The Crew - Review

The Crew from Ubisoft is a strange game, it offers up perhaps the largest playground ever in a racing game but also embeds online elements into its core, which results in a game that has never been seen before.

Let’s get this out of the way first, The Crew has a story mode, which you can ignore. While it is nice to have something to do outside of online racers and skill challenges, the story is so paper thing that attempting to care about it is more effort than its worth. The story tells the tale of Alex, who is quite the gifted racer and brother of the V8, the man who leads the 5-10, a nationwide car club and after he is killed and Alex arrested for his murder, he wants revenge. Helping you out is FBI agent Zoe, who has her own reasons for getting you out of prison and along the way you will meet other characters as well.

The problem with the story is that is B grade at best, the story has been told many times before in other formats and here it also suffers from the lack of character development. Alex is a bad lead, he shows no hesitation in anything he is asked to do by anyone and on the odd chance he does raise a question he just accepts the answer. Other characters suffer from bland stereotypes and do nothing out of the ordinary to elevate them above the token roles they fill.

Thankfully, where the story is pretty thin, the game world is not because here you are given the entire continental USA to drive around. The best bit about the game map is that there are no load times, you can drive from Los Angeles to New York and not see a single load screen, entering races or loading up the map will give you slight loads, but that is to be expected.  Taking the drive from one side of the country will take you around 1 hour, of real world time, which is pretty amazing, but it is a lonely drive, unless you head out with your crew.

That is where the game shines, once you join or form a crew of your own, you can take part in races and events with them and build up your own reputation, while having fun. The problem with creating a crew is that you really need people you know outside of the game, as joining a random crew can result in some less than ideal driving companions. But as that is the same with any online game, experiencing it here is nothing to worrying. What is worrying however is the visuals the game possess, being able to drive across country and see the changing landscape is pretty amazing, but it also shows off a lot of issues.

The Crew has to be commended for the size of its world, there is nothing like it anywhere, but the problem the world has, is that the visuals suffer from a variety of slow loads and random graphical problems. When I was racing to Los Angeles for the first time, a lot of what I saw was desert, which means a lot of nothing, but when I drove to Seattle from Chicago I was surrounded by trees and rivers, but the pop in on those elements was really bad, but that was not the worse. In races in towns or the country I had multiple times where cars would just spawn in front of me, which resulted in my having to swerve around them.

To be honest when this was happening in races, I assumed it was because I was moving at high speeds and the game just could not keep up, but sadly that was not the case. Even when cruising around town at a normal speed, the same things were still happening. Buildings were popping in, but details around them would not appear until I was closer. One visual element the game has right is that when you do slow down, things near you appear normal, so that’s nice, but pop in is not the worse part of the visuals, I have had sections of road disappear, but only in visuals, I was able to drive over it no problem. There was even an instance when I was being chased by the Police and no matter what happened, they simply kept driving through me.

Visuals are not the only bad part though, the sound had many issues as well, including out completely and after almost 10 minutes, I had to quit the game and restart it from the console dashboard to get it back again. Other sounds just never worked when you would expect them too, but the worst part of the game was the AI for the other racers. At times they would provide a real challenge, but then they would just smash into corners, or other cars and then simply give up. While some people may find that to be great, wining race after race without a real challenge was not ideal.

If it sounds like I have been harsh on the game, that’s because I have been. For each element the game does right, it does two things wrong and while I expect the game to be fixed down the line, right now what fun that can be found, requires a lot of patience and luck. Once fixed though, The Crew could be the game it was promised to be.

The Score

6.0

Review code provided by Ubisoft

The Pros

+The size of the world can't be understated

+The amount and variety of cars is wonderful

The Cons

-The game contains far to many bugs to be fun

-The story is bland and contains no characters worth caring about