The racing genre is one that really doesn't receive enough love in the video game community. Games maintaining any sense of reality are often full-blown simulators like SPINTIRES and Assetto Corsa, while those outside that category are dominated by the quintessential Need for Speed series. Seeing this, Ubisoft decided to tackle the genre with their own The Crew, a game that mixes the extensive customization of Gran Turismo with the ease of use of most arcade racing games. Taking it a step further, the game boasts its massive map spanning the size of the US, each region filled with races and challenges and stuff to explore. Excited about this, I was pleased to find out that Ubisoft was holding a closed beta for the game in the summer, and even more pleased to later find out that I was accepted into it. I deemed it a unique enough chance to record my experience with the game and give a first-hand look at the hyped game.
Despite my enthusiasm, my initial interaction with the game was met with ordeal, like waiting six hours for the game to download, and waiting another four hours for the game to connect to Ubisoft's servers. At this point, I was beginning to draw flashbacks of my initial appreciation for EA's infamous SimCity, and my massive disappointment come launch day.
Soon, the game finally launched without trouble. I was divided whether or not to feel angry for the game taking this long to work, or relieved that it was actually working for once, but I eventually settled on the latter. After booting, you're taken to a cutscene of the main protagonist Alex, outrunning the cops and making his way to his brother. Alex follows him along with a deal that he makes with a gang member in a fancy sports car, but the gang member shoots him and drives away, framing him by leaving his gun. Speed up five years after Alex is sent to jail, where an FBI agent proposes that he joins her undercover in attempting to find the supposed killer of Alex's brother. He's told the in-and-outs of the street racing world, and commanded to rise up the ranks to gain more potential info.
It should be mentioned at this point that the emotional intensity of the story is pretty unexpected. I went into the game thinking it was going to be set up similar to a silly action film like most racing games, but the game makes a genuine effort to be heavy-minded and dramatic, even if its results are ludicrously unrealistic.
Starring Gordon Freeman, sponsored by Gamespot-watermarked screenshots.
After this introduction, you're taken to a car dealer in Detroit, where you choose from four cars to start off with. Unfortunately, the selection it gives you is pretty limited, not necessarily in number but rather style. Three of them are outright Dodge Charger-like muscle cars, while the fourth one is a more nimble Nissan. I ended up picking the Nissan, as I'm usually partial to smaller cars in racing games.
You're then allowed to test out the car you chose with a few laps around a test drive track. The driving mechanics themselves aren't too bad, but they can be really inconsistent at times. For example, if you hit an object dead-on, there's a 50-50 chance that your car will either stop dead in its tracks, or just totally ignore the object as it clips past the edge of your car. This can be a pretty major pain when you're driving in more urban areas due to the mass of traffic you'll often be facing.
Another thing that's annoying about it is that while Ubisoft did make an effort to make the game both semi-realistic and arcadey, it's pretty clear while driving when these two extremes collide. You can turn your car pretty effortlessly, but try drifting and your car just understeers. I'm assuming that this is set up to lead to upgrades to make your car more responsive, but it ends up being more of a nuisance rather than a genuine difficulty to overcome.
I don't remember the Rockies being so, uh, prominent.
After you select your car, the game then sets you up with a series of story missions. They're pretty much what you'd expect, ranging from your typical racing scenario, to "takedown" missions that have you chase and disable a car. The takedown missions in particular, however, are pretty poorly made; for some reason, I found it extremely hard actually managing to get myself to ram into the pursued. The odd thing is that the person you're chasing literally goes in a straight line for most of the mission, so I'm really confused to why it's so difficult. Maybe I'm just bad at video games.
The game also features a police system. Police activity is triggered when you cause enough mayhem, like running over streetlights or ramming into cars. However, the police is laughably bad, and it took barely any effort in escaping them in the very few times they got on me. The police system also features a star rating similar to that of GTA's, but even on higher ratings there simply wasn't any difficulty getting myself out.
Yet another feature of the game that simply doesn't work is the damage system. Car damage is a fairly standard component in racing games, but The Crew screws it up by implementing regenerative health set up in bars, very similar to Far Cry 3's health system. Because of this, damage is very insignificant and I rarely if ever had to worry about my car being totaled.
Despite these rather failed mechanics, however, what the game does do well is its free roam exploration. In a mission that gets you going to St. Louis, I passed on by the general location of my hometown in central Illinois. While the game obviously doesn't hold every little town in the US, the overall “feel” of it did resemble it pretty well, to the point where I almost starting feeling a little nostalgic driving around the sunset-tinted countryside, what with all its corn.
I made my way into St. Louis, and while the scale is off, the tone of the downtown area feels pretty spot-on. The game also features the classic Gateway Arch, towering over the city, and generally just being there. Sadly, you cannot drive under the Arch, which totally doesn't ruin my completely nonexistent dream of systematically running over row after row of innocent pedestrians basking under a major metropolitan landmark with a $200,000 sports car.
*sniff*
Speaking of landmarks, one weird feature the game holds is its Landmark Collection, where you get a neat little camera-pan over of multiple places around the country. However, in order to initiate it, you have to stop what you're doing, brake, and back up into a circle barely larger than your car. It really breaks the flow of the game, and I ended up ignoring it, as it really feels like another Ubisoft Approved™ useless collectable.
It's also worth mentioning the graphical quality and performance of the game, critiquing Ubisoft's boasting of it being “next-gen”, and it's really not too bad. While nothing particularly pops out technically speaking (outside some admittingly good shading), it's quite impressive considering the scope of the game. It's made even more impressive by the game's interactive map, which you can zoom to any point of the world in real-time and with no loading screens. Despite this, I did notice the occasional low-res texture and graphical glitch, which I guess is expected considering it's a beta.
Another feature The Crew totes is its player connectivity, ensuring that all players within a certain session will drive and race around each other. I didn't even know this feature existed until about two hours into the game, when a bunch of little UI elements randomly showed up on screen, indicating where each of the players were. It didn't take me too long to mentally figure out what it was before it switched off again. It does that constantly. For a game whose main gimmick is “Never Drive Alone”, it's a bit odd that 95% of my time playing the game was, indeed, spent driving alone.
In the brief moments that player connectivity worked, it was severely disappointing to say the least. Players were miles away from me, and whenever I initiated a server-wide invite to a race I was about to start, I got nothing but the occasional relapse back into connection failure. To make it worse, there was always at least one guy who had his mic on constantly, making a loud droning static sound. You have the option to mute players, but that's the thing; you can only mute all players, rather than individually picking them. Honestly, I don't think I missed out that much since it seemed like everyone was disinterested in participating anyway.
Overall, though, I have to say that I had a fair amount of fun playing The Crew. The game plays pretty nicely, and it's hard to deny how enjoyable it is to just freely drive around the US. Despite this, however, I can't recommend preordering it. My first experience with the game makes me worry about Ubi's capabilities for launch. I mean, this is a closed beta. Imagine the actual full release. This is stacked on top of the fact that the game can get boring after a while; its sense of progression doesn't do much to hook me on other than the occasional car part to unlock. However, if the game launches without worry and undergoes some touching up (both gameplay and technically-wise), then sure, I happily recommend giving it a go.
'Das a pretty car.
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