The arcade racing genre has had a rough time these past few years. With the latest entries in the Need for Speed series being less than stellar and the Burnout series doing just that, racing fans have been crying out for someone to make a game that has everything they want and more.
When Ubisoft announced The Crew as an open world, story driven MMO style racing game, it understandably had fans of the genre cautiously optimistic. Would the open world MMO format work for a racing game? Would it appeal to the “tuner” crowd as well as the casual racing crowd? Would it truly be open world or just a less linear path that is called open?
The good news is that The Crew does a lot of ambitious things very well. The open world is very well done. It’s immersive and one of the best settings I’ve ever seen in a racing game. It's progression is very well done. It’s not necessarily linear, yet pushes you along a very well written (albeit obvious) Sons of Anarchy meets Revenge storyline.
Ubisoft's seemingly popular (read: pushed down your throat like the medicine you didn’t want to take as a child) always online mechanic makes a return here. You can play through the game solo as much as you want but you must have an internet connection. This allows you to join/create a crew of your own with other players and allows you to compete in missions against someone other than the AI the game provides you. While this is a nice touch, it feels a bit unfinished and the always online mechanic is awful. The servers so far have been unreliable and often times have lagged horribly in my experience, causing me to crash into something and ruin a placement or streak I had. I’m sure this will be patched/fixed/updated soon, but the early adopter frustration is high.
As I hinted above, the story is one that is well traversed. You play as Alex Taylor (voiced by video game journeyman Troy Baker) a member of the 510 car club that his brother runs with. His brother is murdered in a plot by another club member and Alex is framed by a dirty FBI agent and takes the fall. Fast forward five years and Alex is given the opportunity to infiltrate his old crew and take revenge on its leader along with the FBI agent who put him away. Once you’re out you get your first customizable car free of charge (of course) and are sent off to “prove your worth” to the crew’s new In-Guy, Troy. This sets you on a great variety of introductory race missions ranging from chase missions where you need to damage the opponent’s truck to stop them from making a delivery, to more standard drag/jump races where you need to place first in order to advance.
This is where one of the most frustrating mechanics ever in a race game makes a valiant return. The fact that you need to win outright in your first missions against better skilled and equipped AI players is a huge disadvantage. Either you are in your newly purchased and barely upgraded car that handles corners about as well as the Titanic, or you’re given a car from Troy for that race that is specc’d to be strong for that race type. The only problem with that? You need to play the race a few times to get a handle on how the car feels. It severely handicapped my first few hours with the game and something I wish racing games would remove or revamp somehow. The constant grind of doing a race over and over again made me want to throw my controller across the room if I missed one simple turn because you knew the race was lost and it was easier to restart than try to catch up. You don’t even get any experience or money for having to re-do these races over and over again. There is no risk/reward system here. The constant grind is annoying at times and the payoff for doing the races over and over again can arguably be called miniscule.
Graphically this game is hit and miss all over the place. At times when driving through the open world I was totally immersed in the beautiful scenery around me, with the sun shooting through trees around me, the wind blowing grass around my car. At other times the pop in is so bad I’m wondering if they borrowed the Assassin’s Creed: Unity design booklet and threw it in the game. Trees can pop in and out randomly while driving through a wooded area. Trees change from snow covered, to leafy, and back again. The cars themselves all look wonderful. They shine and beam in the sunlight and the inner workings of the cars in the shop while upgrading/changing parts are all very accurately represented and detailed. It’s a great thing to see. This all comes to a crashing halt when the cars start taking damage. Sometimes the damage looks okay with somewhat accurate representations of what actual car damage from a crash of any variety would look like while other times it looks like a designer took a few pixels out of the paint design and said “Well that looks well enough like a car scratch. Lets put that in!” It’s almost as if the car designs and the crash/damage designs were made by two separate teams that were forced to mash their information together with little overlook due to time constraints. But Ubisoft would never rush a game, right (because Assassin's Creed: Unity was a highly polished masterpiece after all)?
Sound is another very well done aspect of the game most of the time. The cars all have realistic sounds to them, from driving and braking, to the whoosh of passing another car going 100 MPH. It's very exciting and thrilling especially if you’re playing on a surround sound headset or surround sound system like I am. Great care was obviously given to the sound of each vehicle and how it reacts to the environment around it. It’s a shame then that the same care wasn’t given to the sounds outside of your car. Most of the ambient sounds in game sound okay. They can be tinny and high at times, or just downright bland. All of the games voice acting is very well done, with the exception of what I believe could be a few reused character voices. I cannot confirm this, but some of them sounded a bit similar.
“Arcade, open world driving madness not seen since Need For Speed was good.”