The Crew Reviews
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
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.
I am nominally interested in all of The Crew's parts, but none of them hold my attention
It's a game that requires and occasionally enforces patience, but like all great road trips it's about the journey, not the destination.
And this is it with The Crew; it tries to do so much and excels at nothing. It falls apart on almost every level, and given the potential it had that is a damn, damn shame.
So is Ubisoft's open world racer worth your time and energy? It just depends how starved you are for a brand new racing game and your willingness to tolerate its many concerns until they're rectified, if at all. If you aren't, you're better off playing some of the older Need For Speed games instead.
The Crew's big wins are buried under a mound of frustrations
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.
The Crew has a fantastic open world to explore and some excellent racing, but too much is second-rate about the visuals, the handling, the narrative and the mission design for it to make the most of all that good stuff. It's worth playing for the scenery, the challenges and the variety of the gameplay, but it's neither polished enough nor consistently strong to stand up to Forza Motorsport 2 as a thoroughbred next-gen racer.
More ups and downs than a Pike's Peak speed run
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.
For years developers have been hunting the white whale of being the biggest and the best. Like Captain Ahab's fabled story, this hunt can often lead to ruination. Sure you've done a lot of things along the way and certainly have some stories to tell, but The Crew sits as an empty shell, capable of housing so much more.
The Crew is a decent racing game that's weighed down by its constantly online mechanics. The missions and challenges are nice, but if you don't have friends, you'll be hard pressed to find them in the game. This drastically reduces the amount of fun you can have in it, but even if you do have buddies, you might be hit with surprise disconnects or errors that can temper most groups, no matter how enthusiastic.
One of the most exciting racing game environments for years, unfortunately bound to a slew of dull races and superfluous story.
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.
There are some genuinely great things about the racing action, the beautiful environments, and the vehicles are incredible looking, but overall the physics bugs and frustrations outweigh the adrenaline and elation of winning.
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.
The Crew is a fantastic tribute to American car culture, but not a fantastic racing game.
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
There's a good game buried here, and when they finally plant the headstone, the cause of death will be chiseled as "trying too hard."