I played four hours of it in the free trial on PC (3080Ti, 5800X3D, SSD), in singleplayer.
Pros:
- great graphics (perhaps not quite to FH level, but still great)
- pretty fun handling on controller with assists off
- the playlists (series of races) were thematic and pretty fun (one focused on japanese cars, other on muscle cars, one specifically on Porsche)
- cockpit view is great, especially the steering wheel animation - finally proper turning, no more limited 180 nonsense! FH must copy this. But shame about no working mirrors, so stupid
- ran completely smoothly, zero framedrops or stutter on ultra preset, 1620p (DSR)
Cons:
- the whole festival schtick is my least favourite thing about FH and they completely rip it off? Boring. "A Ubisoft Original", suuure.
- so much cringe boring stupid dialogue during races, they should have named the game Crew: Cringefest. I really recommend just muting all voices and disabling subtitles, made it fun again
- Not a huge fan of the Oahu map, it is much smaller than US and feels a bit "been there, done that" since it was in TDU, would much prefer scaled down Japan or Central Europe or some such
- all the avatars you can select look pretty terrible, why can't Ivory share character model assets from other ubi studios if they cannot make decent ones themselves? Not that this point matters too much, but still.
Overall I quite enjoyed it, but if I play more, it will be in ubiplus sub when Avatar comes out. I do not plan on buying this game. I loved Crew 1, with its B-thriller revenge flick story, even as ungreat as it was, I still much preferred it over the festival stuff.
