Why does The Crew Motorfest trample all over the island of Oahu?

Ubisoft’s The Crew Motorfest has landed, a four-wheel festival of racing based on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. I have been holidaying in Oahu for the last sixteen years and technically lived there for over six months so I know the island like the back of my hand and I can tell you, it does not lend itself to racing.

Around downtown Honolulu, the Airport, and Waikiki there are plenty of roads, fairly small roads it has to be said, but roads. However, there are just three of what we in the UK would call motorways, and there is no way to drive around the entire island due to American army bases and nature reserves.  There are two large tunnels through the mountains, so long that they can have completely different weather at each end, and these are connected by what we affectionally call the “Outrun section”, a vast motorway raised above the tree tops of a rainforest. If you don’t use these tunnels to get from one side of the island to the other then you have to drive on a small road along the coast, the 83, which just has two lanes of traffic, one each way. It’s a road that always has traffic jams on it.

The only section you can really put your foot down and break the speed limit without getting caught – something we never, ever did of course – is round on the North Shore where there is a single road leading up to ‘The Lost Beach’, so named by us because it was the beach they filmed the TV show ‘Lost’ on. Fun fact: If the castaways of Lost had looked behind the bushes on their beach they would have found an airfield packed full of light aircraft and could have escaped at any time.

So, very few motorways, vast sections of the island completely off-limits, and for a large part of the island just one single road.  This doesn’t sound like a racing paradise to me. Ubisoft have said that they have “taken the liberty to integrate biomes and landmarks from other Hawaiian islands in our recreation of Oahu, to best transcribe the diversity and interest of the whole Hawaiian archipelago” so that’s going to be interesting.

The loading screens has the first inaccuracy – Stars and Stripes! Quick history lesson: Hawaii was independent and actually closely tied to the UK until 1893 when a bunch of American businessmen staged a coup d’état against Queen Liliʻuokalani and basically stole Hawaii and made it an American territory.  The USA has since apologised but most native Hawaiian’s really don’t like the USA, in fact the Hawaiian national flag still has our Union Jack on it. You can imagine how well that went down with mainland USA.  Over on the North Shore you can’t move twenty metres without seeing a different flag, the Kanaka Maoli. Many of those of Native Hawaiian descent consider this noncolonial flag to be “the people’s flag,” and you certainly wouldn’t see a Stars and Stripes flying there, it would be ripped up within seconds.

Let’s start with the area I am most familiar with, downtown Waikiki. The main road is surprisingly accurate, the major junctions are in the correct places, the buildings look just as they should and local landmarks such as the Duke Paoa Kahanamoku Statue are in place. What there is missing is people, this area is always packed full of people but Motorfest is populated by vehicles only which makes things feel very weird. Continuing down the road and we pass the triangular church and the block where I have my morning coffee, but then things start going awry. O’ahu Zoo has been replaced and you can now drive straight through Diamond Head, a volcanic crater and State Monument.

After that the game has features of the real roads but there’s also a lot of artistic license until we get round to Kaneohe which looks quite familiar. Following my usual tour around the island a pattern emerges, the built-up areas do have some resemblance to actual locations but the roads in between are fictional. All the military bases have been wiped from the map, as have all the national parks so you can now drive pretty much anywhere you want, and yes, you can now do a full circle of the island.

Driving inland one of the best scenic routes on the island, a winding single-track road up to Tantalus Lookout, is sadly missing.  In the real world you start from the outskirts of Waikiki you wind your way through a massive rainforest that looks like something from Uncharted. Huge trees block out the sunlight, giant palm trees flutter in the breeze, and forests of bamboo rush past as you drive; it is truly spectacular. Ubisoft have removed all this and just made a generic forest to race through, replacing the ‘Rainforest’ area over to near the North Shore, completely illogical as that side of the island is more like a desert and gets far less rain.  Things then get silly, there’s a new canyon right through the island and a second volcano which conveniently replaces the poorer, and therefore less interesting, neighborhoods of the island.

I started this piece as light light-hearted look at the game – lets be honest the roads were never going to be that accurate – but after playing I’m rather more worried about just how little Ubisoft have cared about Oahu. Racing boats around Pearl Harbour, a National WW2 memorial, is insensitive and the only showing Stars and Stripes feels particularly wrong, it’s like basing a racing game in France and only flying EU flags.

To top all that there’s a dash of casual racism. Mokolii island is an islet in Kaneohe Bay but Ubisoft have used the Americanised title, Chinaman’s Hat, a name that is racist to many of Hawaii’s Asian residents and no longer used by many places including Hawaiian Tourism Authority,  TripAdvisor,  and Wikipedia.

The Crew Motorfest may be a good racing game, but what it isn’t is a good representation of Hawaii.  It’s like someone read a glossy magazine about Oahu and basing a game on that rather than the real thing.