The Crew Reviews
The mission design is sometimes inconsistent, with some missions only playable solo and others very difficult unless playing as part of a crew
More ups and downs than a Pike's Peak speed run
The Crew had an amazing game on their hands until they ruined it with the must win condition.
This game was made for 12 year olds that watch the Fast & Furious movies and believe everything in them is real.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ubisoft's ambitious open-world racer offers you a whole continent to explore, but struggles to make it really live
Ubisoft may want us to form crews and connect with fellow racing fans, but as it stands, we'd rather just get behind the wheel, turn up the radio and explore this staggering country by ourselves.
It pains me to say it seeing as I had such high hopes but The Crew missed its mark by a long shot and just barely chugs over the starting line.
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.
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.
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's an okay racer, but when stacked up against its competitors it really falls short. Open-world fans would be far better off picking up the likes of Far Cry 4, while racing fans have been spoilt rotten in recent months with the likes of Forza Horizon 2, GRID Autosport, and DriveClub. A terminally dull storyline gets in the way of what is an epic-scale racing game, and its huge landmass can be a genuinely exciting experience driving across, it's just a shame it's spoiled by so many niggling problems.
The Crew's magnificent automotive American playground and high-octane multiplayer road trips are sensational, but the tragedy is that Ubisoft and Ivory Tower didn't know when to stop.
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.
If you are a die hard racing fan with some friends who are playing this you MIGHT enjoy The Crew. Sadly though this is a classic case of biting off more than you can chew. The idea was great but they needed more time to polish up and add things to it. This road trip is one you can skip out on.
Ubisoft set out to create a social racing game with a story. While the story aspect is completely forgettable, Ubisoft did do an excellent job in setting up a racing MMO-like experience. Mechanics like experience and money couple with exploring new territory in a way that tickles the RPG gamer in me. Unfortunately if you attempt to play The Crew by yourself, are hoping for simulation racing with loads of detailed cars or state-of-the-art visuals, The Crew will likely disappoint on those items. This turns The Crew into an interesting experiment that only makes for a decent game.