In 2013 Ubisoft announced a grandiose car racing game named The Crew. Lots of cars, tuning, millions (almost MMO levels) of mission all on the entirety of the USA, plus a revolutionary social network. I was very interested, since EA was not willing to hear our cries for a NFS Underground 3, what Ubisoft would create, aaaaaaannnnd they kinda did that they did with most of their AAA titles this year. Screw up, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

If I were to ask myself if there was a racing game where the story is not the usual boring cliché I would not be able to mention one. Sadly The Crew is no exception, and I don’t know how long the company took time to figure out the story, but probably it was around a table of beers one evening.

We play as Alex (for Christ’s sake, Troy Baker is here again!) whose brother is killed, and the FBI is on your trail and …. Whatever, I pretty much can see that the developers didn’t really bother with the story.

What got me wound up was at the time of announcement: The large playfield. Although you need to play 4-5 hours to finally unlock true total freedom, but after that New York, Detroit , Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and the cities between them are all ours for the taking.  I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say, such a large level was never made in any racing game. Although the world is not 1:1 (in order to avoid too empty levels), I was still able to get lost in this huge open world.

It’s not the size that matters

These days many games have large open worlds, but they lack any exciting content to fill them up with. Here there are 65 main missions, and lots of side challenges. The problem is that it doesn’t matter if there’s quantity but no quality in these missions.

For main mission there are the following types: checkpoint, takedown, circuit race, time trail, and escape from the cops. I would like to specifically highlight the cops, because the game cheats so much with them that it is unbelievable and have long not seen such dickish moves. There were times when I was able to leave them behind and then suddenly they’re hitting me again, aggressively.

Challenges are given during your open world roaming. We can’t really go 500 meters without seeing one. However these are also pretty much the usual: slalom, checkpoint, keep the speed up, and jump the longest.

Faction mission are a bit different though. These are entirely online centric checkpoint based races that can literally take up to two and a half hours. Since the game does not run without online connection (PS plus or Xbox live is not required), it’s a fantastic feeling when near the end of a race you get a disconnect. I have no idea whose brain dead idea was this but I would love to hit the person’s head with a baseball bat for awhile.

Never Drive Alone

We now arrive to the game’s main “course”, the social aspect. Again… nothing to sing praises about: You can do the main missions alone or with a team, or just roam around together and do the challenges together. I’m not saying it’s not fun, and the community is great. The players talk to each other and try to help as much as they can. Once we complete an objective we receive XP and our cars equipment. As we move forward, we get better gear, cars, and we’ll be able to upgrade them visually also. I especially enjoyed having the option to tinker with them. We can spend hours trying to make them look awesome. The cars are sorted into the following groups: Street, Dirt, Performance, Raid, Circuit. The problem is that the upgrades only work for the car you picked them up with. I guess the developers wanted us to play more, or just stretch out the time that we play or…

Never Buy Alone

To pay a bit in real cash to get forward, cause this game has lots of micro transaction. So you’ll end in a situation where if you’re impatient, or would not like to play 10-20 hours to just get your favorite car to max level, you can skip the grinding with real cash. There’s no problem with this but is this really the good way?  Shouldn’t there be a gameplay that would let you have fun for maybe? Hundreds of hours even?

Visually this looks sort of okay. The car’s look great, but the environment are subpar in certain areas. Some look pretty good (the deserts), but the buildings in big cities. I don’t know when I have seen such underdeveloped buildings in a videogame.

 

I have no idea why this is a next gen only game (although an Xbox 360 was released). There will be no PS3 version, and I don’t know why not. I think this game should have looked better on these next gen machines. Last year’s NFS Rivals looked better, even on last-gen machines. This is true for sound design also.  The sound of the cars are average, soundtrack is mediocre, and couldn’t even remember a song even though I play 3 hours of it.

Plus it loads way too much even on the PS4.

Ah, CREW that!

I don’t really get what this game wanted to do? There were similar tries from other companies like EA’s Need for Speed World, or Motor City Online, but those were also mediocre. It’s the same situation here also. Isn’t it getting boring to grind for gear, and high levers? Or if it’s this type of game design, just change the gameplay. It’s no secret they want a few extra dollars with the microtransactions.

I’m disappointed that, while there are good ideas, they’re not realized to their fullest potential.

After DriveClub’s failed launch, and no NFS this year, Ubisoft had the perfect opportunity to become a leader in the genre. Sadly they did not live with the moment.

-Sonny Cavalera-

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Editor: Ivory Tower, Ubisoft Reflections

Developer: Ubisoft

Genres: car, racing, action

Publication: December 2014