The Crew Review

From its inception, The Crew was sold, and heavily marketed, as a next-gen driving game. Not because it looks photo-realistic, or because it incorporates revolutionary game mechanics, but rather because it acts as the ultimate example of modern connected play. A seamless online world in which you can travel around a digital representation of the US inhabited by other human drivers. You can form crews to take on missions together, and generally interact with strangers and friends alike. Yet with the game loaded and on-screen, it quickly becomes apparent that Ubisoft may have been going about this the wrong way. Ivory Tower hasn’t created an incredible online driving-world, instead, they’ve created one of the most vast, and incredible gaming locations ever.

The Crew’s small-scale-but-still-huge version of the USA is absolutely fantastic. It feels perfectly sized to be both fun and reasonable - which means that driving from one end of the country to the other (as Ubisoft, admittedly, has recommended in the past) never feels boring or unspectacular. This is the crowning achievement of The Crew. I’ve never played a driving game that provides such as incredible variety of locations. You’ll be racing through the gritty streets of Detroit one moment, then speeding across the Bonneville salt flats the next. You’ll be ploughing through the sands of Death Valley, then winding up the snow-capped mountains of Idaho. Then it’s up to the densely forested sections of Washington state, but not before a stop-off at Laguna Seca raceway.

Perhaps one of the greatest sins a driving game can commit is to not feature enough tracks. A lot of the best driving games ever have one common theme - plenty of places to drive, and therefore a great sense of variety. The Crew, without any sense of exaggeration, has the most tracks in any driving game ever. That’s because, in essence, the whole USA is your track and just about every event and skill challenge you’ll partake in will take place on a brand new circuit. It’s difficult to quantify just how important that is, largely because it’s never really been done before. There’s certainly a risk of nearby locations all becoming a tad similar, but Ivory Tower has done a great job of making every little part of their map unique.

It’s a good job the world is so fun to race through, because the central story of The Crew is pure, unadulterated, tedium. It’s a story you’ve heard a hundred times before, told in a way you’ve also heard a hundred times before. Brother of the car-addicted protagonist Alex is gunned down, Alex is jailed for five years only to be released by the FBI and signed up on a mission to take down his brother’s murderer. Shiv (you can tell he’s a murderer because his name is a weapon) is the leader of the 510s, a driving gang who’ve become more focused on the gang part than the driving since Alex was away. The plot as a whole features a cast of ultra-dull characters backed up with astonishingly poor writing. It’s heaped in action-movie cliché and you’ll regularly find yourself wondering if you could have written better stuff - you probably could have.

Still, it serves a function, and I must confess I looked forward to seeing if Shiv would get his comeuppance at the end of the game. The awful story isn’t enough to drag The Crew down though, because most of the story (aside from some beautiful, if boring, cutscenes) is told while you’re driving. The driving is comparatively brilliant. It’s actually reminiscent of heavily arcadey titles like Ridge Racer or Outrun. It’s sluggish and lacks sensitivity, but this makes races high-impact and high-velocity, especially when off-road. It can also be difficult to have a race-ending crash, obviously in a gambit to attract more than just your typical racing fans. I wasn’t too happy with the handling to begin with, but after a little bit of adjustment I started to understand the logic behind such a simple, but effective system. More hardcore fans won’t be happy, but they’d be looking in the wrong places anyway.

While it is indeed possible to just drive where your heart desires (almost) right from the off, the game’s story does funnel you through the five different regions within the US. You start off in in the Midwest, in particular Detroit and Chicago, where you learn the ropes. Then with the story missions complete you’re encouraged to head off to the East Coast, which means a pleasant long drive from Chicago (or nearby) to New York. These long drives, which can take up to half an hour, are some of the coolest moments in The Crew. There’s generally plenty to do on the way, including neat little skill missions that provide tasks ranging from speed to jump challenges. All you have to do is drive through a gate and the challenge begins, usually arranged so that they take you in the direction you’re aiming for. The skill missions are practically seamless, so they just feel like a natural part of your journey.

These things absolutely litter the map by the way, so you’re likely to encounter more than a few on a cross-region trip. The map also holds a huge number of ‘tourist spots’ (that’s my own title), where you can get a little background info on the famous locations within the game - of which there are very many. Little details like this are great to see, especially for a non-American player such as myself. I dare say I learned a thing or two about American geography during my play time, which should help on the next pub quiz! The game does thankfully include a fast travel feature with which you can travel anywhere on the map so long as you’ve been there previously. In my eyes, that’s the perfect fast-travel system as it encourages exploration but doesn’t incite boredom. It also helps that the mechanic is amazingly fast, it only takes a few seconds to jump from one of end of the map to the other and it does so from a cool zooming-satellite view.

Of course, I’ve managed to get this far without really talking about the actual racing. What can I say, the simple driving is fun enough. The Crew offers a pretty decent selection of events, although with the number of races you’ll be partaking in, they do get repetitive a little too soon. Most events revolve around a few key types: multi-driver races, point-to-point time trials or damage an opponent. There a a couple of other types that pop up every once in a while, but these three will be your bread and butter. Saying that, the game also offers up off-road driving as well as road or circuit based stuff, and often this proves to be the best The Crew has to offer. Yet while the race types do have a tendency to repeat, the amazing number of tracks keeps just about every event fresh. The different regions provide their own unique style (be it Street, Dirt, Performance, Raid or Circuit) and variation in terrain type is astounding.

 With all this, it’s easy to forget that The Crew has indeed been set-up as the ultimate social driving game. I encountered a rather considerable number of issues with this feature though. The promise of a player-inhabited world never really lived up to the hype; I rarely found myself in-game with more than two or three people and even that was intermittent. I played long stretches of the game connected to the internet, but without anyone to play with. Not that that was a terribly bad thing. Whenever someone did join my mission or visa versa, they’d just prove to be a hindrance as opposed to a help. Racing co-op is a bit of a misnomer really - turns out that once people are behind the wheel they turn into a bit of a prick. It was enough to stop me asking for co-op buddies by the midpoint of the game, purely because it was more fun to race alone.

The whole crew concept is somewhat more successful, allowing friends to join up in-game and drive around together. As you can imagine though, that’s only fun for so long and you’ll probably find yourself wanting to get out of the car GTA style after a while. There’s a faction metagame included, in which you can complete special events for your faction which ranks you up within the group and earns both yourself and your faction money/points. The best thing about this system isn’t actually the faction mechanic, but rather the brilliant associated events. To the team’s eternal credit, Ivory Tower has made the bold move of including long endurance-style races that can take upwards of three hours to complete. For the right player these missions will be a godsend, especially considering the ripe rewards on offer for completing them.

As a final note, I’d be remiss for not mentioning the tragically bad soundtrack. I can’t help but feel as though Ivory Tower has missed a trick on this front, as GTA proves over and over, driving is always enhanced by a quality soundtrack. Yet there are only a few decent cruising tunes on offer in The Crew, the rest are pretty forgettable. The overall visuals are also a little lacking; the game looks good, just not especially ‘next-gen’. Although it’s easily forgivable considering the size of the game world and number of well-crafted recreations of real-life landmarks. The vehicles themselves do look pretty neat and there’s a good variety on offer. It’s also pleasingly difficult to save up for the more snazzy rides, encouraging you to try those longer missions.

The Crew is a badly named game. As Ubisoft intended, the name highlights the social elements that were supposed to bring the driving game into the new-gen at full speed. Yet if you’re looking for a stellar game world, incredible race variety and a relatively seamless driving experience, then you’ll struggle to find anything better than The Crew - certainly not on Xbox One or PS4. The Eden Games heritage of Ivory Tower shines through in just about every element of the game - including, sadly, the awful story. The social features are also a little underwhelming, and there are much better looking driving games out there. Yet for every stumble, The Crew makes a huge leap. It’s so immediate, with very few loading screens, and the fact that you’ll probably never race on the same route twice cannot be understated. It’s a game changer, and I’m somewhat concerned that I’ll never be able to play a normal circuit racer ever again.