The Crew Reviews
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.
For the short time that I have had with The Crew, I have had a lot of ups and downs. I certainly see the promise in this game, but I don't have the patience or the social circle to really take advantage of it. Nonetheless, I just keep playing, interested in seeing what I can unlock next. Personally, I'd recommend The Crew to anyone who has a dedicated circle of friends who would play with them, who all have great internet connections. If you do, this game is pretty awesome, and possibly even a better format than a lot of other driving games out there. If you don't, the game can get frustrating at times. This is a "your mileage may vary" sort of game, good, but really only appealing to a very specific type of gamer. I'll let you know if my opinion changes with more time... and more friends.
Despite delivering an impressive playground that captures the spirit of America, The Crew struggles to build out a worthwhile game experience around it, resorting to frustrating missions, insipid storytelling, and off-putting microtransactions.
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."
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
The Crew is a fantastic tribute to American car culture, but not a fantastic racing game.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
More ups and downs than a Pike's Peak speed run
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.
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's big wins are buried under a mound of frustrations
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.
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.