. You're not deciding whether you’ll play Counter-Strike 2 or Valorant. You’re asking yourself whether you’re in the mood for cherry blossom touge runs or an RC car stunt session.

Destination 1: NASCAR. Added in season nine, it’s an official collab that adds new oval race circuits on the Playground Island and the Ford Mustang Dark Horse, Chevrolet Camaro ZL1, and Toyota Camry XSE Cup Series with their official liveries.

If you keep any kind of document which tracks the unlikeliest brand collabs in motorsport it’s time to update it, because stock car oval racing and Ubisoft’s brand of lighthearted skiddy arcade vehicular open world aren’t an obvious pairing. And sure enough, there are concessions to make it work: the 40-car grid size has been shrunk to eight, and the endurance racing takes about 15 minutes from green light to chequered flag. It’s a shame the chaos of the game’s 28-player Grand Races couldn’t be replicated for these events.

Nevertheless, the addition of fuel and tyre management makes NASCAR races different to, well, anything else in the game, and without wishing to labour the point, to anything in Forza Horizon 6 either.

Destination 2: RC racing. A new playlist of events added via the Year Three Pass, this is Motorfest at its most playful, experimental and, dare we say, French. There are two things that make this worthwhile, and in rank order those things are being very small and thus seeing the world map from a fresh perspective, and launching your very small self into the air to do stunts.

It’s fascinating to look at the same Hawaiian environs with a new eye, looking at the spaces between the roads for their RC potential. With respect to the denizens of the island, if they didn’t want little cars invading their back gardens and using their driveways like stunt ramps, they should have built bigger walls.

Destination 3: Track Forge. Another big addition for Year Three of Motorfest, this is a set of pretty powerful creation tools which the eagle-eyed will have deduced from the name is all about building tracks. It’s a forge for tracks. A Track Forge.

The Track Forge lets users create all manner of outlandish layouts or recreations of real circuits, and then upload them to the database so that anyone else can race on them and compete for leaderboard times.

What does the Track Forge reveal about the Crew Motorfest community? That players really enjoy driving very, very fast in a straight line. Three of the top five most upvoted tracks at the time of writing are very fast straight lines which facilitate this activity.

This serves a purpose, of course. Tracks like this let you sus out which cars in each category have the best top speed and which pro tune settings extend those top speeds, and that’s all terribly important if you’re serious about winning Grand Races.

But in among those utilitarian stretches of tarmac are far more interesting and characterful creations. Roller coaster-like undulations and loops. Multi-terrain obstacle courses. Grounded, realistic circuits and physically impossible layouts with vast jumps that’d break an insurance company’s liability algorithm on sight. Our own creation, a 1:1 replica of Brazil’s Goiania circuit, is currently WIP. Updates to follow.

If you’ve been recently re-immersed in Forza Horizon’s uber-polished, masterful and incredibly safe formula for open world racing via FH6, all of this ‘let’s try this idea out and see if it’s fun’ spirit in Motorfest feels a million miles removed from Playground Games’ approach.

That means there’s really no point in having a conversation about which game’s better. It’s like appraising the England squad against pizza. The real takeaway having reacquainted with the admirably strange and consistently gripping Motorfest, is that there are very compelling reasons to keep playing two arcade open-world racers in 2026.

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You might have spotted that a little game called Forza Horizon 6 has arrived. Signs of its arrival include eerily quiet comments sections beneath the latest garish restomod reveal, the conspicuous absence of aftermarket exhaust sounds in the late night air, and, er, a massive marketing campaign for said game. Oh well, that’s it then. The Crew Motorfest had its moment in the Oahu sun. Right?

Well, we popped back over to Ubisoft Ivory Tower’s lunatic depiction of Hawaiian tourism, and found a playground of remote control cars, NASCAR, custom tracks with stomach-troubling loops and an overriding sense of strangeness that is, frankly, missing in Horizon.

Sure, Playground Games’ series has obviously been a major inspiration to The Crew Motorfest, but since its launch in 2023 Motorfest has been taking all sorts of creative chances, looking for ways to discern itself from the formula. And three years later, it’s done just that. So with Horizon 6’s arrival, it isn’t an either/or question. You're not deciding whether you’ll play Counter-Strike 2 or Valorant. You’re asking yourself whether you’re in the mood for cherry blossom touge runs or an RC car stunt session.

Destination 1: NASCAR. Added in season nine, it’s an official collab that adds new oval race circuits on the Playground Island and the Ford Mustang Dark Horse, Chevrolet Camaro ZL1, and Toyota Camry XSE Cup Series with their official liveries.

If you keep any kind of document which tracks the unlikeliest brand collabs in motorsport it’s time to update it, because stock car oval racing and Ubisoft’s brand of lighthearted skiddy arcade vehicular open world aren’t an obvious pairing. And sure enough, there are concessions to make it work: the 40-car grid size has been shrunk to eight, and the endurance racing takes about 15 minutes from green light to chequered flag. It’s a shame the chaos of the game’s 28-player Grand Races couldn’t be replicated for these events.

Nevertheless, the addition of fuel and tyre management makes NASCAR races different to, well, anything else in the game, and without wishing to labour the point, to anything in Forza Horizon 6 either.

Destination 2: RC racing. A new playlist of events added via the Year Three Pass, this is Motorfest at its most playful, experimental and, dare we say, French. There are two things that make this worthwhile, and in rank order those things are being very small and thus seeing the world map from a fresh perspective, and launching your very small self into the air to do stunts.

It’s fascinating to look at the same Hawaiian environs with a new eye, looking at the spaces between the roads for their RC potential. With respect to the denizens of the island, if they didn’t want little cars invading their back gardens and using their driveways like stunt ramps, they should have built bigger walls.

Destination 3: Track Forge. Another big addition for Year Three of Motorfest, this is a set of pretty powerful creation tools which the eagle-eyed will have deduced from the name is all about building tracks. It’s a forge for tracks. A Track Forge.

The Track Forge lets users create all manner of outlandish layouts or recreations of real circuits, and then upload them to the database so that anyone else can race on them and compete for leaderboard times.

What does the Track Forge reveal about the Crew Motorfest community? That players really enjoy driving very, very fast in a straight line. Three of the top five most upvoted tracks at the time of writing are very fast straight lines which facilitate this activity.

This serves a purpose, of course. Tracks like this let you sus out which cars in each category have the best top speed and which pro tune settings extend those top speeds, and that’s all terribly important if you’re serious about winning Grand Races.

But in among those utilitarian stretches of tarmac are far more interesting and characterful creations. Roller coaster-like undulations and loops. Multi-terrain obstacle courses. Grounded, realistic circuits and physically impossible layouts with vast jumps that’d break an insurance company’s liability algorithm on sight. Our own creation, a 1:1 replica of Brazil’s Goiania circuit, is currently WIP. Updates to follow.

If you’ve been recently re-immersed in Forza Horizon’s uber-polished, masterful and incredibly safe formula for open world racing via FH6, all of this ‘let’s try this idea out and see if it’s fun’ spirit in Motorfest feels a million miles removed from Playground Games’ approach.

That means there’s really no point in having a conversation about which game’s better. It’s like appraising the England squad against pizza. The real takeaway having reacquainted with the admirably strange and consistently gripping Motorfest, is that there are very compelling reasons to keep playing two arcade open-world racers in 2026.

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The battle of the open world racers is a far closer affair than it used to be