- reviewed on PlayStation 4 / Rated T / $59.99 / released December 2014
- OFFICIAL SITE: the crew-game.ubisoft.com
- PURCHASE LINK: Amazon
- FINAL: You can SKIP this game. 2 out of 5 stars
“The Crew” begins with an audacious premise – drive across the entirety of a virtual United States – but pays too high a price to make that happen. The game drives right through an uncanny valley where the miniaturized America appears totally convincing until you find yourself parked outside a Lincoln Memorial that doesn’t have Abraham Lincoln in it.
With a watered-down story of ex-cons and fast cars, the cast of “The Crew” do little more than push you across the map, unlocking missions and skill tests. This is a driving game, so obviously everything is variations on a theme: escape criminals, win a race, outrun police, drive across town as fast as possible, etc. Initially, your chosen car handles rather poorly, but after a few hours of missions, you work your way up to a vehicle that might actually stick a turn at 118mph.
“The Crew” expects that you’re going to want to customize your ride, but it fails to make the experience rewarding. While you are constantly winning improved car parts that you can optionally install, they reduce down to a boring number bonus. This number is added to your vehicle’s overall rating which is, again, simply a number. It never feels like a specific part enhances a specific ability, like handling or acceleration.
Perhaps more importantly, the cosmetic options – paint job, decals, all the stuff that would make your ride shine to other online players – are locked behind expensive price tags. In most cases, “The Crew” offers two ways to buy items, either with in-game reward credits or, red alert, actual money. Whichever way you go, it’s an unfriendly barrier to customization that turns “do I want to drive a metallic blue car with tribal pinstriping today” into “now I need to buy another paint color.”
This is all very strange, because “The Crew” wants to be the intense, competitive game version of “The Fast and the Furious.” Online play is required, as you are constantly sharing your world with a handful of other connected players. You’re expected to invite fellow drivers into your Crew to run missions or compete in team races. And yet: it’s more stress than needed to pretty up your vehicle, the world is so large you can drive for days and never see another player, and the competitive matches take far too long to set up.
Which leaves us with the map, an adroitly condensed United States that is legitimately fun to explore. This mini-Merica includes cities of special significance to motorheads, like Detroit and Kingman, Arizona. While it is cool to barrel down Route 66, or bolt from the Everglades to Bar Harbor, Maine, it is weird to stumble across that Lincoln-less Lincoln Memorial. “The Crew” also can have trouble with mapping your next destination (waypoints occasionally vanish), and sometimes all of that landscaping detail is miserable to drive through. Jaunts into the wilderness to find hidden items mean a lot of time getting stuck on rocks. The game is not sure what fences you can crash through and what fences stop your car cold.
But when “The Crew” hits, it hits. The game is so good at capturing the essence of America, with so much attention paid to residential architecture, gently transitioning biomes, and native fauna. It’s great to just hit the road and go for a cross-country drive, but that’s not necessarily the high-octane rush for which “The Crew” was aiming.
