Racing off into that wild blue yonder, chasing the sunset with over 3000 lbs of American muscle and 400 horsepower at my command. From the cloud kissed forests of the Northeast’s I-95 to the scorching glassy flats of route 66, the great United States road trip is often both a rite of passage and a romantic ideal for many young Americans. I’ve known many a jetsetter to take off sea to shining sea at least once in their lives to accomplish this great feat in their car of choice. It’s this journey that Ivory Tower’s and Ubisoft’s The Crew promises to deliver. A real life great American road trip shrunk down and delivered to the comfort of your living room. A racing game unlike any other, where you can outfit any car any way you want and tear up asphalt city to city, state to state, coast to coast. It’s a promise Ubisoft fails to fulfill, delivering instead one of the most boring and frankly, unfun gameplay experiences of the year.
I feel as though each time Ubisoft comes up with a fresh IP they say to themselves “Now how do we make this sparklin’ clean smellin’ idea and make it the most boring, cliché thing possible?” The Crew reeks of watching as many Fast and Furious movies possible, and sticking all its general tropes into what The Crew calls a “plot.”
Alex, a hipster with glasses and black beard who seems better equipped for a stand up stage than illegal street racing, fills the shoes of the late Paul Walker as he goes undercover for the FBI to bring down the big bad motorclub lead by Vin Diesel’s doppelganger, Shiv. The goal of the game is to earn your gang ink, move up in rank, and take down Shiv from the inside. The story is ridiculously straight faced for the game’s content, at least the Fast and Furious acknowledges what it is and has fun with it, The Crew doesn’t. This is a serious mission about serious revenge. It seems like the more straight faced a Ubisoft story is these days, the more eye rolling it tends to be. VENGEANCE, I shout yet again not as Aiden or Adewale or Arno or Aveline, but as Alex. Only this time I also needa git DAT FIVE-TEN INK.
Alex, participating in illegal street races between typing his screenplay at Starbucks and browsing Earth, Wind and Fire records.
It’s a bit surprising The Crew has a story at all. What’s not so surprising is that the writing is bland and boring as roadside motel coffee. Bad acting, completely unlikeable characters, all made worse by the fact the game will nag you, yes nag you, for ignoring its insipid story missions and tutorials. Ubisoft has famously long, banal, generally uninformative tutorials, and the fact they figured you were too stupid to work out ‘drive car forward’ and ‘customize car in shop’ speaks bounds as to what Ubisoft may think of its audience. Let’s not forget other Ubi-isms, too many copy and pasted sidequests to tackle, and more towers to find for map synchronization? Really? You’re driving in the States, just google maps that shit motherfucker.
Tower synching, because how else would I know it’s an Ubisoft title?
Driving physics are questionable. Maybe not quite as piss poor as the car physics in Watch Dogs or the Far Cry series, but certainly not up to snuff for an arcade racer. Everything handles too “light”, wobbly and shaky like a piece of straw in a hurricane, car turning so miserable, so unruly, you may as well be trying to drive an entire apartment building around the corner. People, cars and objects will lightly “bounce” off you no harm no foul. Exasperated by the fact a high speed “crash” will cause a slow down cam, showing how “EPIC BROH” you are when both cars get #rekt, but the fact the physics keep a car crash from ever feeling real drags these slow motion moments down to below ineffective.
Soh Epec
Don’t be fooled for a second into thinking that The Crew’s selling point, i.e. the ability to explore the entirety of the United States, is at all an awe inspiring experience. A few open worlds have provided me with truly jaw dropping visual moments, from Grand Theft Auto V’s dirt bike chase across the country side, to Saint Row 3rd’s skydiving in a tank, and the ability to emerge from Skyrim’s dank caves and dungeons to truly breath taking snow covered mountains, frozen lakes and verdant valleys. Comparatively The Crew offers no such moments, instead providing the most text book sketch of a few recognizable United States tourist traps, images that said they maybe looked at a postcard for five minutes before moving on to copy and paste the same exact assets repeatedly for miles on end. But don’t worry, they remembered Salem is supposed to be “spooky” so included about 50 miles of copy and pasted pumpkin patch. I’d much prefer one smaller world map done well than a larger world map that’s big for the sake of big. I can’t imagine this is a decent digital fix for those who love exploring the open roads of the good ol’ U-S of A. Besides, didn’t a Penn and Teller video game already give us the experience of driving on a long United States highway? And didn’t we collectively agree it was a monotonous task?
Exhibit A. Most places would resort to a general regional feature, like Salem’s endless pumpkin patch.
Exhibit B. This Restaurant was right across the street from…
From this restaurant. Which was right up the street from another just like it.
The Crew is an equally poor attempt at car porn. The shots on each car are so close, so explicit, with wild cutting designed to tease and tantalize. You could easily imagine this being Bang Bros Presents: Cars. The problem here is the car models at this point are pretty old, and the graphics look like they come from a game designed in 2007, not 2014. The customization is limited, uninspired, and while I like expensive toys to play with, from American muscle to luxury to high end sports cars, for an illegal street racing game it’s severely lacking in street cars (the Nissan Skyline comes to mind as one of the few included) it’s almost as though Ubisoft was in such a rush to get all those sweet endorsement deals they forgot to include the cars purely for pimping out and tearing up the track. Not that it mattered all that much, a lot of the cars felt like just like the next, with only the thinnest differences in how they handled for the sake of keeping all vehicles “balanced.”
Navigation is a complete and utter mess, with a GPS that will often break and misguide or just stop working. The leveling system is weird. Car level is different from Player level, with car level often determining if you smoke a mission or eat burned rubber. Player level on the other hand more just determines where you’re at in the story and what equipment you can unlock and equip. Sometimes you’ll need to grind to get your car to the right place. These mechanics may be right at home in an MMORPG, but feel counter intuitive for a racing title.
I’ve complained about Ubisoft’s exaggerated air quote “game design” tactics before where they’ll artificially boost the difficulty by stacking certain parameters against the player. It’s to the point of laughably bad in The Crew, where you’ll tackle a mission and realize the suggested route will guarantee you a bronze medal at best, if not a complete fail. Specs you get later in the game will greatly improve the handling and braking of your cars, making you scratch your head why you weren’t just driving that version of the vehicle to begin with. Enemy cars can blast into first if they feel like it. Police will stick to you like mice on glue traps. Cars of a heavier weight class or notoriously slow model with poor steering will kick your ass no mater what you drive. The odds are stacked so heavily in this one you’ll ask yourself why is Ubisoft in the business of making video games? Why aren’t they just in the business of punching gamers in the face?
The most fun I had in The Crew was when I ran into other players. You may think ‘well that’s the point’, but the kind of fun we had was completely independent of what the game’s core has to offer. We would play bumper cars, have “diving” contests by launching ourselves off ramps and aiming for bodies of water. The real blasts were mostly composed of the stuff we made up. Even if The Crew’s missions were completely fun on their own, you’re always at the mercy of your own or another player’s internet connection, with players sometimes being inexplicably booted because their net went down, with some overall terrible rubberbanding and some real bad glitches that would occur the more players it tried to handle. If this is meant to primarily be an online game, it doesn’t do it well.
Oh and don’t even bother with Ubisoft’s pride and joy with this game; the faction missions unless you have a crew for certain backing you. Those hour or longer races that have you zip across the United States require coordination, precision driving, and using every cheap trick you can muster in order to complete them. There’s a “solo” option, however I’ll tell you that trying to take these things solo is essentially time theft, hours of your life you will never, ever get back and will in all likelihood be absolutely wasted because even if you burn every single nitro boost, snag each shortcut between checkpoints, there’s a sure shot one of the computer’s cars will spin up its faster than light engines, blur past you and steal the lead. In the solo version of these missions not even snagging second or third is enough to reward you, you get nothing, you lose, good day sir. Though I entirely advise against you and your friends grabbing this title, if you absolutely must, have those headsets ready and maybe a bottle of Gatorade to both drink from and piss in as you slog through these hateful missions.
Oh yeah. Work that back fender baby. Let daddy see that exhaust pipe.
In the end this feels as though it’s yet another 2014 cash in attempt by an otherwise competent publisher. There are easily a ton of better racing games fresh and brand new on shelves right now that are more worth your time. Forza Horizon 2 is a better game. Driveclub is a better game. Hell, Mario Kart 8 and Grand Theft Auto 5 are better driving games. I’d even go back to Cruisin’ USA. I’m not tired of playing Ubisoft games, I’m just tired of playing bad Ubisoft games. Music, graphics, gimmicks all mean absolutely nothing if the experience of a video game, that interactivity, that ‘fun factor’ aren’t up to snuff, and in The Crew they are far from up to snuff.
