The Crew Review (Xbox One)

Racing games have maintained a smooth rhythm in recent years, thanks to franchises like Need for Speed, Forza Motorsport, but also new experiences like Driveclub, which all offer fans the ability to drive great cars across different environments both alone, as part of a campaign, and competitively, thanks to different multiplayer modes.

With The Crew, Ubisoft, together with the two developers – Ivory Tower and Ubisoft Reflections –, wants to deliver a seamless online world in which players can race with or against others and compete in all sorts of ways while driving their favorite real-world cars.

The game has seen a large number of beta stages over the last few months and now it's finally been made available across the PC, PS4, Xbox One, and Xbox 360 platforms.

Does The Crew manage to get off to a great start or should it be sent to the junkyard? Let's find out.

Story

While some racing titles decide to abandon any pretense at a plot, The Crew features an actual story, for better or worse. You play as Alex, an illegal racer from Detroit who gets sent to prison for a crime he didn't commit. Thankfully, he's freed by an FBI agent looking to take down the corrupt authorities that arrested Alex in the first place and are now smuggling drugs, cars, and other goods across the U.S.

You must now infiltrate their illegal club, the 5-10, by competing in various races and pulling off jobs for the different low and mid-tier bosses until you get to the V8, the man in charge of the whole operation, and his partners from the authorities.

The basic plot could have worked relatively well in a cheesy manner, but the dialog and exposition fail to elicit any kind of response from the player. While the voice actors try to pull things off, the whole story is pretty forgettable, so you might just want to skip through all the cut scenes. Unfortunately, during most of the opening hours of the game, you'll constantly be assaulted by the story characters, who urge you to complete missions and other things.

Annoying police

Gameplay and Multiplayer

The Crew is envisioned as an online racing game, but especially in the opening hours, you don't really feel like you're in a world with other people. Sure, the open world modeled after the U.S. is huge, to say the least, and filled with cars, both regular and driven by AI-controlled 5-10 members, to make it seem like the club has members patrolling the streets.

However, real-life players are few in a game session, and most of the time, are very far from your immediate location. You can try to drive to them but interacting with others isn't all that easy due to the clunky systems.

This is particularly one of the worse sides of The Crew, as racing alone in the huge world can be quite disappointing. As such, if you don't have real-life friends to join up with you, you'll be hard pressed to find others and establish friendships inside the game.

In terms of actual gameplay, The Crew delivers your pretty standard racing experience, with events involving lap-based competitions, point-to-point sprints, not to mention drag races and many other standard encounters.

There are also the special events that involve racing through checkpoints or escaping cops. These can prove quite often rather frustrating, as the races can go on for a long time, even over 1 hour, which means you'll often get tired or frustrated with the performance. The police pursuits are very annoying due to the toughness of the cops, as they can catch up to you in just a few seconds and can easily follow your car even through the tightest of corners. What's more, when the pursuit chopper gets sent in, your task becomes even harder.

However, while The Crew's standard gameplay follows recipes already made famous by other games, it innovates a bit when it comes to actually driving through the world, as the game scatters all sorts of different challenges. These involve racing through increasingly narrow checkpoints, doing a slalom between virtual posts, breaking virtual obstacles, or pulling off jumps. These activities make traversing the huge map much easier, but even they can wear on your nerves.

Speaking of the actual map, The Crew's world is one of the few really impressive qualities of the game. You get to explore a shrunken version of the United States with just a few major cities, from Detroit and New York to Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Las Vegas. These are pretty well done, although those who actually live in them will certainly find missing areas. Unfortunately, the game begins in Detroit and its dilapidated urban environment makes for a poor first impression. However, once you reach the neighboring mountains and see snow, or go through the sandy beaches of Miami, you get a feel for what The Crew can actually deliver.

In terms of actual racing, you start off with a free car and must gradually improve its level by unlocking better equipment, similar to a character in an MMORPG that gets better gear. You can choose from several different specs (think classes), from Street to Raid, Dirt, Performance, and Circuit. These all have advantages and disadvantages, but in the beginning, if your ride doesn't correspond to the current event, you'll be given a specially modified one.

Earning new parts can be done by completing events and challenges, but as the norm is nowadays, you can spend real-life cash via microtransactions to get new cars and special boosts. Joining in-game factions also accelerates your in-game currency progress and awards you free premium currency, but there's a limit to how much you can accrue.

Of course, besides featuring solo story missions, there are plenty of events that you can complete cooperatively with others, not to mention competitive ones in which you go head-to-head with people. While they are relatively fun, expect to endure lengthy waiting periods while the game searches for other people to play with.

This also brings into question the whole online aspect of The Crew, as you're reliant on Ubisoft's servers which, so far, have proven quite erratic. You'll often be met with surprise maintenance periods, not to mention plenty of endless loading when attempting some events. This gets even more frustrating when embarking on the hour-long events, as you'll have to repeat them all over again if the connection or the server drops during them.

Visuals and Sound

The Crew looks decent but it's plagued by a phenomenal amount of jagged edges, low-resolution textures, and object pop-in. Sure, the game can produce some great vistas every once in a while, especially when entering different zones, but don't expect impressive visuals or even a stable framerate, as it often drops below the 30fps limit on the Xbox One.

The soundtrack is pretty good, as there are quite a lot of different radios that you can listen to in the game. However, the actual environmental sounds aren't that great and many cars sound the same. The voice acting is decent, but the dialog makes everything sound unimpressive.

The Good

The Bad

Conclusion

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.

Play Video