Price: £35 inc VAT
Rating: 7
Right now, there’s quite of choice of new driving games. There’s DriveClub on the PS4, Forza Horizon 2 on the Xbox One and The Crew on both… as well as the PC version we tested. Here’s our The Crew review.
The Crew is a massively multiplayer racer which means it’s best played online. The undoubted highlight is Ubisoft’s scaled-down map of the United States which offers a huge and varied open world to drive around with practically no restrictions. (See also: Grid Autosport review)
The game promises a lot, calling itself a ‘next-gen driving game’, but while there are moments of brilliance and gratification, there are arguably too many failings to make The Crew great overall.
Confusion reigns right from the start while you watch the gorgeous cutscene that begins the game. You play the brother of a street racer murdered by a corrupt cop. Arrested for the crime yourself – and hell bent on revenge - you agree to be a CI for the FBI, posing as a street racer and working your way up the ranks of the 5-10 gang which has factions all over the US.
The premise just about holds together: in the main, you must win races against the local 510s in order to rise through the ranks to get to the boss. Where it falls down is by trying to do too much. Because the Crew borrows from just about every other racer (including Need for Speed, Burnout and even GTA) it feels a bit like all of them, but not in a good way.
In some races you have to escape from the cops or goons, Need for Speed style, and in others you have to ‘take down’ random opponents by ramming them. There are point-to-point as well as circuit races. The problem is that The Crew’s AI, physics and game mechanics are all rather suspect.
The cops (and goons) have wildly overpowered cars which are able to easily keep up no matter what you’re driving. Then, you’ll retry the escape only for them to somehow lose track of you when you’re right in front of them, so there’s no sense of achievement. It’s similar in takedowns, in which it’s virtually impossible to catch your enemy, but once you do, it can be ridiculously easy to disable them.
Some races are challenging because you have to win, but it’s easier to do so by upgrading your car's performance or enlisting the help of up to three other players – your ‘crew’. These can be friends, or just random players who answer your request for a co-op race. If someone else can win, you reap the rewards too.
Winning mission races earns you plenty of XP and cash so you can upgrade your cars. You’ll get a warning if the race will be ‘hard’ or impossible with your current car, so it’s worth waiting until your car is better than the competition if you want an easier time. Mission races alone won’t level your car (and you) up enough, so you’ll have to grind through some of the smaller races as well as the ‘race while you drive’ events which appear on the road and involve various skills such as slalom, staying on the racing line and jumping the farthest distance.
There are also PvP races where you can race for yourself or your faction. However, during our testing, the PvP lobbies were worryingly empty and there were lengthy waits to find a match. While you wait, you can continue playing the game at least.
The selection of cars on offer is reasonable but by no means extensive. The good news is that you can customise them to your liking with decals, spoilers, alloys, body kits and even the colour of the interior leather stitching. A load of effort has been put into the demo mode where you can inspect every last detail of the exterior and interior, which is very reminiscent of Test Drive Unlimited, but seemingly little has been devoted to the cars’ handling models, or indeed into high-res textures.
Even running the game on Ultra settings, the graphics look dated and grainy. It’s partly saved by the varied landscape and convincing weather effects, but it’s certainly not ‘next-gen’ on the PC at least. It's good, though, that there's an in-car camera view. It can be a bit nauseating with the auto-look mode where you look out of the side windows while cornering.
The physics model is arcade-like, and The Crew never claims to be a simulation. There are five types of cars: stock, street, performance, dirt and raid. You buy a ‘fullstock’ car and then it gets magically cloned into a new vehicle when you buy a street, perf, dirt or raid kit for it, but not all cars support all kit types. You’ll have to play for hours before perf or raid are unlocked: you need to be in it for the long haul to get the most from The Crew.
Once you get the hang of it, cars are quite fun to drive. They even sound good, but you have to wait until you get your first 'perf' car to hear the whistle and wastegate chatter of a turbo. Again, it's jarring that effort has gone into such details, including the 'working' boost gauges in cars, but when you watch the pre-race cut scenes, front-wheel-drive cars spin their rear wheels and gain V8 engines.
As we already said, The Crew is baffling in both its scale and bizarre missions. Some seem superfluous, forcing you to drive as fast as possible from point to point to fulfil some inane plot point. Yet there are times when those races end and you simply drive off, seemingly forgetting why you went there in the first place.
Buying Advice
Ultimately, The Crew is much like the Fast and Furious movies. You don't watch them for their brilliant plot lines or engaging acting: you sit back and enjoy the action. The Crew may lack finesse because it tries to do too much, but there's just enough here to keep you coming back for more.
