Ubisoft aims to give players a new type of social experience with The Crew, coming out this year for Xbox One, PS4, and PC. Their main selling point? Drive across the entire country, with your friends right there with you. Does The Crew live up to the hype it has been given over the past months? I was lucky enough to get into the closed beta for the game, and after spending some time with it, I can say that it definitely has some potential.
Please bear in mind during this review, that I strictly played single player. The game enables you to invite your friends in to certain missions, making it more likely that one of you will win, and thus, everyone in your “Crew” will then gain the rewards. Playing the game in the closed beta, and also having no one on my Uplay friends list severely deterred any social playing for me. I did, however, run into some other drivers along the way, which I will get to later.
** CAUTION: SPOILERS AHEAD **
The setting in The Crew is pretty straight forward. You are Alex Taylor, a typical run of the mill street racer from Detroit. Both you and your brother are members of a racing gang known as the 5-10. When your brother gets murdered, and a dirty FBI agent frames you, it's off to prison for Alex. After five years rotting in jail, you get recruited by a new FBI agent to infiltrate the, now nation-wide, 5-10 gang, and bring down your brother's murderer, along with the dirty agent. Once you're out the FBI provides you with a ride, and it's off to the races to earn rep, and work your way up the ranks of the 5-10.
It all felt strangely familiar to me, and then I realized it was all very reminiscent of the first Need for Speed: Most Wanted.
Anyway, after a few opening missions, you're free to go and do whatever. You can progress with the story missions, or tackle some of the more mundane tasks that are littered around the map, such as long jumps, slalom type courses, and the like, all of which net you cash, and rep. This is all well and good when it comes to gameplay, but it didn't seem to make sense that right after the FBI sprung me from jail, they would let me roam around the country doing whatever. The Beta was over before I could go anywhere further than St. Louis, so for all I know, if you stray too far outside the story mission cities, they might send a fleet of cops after you or something. Who knows at this point. It's a beta.
The map itself is sizable. It lets you zoom out so that you can see the whole country, but as you'd expect, it's considerably smaller than the actual size of the fifty states. To try to gain some perspective on the actual size of the driving area, I timed a drive from Detroit to St. Louis, about a fifth of what the entire map is. It took me roughly ten minutes, so you can do the math. The map lets you place way points, and fast travel, just in case you happen to be in New York, and don't feel like driving a half hour to get to LA for your next event. As you're driving across the map in free-roam, you will come across other players doing the same. Usernames will follow above the cars, letting you know that these are real people, instead of just NPC drivers. Opening up a menu option appeared to give me a list of other people playing, but to me honest, the menu system is quite confusing. There is a pause menu that pops up on the right side of the screen, a crew menu that pops up on the bottom, a map menu, etc. I found myself getting lost trying to figure out how to get around the menu. Ubisoft really needs to simplify that sucker before release.
Driving feels a lot more like GTA than it does in your typical racing game. Cars felt loose, but that may be because I was still working with the low end models. One of the neater things I found was that you you aren't constrained to the roads. You can drive through corn fields, beaches, small rivers, etc, as long as your car can handle it. If it's not fitted for off-road, you're going to mess it up pretty quickly, and that means fixing it at the shop.
Your shop (aka. Headquarters) is standard for a racing title, showing you your current story progress, and letting you pick your custom spec for the various cars you own that will fit the current mission best. Each car has five difference spec customizations to choose from. “Full Stock”, which means just leaving it how you bought it, “Street”, which is best for long road trips, “Raid” is your off road spec, “Performance” for drag racing, and “Circuit” for those professional races. Each customization changes the look of your car too. It'll pretty interesting to see a Lamborghini equipped with bigger, wider dirt tires and crazy suspension for off-roading.
Final Verdict
All in all, The Crew has some serious potential to be a great racing game. It has enough new ideas that it could definitely be competitive in the wide market of racing games. I doubt I'll be picking it up at launch, but maybe on a Steam sale down the road a few months.
Please bear in mind during this review, that I strictly played single player. The game enables you to invite your friends in to certain missions, making it more likely that one of you will win, and thus, everyone in your “Crew” will then gain the rewards. Playing the game in the closed beta, and also having no one on my Uplay friends list severely deterred any social playing for me. I did, however, run into some other drivers along the way, which I will get to later.
** CAUTION: SPOILERS AHEAD **
The setting in The Crew is pretty straight forward. You are Alex Taylor, a typical run of the mill street racer from Detroit. Both you and your brother are members of a racing gang known as the 5-10. When your brother gets murdered, and a dirty FBI agent frames you, it's off to prison for Alex. After five years rotting in jail, you get recruited by a new FBI agent to infiltrate the, now nation-wide, 5-10 gang, and bring down your brother's murderer, along with the dirty agent. Once you're out the FBI provides you with a ride, and it's off to the races to earn rep, and work your way up the ranks of the 5-10.
It all felt strangely familiar to me, and then I realized it was all very reminiscent of the first Need for Speed: Most Wanted.
Anyway, after a few opening missions, you're free to go and do whatever. You can progress with the story missions, or tackle some of the more mundane tasks that are littered around the map, such as long jumps, slalom type courses, and the like, all of which net you cash, and rep. This is all well and good when it comes to gameplay, but it didn't seem to make sense that right after the FBI sprung me from jail, they would let me roam around the country doing whatever. The Beta was over before I could go anywhere further than St. Louis, so for all I know, if you stray too far outside the story mission cities, they might send a fleet of cops after you or something. Who knows at this point. It's a beta.
The map itself is sizable. It lets you zoom out so that you can see the whole country, but as you'd expect, it's considerably smaller than the actual size of the fifty states. To try to gain some perspective on the actual size of the driving area, I timed a drive from Detroit to St. Louis, about a fifth of what the entire map is. It took me roughly ten minutes, so you can do the math. The map lets you place way points, and fast travel, just in case you happen to be in New York, and don't feel like driving a half hour to get to LA for your next event. As you're driving across the map in free-roam, you will come across other players doing the same. Usernames will follow above the cars, letting you know that these are real people, instead of just NPC drivers. Opening up a menu option appeared to give me a list of other people playing, but to me honest, the menu system is quite confusing. There is a pause menu that pops up on the right side of the screen, a crew menu that pops up on the bottom, a map menu, etc. I found myself getting lost trying to figure out how to get around the menu. Ubisoft really needs to simplify that sucker before release.
Driving feels a lot more like GTA than it does in your typical racing game. Cars felt loose, but that may be because I was still working with the low end models. One of the neater things I found was that you you aren't constrained to the roads. You can drive through corn fields, beaches, small rivers, etc, as long as your car can handle it. If it's not fitted for off-road, you're going to mess it up pretty quickly, and that means fixing it at the shop.
Your shop (aka. Headquarters) is standard for a racing title, showing you your current story progress, and letting you pick your custom spec for the various cars you own that will fit the current mission best. Each car has five difference spec customizations to choose from. “Full Stock”, which means just leaving it how you bought it, “Street”, which is best for long road trips, “Raid” is your off road spec, “Performance” for drag racing, and “Circuit” for those professional races. Each customization changes the look of your car too. It'll pretty interesting to see a Lamborghini equipped with bigger, wider dirt tires and crazy suspension for off-roading.
Final Verdict
All in all, The Crew has some serious potential to be a great racing game. It has enough new ideas that it could definitely be competitive in the wide market of racing games. I doubt I'll be picking it up at launch, but maybe on a Steam sale down the road a few months.