Imagine an open world racing game with a huge map of the mainland USA that allows you to tune and customise every major aspect of your car. On paper, this idea sounds brilliant. Add to that Ubisoft’s Open World Tower and activity formula as seen in Watch_Dogs, Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry and your enthusiasm might lower a notch (or increase exponentially if that’s what you love). Then make the game playable only if you’re connected to the internet, even for single player and add in arcade handling based on realistic physics and suddenly this brilliant idea doesn’t quite sound as appealing anymore. This is just what summarises The Crew, the promise of something great spoiled by awful execution.
After playing the release version of The Crew, we found that all of our observations from the beta still held true. The game has some good things going for it, but the bad things outweigh them. We’re not sure why the game had so many betas if they didn’t fix any of the annoyances that marred our experience.
The Crew has a humungous open world. The map is a scaled replica of the United States excluding Alaska and Hawaii, with some areas being more detailed than others. There are many famous landmarks to drive to and visit, and plenty of Easter Eggs as well. The world is littered with various Skill challenges and car wrecks, as well as communication towers. Ubisoft’s standard tower unlock gameplay is implemented in this game where you need to ‘hack’ a communications tower (a huge satellite dish in the game) in order to immediately see all skills, wreck locations and landmarks in an area. However, it does not reveal the map area, though you can manually do this by fast travelling to the edges of the revealed area and returning to the map to repeat this again. You can discover these locations through freeform exploration as well.
An annoyance with the overview map is that it does not let you view all the objects in one view, forcing you to cycle between skills, exploration and missions. Also, the GPS is quite not right. It uses an overhead Blue line much like a skyhook line from Bioshock Infinite, but isn’t very smart about the routes it chooses or the odd kinks it shows at some turns. You can change the GPS indicator later on in the game to a line on the ground, but it would have been better if this option were available from the outset. Going by our experiences in other games with this tower gameplay formula, we found The Crew to be lacking in terms of the amount of collectibles and random activities that can distract you. It makes up for these in numbers though.
Collectibles in The Crew include Wrecks and Cutscenes. Yes, Cutscenes! Possibly the most pointless collectible ever. Ivory Tower seem to have a real fetish for cutscenes, since The Crew is saturated with them. Besides the collectibles, you get cutscenes at the start and end of every race, you get them every time you enter and exit a building, you get them for every tower you unlock and for every time your car crashes. These are all in-engine and most can be skipped. There are pre-rendered cutscenes for the story too. Coming back to the collectible cutscenes, each shows off the landmark and its surroundings while providing some interesting information about it. Nevertheless, you will get bored of checking them out after the first few times and will merely collect them for the currency and experience they provide. This is the best example of how not to do a collectible since it offers no real motivation to collect it, nor is it very useful to your game in any way. Note that if you set the game to run at 60fps, the cutscenes are broken on PC, since this is another game designed to run at that ‘cinematic’ 30fps.
Wrecks on the other hand, aren’t so easily found as fast travelling to their location from the map. Like the communication towers, wrecks show up as a search area on the map with a pinging indicator as you get closer to their location. Finding a wreck grants you a part of a hidden car. There is one such car in each of the game’s five regions. This seems inspired straight from Test Drive Unlimited 2 and is actually a very useful collectible since you can then earn a car without spending any Bucks. The Crew would have benefited from having more of this type of collectible.
The currency of The Crew is called Bucks. You also earn XP that goes towards levelling up your car, while Bucks can be spent on car parts or new cars or for paying the fine if the cops arrest you. You also get AP for unlocking achievements in the game though these aren’t spent on anything. The crew has an alternative currency that uses real world money to buy things instead of Bucks. This currency is called Crew credits and is part of the optional microtransactions scheme for the game. The microtransactions do add a slight pay to win element to the game. You also get Perk points for every time you level up and these can be spent at your Headquarters based on what your support crew offer, for improvements to the game’s systems or your car’s performance. The good thing is that you can reassign these perk points at any time, so if you aren’t happy with your choices you can change them later.
The Crew’s map is littered with a lot of drive through Skill challenges which range from precision driving through gates and a line, both of which keep shrinking till you make a mistake, to jumps, slaloms, destroying barriers (called Scramble), escaping from a police search (similar to Watch_Dogs) and so on. Each skill has gold, silver and bronze medals based on the score you rack up and platinum medals later on. Some skills require a specific type of car, and there’s always a gold medal ghost to give you a hint of what is required. Some skills can be done in both directions of the road, though one approach may be easier than the other one.
What’s a racing game without its cars? The Crew offers a decent selection. There are plenty of American Muscle cars on offer, but European and Japanese representation isn’t quite up to par, unless one purchases the DLC. Some on disc cars were locked away behind a preorder code. The Crew gives a lot of love to its cars and lets you tweak their performance by using a variety of parts. The game visibly disassembles the car to show only these internal components when you modify them, which looks very cool, though the red and chrome colour scheme tends to get boring after a while. These parts can be bought at a tuner or earned by getting medals in skill challenges. The performance boost from equipping a new part isn’t quite visible until you compete against cars of a much lower level. This levelling and part swapping system is probably what Ivory Tower mean by calling The Crew a CarPG, a car game with RPG elements, since there isn’t any role-play on offer.
The game offers five different tuning specs that allow for different types of modifications to your car and different race types. Street spec is what you start with and is the familiar custom tuning for illegal street racers. Dirt spec is an all-purpose tuning spec that works well on and off the road. Perf spec performs better than street spec on the roads but suffers off them. Raid spec is for taking down other cars and driving wildly off-road. Circuit spec is suited to racetracks and isn’t meant for regular roads.
The Crew offers arcade handling but uses a realistic physics model. This makes the driving a real chore in the game. Cars move strangely, environmental objects can be randomly rigid, and minor scratches can trigger the car crash cutscene. The car can also spin around simply by grazing a wall or another car. This sucks all the fun out of gameplay. What ruins it further is the randomly generated traffic that can completely ruin your race right at the last turn. The Game world can be persistent at times and randomly reset at others. So any destructible objects you remove in one run might not hinder you the next time around, allowing you to cheat on your run time, since collision with a destructible slows your car down. These handling issues make it a real chore to get gold medals in skill requiring sim-like precision driving. This is the sore point that ruins The Crew as a game.
There is, of course, Law Enforcement on the roads and off them in The Crew. You have heat levels that go up to five stars and the aggressiveness of the cops increases with each level. Both your and the cops’ cars have a health meter and each takes a beating upon collision. Note that you need to spend Bucks from time to time to repair your car at your HQ and a mobile mechanic to do this is unlocked later. The Cop AI seems to cheat given how easily they can catch up with you. There are also helicopters that make escape difficult and can see through trees at higher heat levels. The most annoying part of cop chases, already ruined by the awful handling, is that the arrest timer counts down very rapidly if your car is below its speed limit. This can make it difficult to execute evasive manoeuvres in the presence of cops such as 90° turns and 180° spins.
Racing is the soul of a Car game and The Crew offers plenty of racing opportunities tied in with its story missions. Every mission is suited to a particular spec of car and some missions let you borrow another car to play them, but the game has no pink slips system to let you win an opponent’s car and keep it. What sucks about these races is that they too have a gold, silver and bronze medal system and the game gives you no indication of your performance until after the race finishes. Also, one can’t hope for a perfect run every time thanks to the awkward handling and the dynamic traffic. Given that these missions have their own set of unskippable dialogues that will repeat every time you restart, you will soon find yourself pretty annoyed with playing the races. In short, the racing is not very fun, which is a major negative in a racing game. Ubisoft’s previous racing title, Driver San Francisco was a much more enjoyable game than this mess.
The AI in the game can be really dumb at times and superlative at others. In some races, it will give you a run for your money, making you resort to dirty tricks to keep ahead of it. In others, it will barely offer a fight, running into traffic or squeezing into a gap too small for it. It can also change its behaviour in subsequent runs of the same race, so you can find it springing a surprise on you at times. The Traffic AI is designed for the sole purpose of hindering you given how it manages to spawn vehicles at the worst possible locations. The pedestrians do their best to move out of your way, though sometimes they can end up jumping right in front of you, only to ghost right through your car. Their comments upon surviving a near hit and run are rather amusing.
When it comes to story, The Crew lacks inspiration, spewing out this familiar tale about a falsely implicated protagonist who must work with a female undercover cop to bust an illegal street racer. Déjà vu to 2005, anyone? Alex Taylor does look a bit like Gordon Freeman though, though he comes with none of the brooding silence of the latter. It seems rather silly of the game to portray him as a squeamish criminal-fearing guy at times when he’s spent five years in prison and should be more hardened to the ways of the world. The cop, Zoe, is quite pretty, but you will hear her more than you see her since she seems to prefer occupying this one desk at your HQ. There are quite a few other characters adding spice to the story, but they’re quite forgettable.
The one thing that The Crew has going for it is the ominous line we ended our impressions with, it’s a trap. Simply put the game has this ability to suck you in and keep playing it, despite all its issues with gameplay. It will trap you with its exploration potential, and trying to overcome the handicap of the poor handling to get those gold medals in skills. It’s a trap because despite the story having an obvious conclusion, you ae still kept interested enough to reach that conclusion. It’s a trap because it was overhyped and has underdelivered.
The game is always online, and it’s designed so that you play it co-operatively with up to three others. As you progress in the game, the missions and skills get progressively harder to the point that you must team up to have a hope of beating them. Finding people to team up with isn’t hard, but finding the right co-op partners is. Also, every time you finish a co-op mission, all the other players except for the host get disconnected when it’s time for the rewards. This is not just on PC but also on other platforms as we confirmed. This reduces the incentive to play the game as the developers intended. The always-online nature also means that one is held at ransom to one’s internet connection to Ubisoft’s servers. Given that we didn’t face many launch time connectivity issues, Ubisoft must be lauded for getting their backend infrastructure right.
Graphically speaking, the game isn’t really that pretty and looks a lot like something from a few years ago. It’s not well optimised as it struggles to give a smooth 60fps on the highest settings with a single GTX 980 despite proclaiming to be a part of NVIDIA Gameworks. What you see visually does not seem to require that much gpu power as can be confirmed by seeing the GPU usage stuck around 70%. The sound effects in the game are well done and the AI pedestrian reactions are quite hilarious. The Engine sounds on various cars are quite satisfying to hear. The OST is a treat for EDM lovers and it features plenty of Racy tracks to get the adrenalin pumping. Too bad this will only be transformed into rage thanks to the horrid gameplay.
The Crew held the promise of potential, given its huge scope and detailed customisation options. An oft-repeated thing in the Crew is the 5-10 symbol, which one wonders was the the portent of things to come, given how broken and mediocre the whole experience is. It’s hard to recommend The Crew due to its messy gameplay but the game could be considered a challenge for the sadists who love added difficulty in their games (No, this isn’t the Dark Souls of Racing games). We have said it before, and we will say it again, it’s a Trap!
