The Crew Reviews
It's a game that requires and occasionally enforces patience, but like all great road trips it's about the journey, not the destination.
One of the most exciting racing game environments for years, unfortunately bound to a slew of dull races and superfluous story.
Take away its vast environment and The Crew is decidedly mediocre. But the enjoyable story and great sense of actually driving, whether alone or solo, means there's plenty of fun to be had all the same.
An odd mix of Test Drive Unlimited, Assassin's Creed, and Destiny. And while the combination is tastier than it sounds it also has an awful lot of lumps in it.
I am nominally interested in all of The Crew's parts, but none of them hold my attention
The Crew has a lot of missions and environments to explore, but there are myriad issues that get in the way of its positive aspects.
The Crew's big wins are buried under a mound of frustrations
The Crew is a vast, expansive driving game that packs a solid story mode and tons of things to do. However, much of its endgame content feels like repetitive filler.
Ambition is both The Crew's greatest asset and greatest downfall. Somewhere buried in The Crew, beneath the bloated content and the MMO shenanigans, is a competent racer featuring the perfect road trip. But for a game whose primary strength is freedom, there should have been more objectives and more incentives to explore its world with friends, instead of copy-and-pasted skill challenges and missions tangled in a confounding plot that's hard to forget for all the wrong reasons.
The Crew offers you the entire countryside to explore solo or with friends (or strangers), plenty of cars, customization options, and a narrative that extends a purpose beyond "being the best" to get your motor running. Ubisoft's familiar structural pitfalls like microtransactions, online-only play, and other trappings hinder rather than enhance, but those things have become par for the course by now. Thankfully, they don't mar the overall experience, and that was an overtly positive one for me. I don't need a crew to cruise downtown Chicago or the west coast. I was just fine going it alone. And if you settle in for a few hours and let the game take you, I surmise you will be, too.
In all, The Crew can be enjoyable for some casual cross-country joy rides, especially if you have some friends to drive along. However, it comes up entirely short of most of its goals, and makes a wreck of car handling and competition for the sake of lackluster MMO mechanics.
I really want to love The Crew. The in game world is absolutely huge and it's filled with a great deal of content – it looks brilliant at times too. Although the handling takes some time getting used to it does feel natural as the game begins to open up. Despite that, the driver AI can be infuriating at times, as with the traffic placement which I refuse to believe is a coincidence. The online doesn't feel well integrated either and the story is uninspiring. If you know that you have friends playing The Crew it could turn out to be a great arcade racer, but if you're playing solo for the majority of it, it will no doubt start to feel lifeless and lacking a bit of soul.
The Crew is quite the ambitious undertaking by a brand-new development studio that offers some fresh ideas for racing games, but it hits a few bumps and roadblocks along the way.
The Crew can be fun under the right circumstances, but unfortunately those are too far and few between. It's not a bad game, as there's a lot to like in this package, but there's also a fair amount holding it back
A decent enough racer slowed down by microtransactions and an awful story
The Crew attempts to take the United States by storm, but ends feeling more like a drag than an actual race.
I wanted to like The Crew.
The Crew is breathtaking in scope, it's just a shame the game isn't very good-looking and filled with broken and unfair AI
While ambitious in attempting to craft a living breathing world with tons to do, it falls short with poor driving and being loaded with superfluous content intended to run up the play clock. The co-op is fun but recommending a driving game where the main activity of driving is no fun is a tough sell.
If you've been clamoring for a new open-world racer the likes of which we haven't seen since Burnout Paradise, I am happy to report that The Crew fits the bill. A mixture of MMO and arcade-sim racing, you better ensure you have a steady Internet connection, or else face frustration. Hopefully a patch in the future will enable offline play, because to see all of the game's terrain will take a long time, perhaps even longer than Ubisoft will keep the game's servers online. All of the United States' major landmarks are here and wonderfully detailed. Vehicles' handling lay somewhere between arcade and simulation, though you can tweak this. Online play is very rewarding, but is over-emphasized at times. With such a massive world to explore, and an addictive leveling system, fans of this genre will be busy for months to come.