SCORE:
Graphics: 7
Gameplay: 8
Sound:7
Overall:7.5
Pros: Huge game world | Fun and addictive gameplay | Nice Story.
Cons: Occasional visual glitches | Difficulty in some missions could be better balanced.
If you are a fan of cars and driving games, you are probably well aware that sadly there aren't many good MMO racing games around. Ubisoft is trying to fill this void with its new multi-platform title: The Crew, coming to PC, Ps4 and Xbox One on November 11th. We had the chance to try this awaited title on our loyal PS4 thanks to a closed beta key provided to us by the publisher, and these are our impressions, so let's find out if the game is worth your time!
In order to play the game, you will need to register a Uplay account if you don't have one, required to play other Ubisoft online games as well. After that, you will be thrown into the game in a brutal and frankly very satisfying way, finding yourself in the middle of a police chase with a lot of police lights flashing around, and obviously you are the one who is running away. You will have to quickly learn the - honestly very intuitive, unless you've never touched a driving game - game controls, trying to reach the checkpoints while staying alive and, well, free. The whole session is action-packed, adrenaline-pumping and very fun. From this first minutes into the game, you will have a taste of the open world nature of this title as you can reach the checkpoints by going wherever you want.
After the first tutorial missions, you will be able to choose your first car and that's when the real game begins. So this is how you meet the main character of the game, Alex, between a narrative cutscene and a gameplay session with various objectives you start to unfold the game's intriguing narrative arch. Speaking about story, we truly appreciated how the developers put some effort into offering a movie-style story and narration, with convincing digital actors and cool scenes. This isn't very typical of driving games, and following the evolution of this Fast&Furious/ action movies inspired story could be very interesting. Thumbs up for the engaging intro gameplay session as well.
Without giving anything away about the story in order to avoid spoilers (but it's cool), we can tell you that the game revolves around illegal races and street gangs, and that at its heart is a free roaming open world game with story missions and secondary challenges, kinda like Grand Theft Auto, but without the possibility to get out of your car or shoot (it's a driving/ racing game, after all). The developers managed to recreate a smaller version of the entire USA that you can explore on your own or following the story missions. The game world is huge, convincing and skillfully crafted, with different areas and styles (cities, towns, countryside and farms) and features a day/ night cicle as well.
On your map you will have your story missions, secondary missions, car dealers, HQ and more, with the option to choose what you see through a customisable filter. The portion of the map that you already explored will be completely visible and you will be able to "fast travel" through its locations without having to drive all the way between missions/ challenges; however, in order to activate the fast travel option you will need to reach that location at least once, exploring the map on the way.
There are a lot of mission types and we never got bored or found the game repetitive during our test sessions. By following the story you can find yourself facing a proper race, a drag race, driving fast from point A to point B without destroying your car, trying to chase and destroy an enemy car, running away from the police and even more. The secondary missions are quick challenges to take on the fly while driving and will task you to perform a good slalom, jump on a ramp and land in the target area, drive as fast as you can through the traffic and more. A lot of variety for a lot of fun.
By completing the missions you will receive parts to improve the performances of your car that you can equip right on the spot (and change later in your HQ). This will increase your car's overall level, giving you an idea of your "strength" and letting you face higher level missions. Of course, being an MMO game, you will be able to play the missions with your friends or with the other players that you see driving around in the huge game world, through direct invitation or the automatic matchmaking.
GAMEPLAY
The Crew is an Arcade-style game and this will be clear from the beginning, with its generous drifting, the immediate and forgiving controls and the action-packed gameplay. In our opinion, the game managed to reach a nice balance between the Burnout series and the ever green Need for Speed Underground 2. However, this doesn't mean in any way that the gameplay is too linear, simple and stale; on the contrary, besides each car behaving in a totally different way, the game lets you equip your ride with one of the 5 available "Spec", that are unlocked through gameplay: Street, Dirt, Raid, Perf and Circuit, which act like other MMO's "classes" and complete the driving experience with your car, making it more efficient on streets, off-road tracks, circuits, etc. Once you unlock them, you can switch between specs whenever you want.
The controls are intuitive, precise and responsive, however it will take time to truly get the best out of your car. Easy to learn, hard to master.
By progressing through the game, you will earn money to buy parts and new pieces to equip your car with and improve its performance, or just play with aesthetics and customise hood, spoiler, colour, sticker and a lot more, through a very deep and complete system.
GRAPHICS AND SOUNDS
Graphics are very good and polished, but maybe they won’t keep up with the upcoming productions of the same calibre arriving on the same platforms. However, you have to remember that The Crew is an open-world game and so developers had to find a good balance in order to offer this kind of freedom with a high quality visual experience. However, we noticed some occasional visual glitches such as some disappearing traffic cars.
Sounds are very good and the game offers a cool soundtrack, nice voice acting and high quality and convincing sound effects that truly help with immersion.
CONCLUSION
The Crew is a very fun and addictive MMO racing game. The interesting and well narrated story, mixed with its open-world nature and the MMO features, contribute to making a complete and unique game that could easily attract a wide audience of gamers. Graphics are good, the arcade gameplay is challenging and entertaining, and we only hope that the game will manage to offer enough content to keep players interested in the long run. If you are a fan of The Fast & The Furious or if you spent hours playing games like Need for Speed Underground 2, you can't miss this game.
I tried the second beta looking forward to the customization of the cars. The “customization” is 100% linear, period. You need to know that anyone with the same level car as you will have the EXACT same specs. There is no way to tune your car (i.e. air, fuel, suspension, ride height, tires, etc). Sure there will be like 40 different cars or something, but the fun in modifying cars these days (i.e. forza, even GTA 5!) will keep that person coming back and trying other things. It would really really be nice in a driving game to at the very least have a dyno….but I’m spoiled, i like driving games to cover the obvious and allow the user to customize the performance specs to the drivers liking. For this very serious overlook in the game, my pre order was canceled.