Terrible Tuesday: The Crew

This is unprecendented in Enemy Slime history, but I’ve finally found a game so bad it deserved a Terrible Tuesday AND a review. The Crew is truly the worst thing I played in a terrible year for video games and that in itself is an accomplishment.

The Crew beats out:

Magus

Marlow Briggs

Go! Go! Nippon! My First Trip to Japan

Skateboard Apps

Kim Kardashian: Shall we date? Ninja Assassin+

Evil Within

and Golden Axe: Beast Rider

In being the most utterly awful and inane thing I’ve played this year. And so, in the tradition of Game of the Year I give you the first ever *trumpet horn*

TERRIBLE TUESDAY OF THE YEAR

In The Crew you play as bad ass Greenpoint resident Alex Taylor whose just gotta go fast, and isn’t afraid to break the rules to do it. “Is that a record player?” Alex asks his other licorice latte sipping friends. “Well FUCK you, because I’ve got a Sony ZX2 Walkman that I’m going to play my jams on, and I’m not even going to put on my oversized headphones to listen to it.”

He shouts in true badass fashion.

Alex Taylor is played by, and I mean no snark when I say this, voice acting heavyweight and all around dreamboat Troy Baker. So it is truly an amazing, overwhelming feat that Alex is such a miserable character you can literally hear Baker dying as he plays him.

In fact, the game surprisingly has quite a few badass voice actors, but you wouldn’t know it because they play it with all the passion that a cat has when going to be neutered. And why would you have any passion at all when you’re cast to play a character like “r0xx0r”, a hacker chick who uses a screen name only teenage boys who had AOL dialup in the 90s found cool. I assume her other hacker friends were “1337”, “Pwnz” and “I can make my calculator spell boobs by typing out 58008 then turning it upside down.”

21/f/LV nifoc tdtm

I’m not entirely sure who told Ivory Tower that planting a rock on the ground, then pushing it forward is how you drive, but that’s what the lead footed button mashing of The Crew feels like. Of course I assume the development team got all their knowledge of car handling second hand as no one that’s been behind the wheel of a real car for more than five minutes would call what The Crew has “driving”, and I haven’t taken the wheel of a car in 10 years. The Crew’s physics meanwhile are meant to simulate gravity on the moon, that’s why I assume driving on a raised surface can send you 90 feet into the air.

Now I’m not quite sure who at Ubisoft is their Street-Wise Consultant, but I assume they must be a snitch, because every character in every goddamn Ubisoft game is a snitch. Ajay Ghale? Snitch. Aiden Pearce? Snitch. Alex Taylor? Goddamn snitch. There’s no problem with having a snitch in your narrative, but it as taught at the University of Reaganomics in Concrete Jungle 101, that must always be followed with “get stitches.”

I get it, Ubisoft, I really do. You have the morality of a Saint, except when it comes to putting out quality content and robbing players of their money, then you have the morality of a gnat. Every one must be the good guy. Good is always a white knight, Evil is always bad. Of course working for law enforcement is the ultimate good, how can you not like someone whose sole purpose is to put all his friends, allies, mentors and lovers behind bars?

Oh right.

Alex is playing everyone he knows the whole game. When you have someone who pretty much lies in the face of everyone he meets, who doesn’t tell his closest friends he’s working for someone that might throw them to the dogs, who only entered a deal to save his own skin everyone else be damned. Do you know what you call that? A terrible person.

A terrible person to go with your terrible driving.

There are three types of insanely bad, idiotic missions that don’t belong in a car game and only one type of mission about racing, and those are bad too. Now you have to “level up” your car in this game. You read that right, level it up, like an RPG character. Why do I have to level up my car? Do you, Ivory Tower, Ubisoft, buy the most high end cars possible then take it straight to the shop to tune it up more? Because if you do, you’re buying your car from the wrong dealers.

Here’s a list of things that will make your car blow up:

Crashing into another car.

Crashing into a tree.

Trying to drive up a mountain.

Trying to drive up a hill.

Leaning too far to your left.

Leaning too far to your right.

Farting.

Here’s a list of things that will make cops chase you:

Crashing into fences.

That’s it. The only affront you could make, the only law you could break in The Crew’s America, is driving into a fence. You can drive on the wrong side of the road, you can drive on people’s lawns, you can hit animals, you can hit people and the police won’t give one single flippin’ damn. But go ahead, crash into that fence, undo that fresh picket white I dare you, I double dog dare you, the police will be on your ass like fly on stink.

Time to go to jail!

Once you do break the nation’s only law they won’t let up. The outdated early 2000s police cruisers of The Crew will hump your back, endlessly, they will hump your back until you die. Then you will respawn. Then they will hump it some more. These aren’t even Dodge Chargers, they look like Crown Vics. Yet they can keep up with an illegally modified GTR. They can ram into a 640 horsepower Dodge Viper.

Wait, what do you mean the Dodge Viper has an acceleration of 7434? That doesn’t even make any sense.

That’s what you get when you include those RPG numbers in a car game.

Alex does spend a damn long time in that car. Aside from maybe once every 5 cutscenes, he’s in it. Far Cry 4 at least has the 4th wall awareness that Ajay Ghale, with all that running around, must have swamp ass. Alex must have swamp body. This car, Alex, is your bedroom, your bathroom, and your lover.

There’s some strong evidence that this game, like many Ubisoft titles this year, wasn’t done. Assets are repeated so many times I refuse to believe they weren’t just placeholders to be replaced at a later date. The Crew has some kind of codec/radio function in which characters will contact you, and certain characters like “Alita” and Harry will have fully animated portraits, while much more significant characters such as Zoe and ‘r0xx0r’ (fucking r0xx0r) will have a static still painting. But whatever, you paid for it anyway, even though the servers for this game will shut down next week.

Now since the game is basically unfinished, it along with plenty other Ubisoft games, houses a hefty collection of glitches disproportionate to the actual quality of the game. Texture pop ins were the least of this game’s problems. You could drive through objects, you could drive through the world, cars would often hover like Magneto made a guest appearance and forced everything to float with his astounding powers of magnetism. The glitches would be exacerbated when other players were present. You know, in this always online game where you’re encouraged to always play with other people and the motto is “Never drive alone.”

You can tell the radio is good because Lorde – Royals will play a thousand times on it.

Unaltered in game screenshot.

The story. The characters. Good lord the characters. They’re both overwhelmingly generic yet creatively awful. r0xx0r simulates the entire badness of all of Watch Dogs in one, awkward, tongue biting cutscene. Troy is a stereotypical black guy who is most likely written by a Cambridge theater arts major who got all his black culture know how from that one 50 Cent movie he fell asleep on once in a plane. I honestly believe Ivory Tower thought they were really hitting on something with their big bad “Shiv”, the leader of the oh so hardcore 510 gang that commits very vague crimes and smuggles very vague illegal goods, when they gave him the voice of a Hollywood Hillbilly. It was pretty intimidating. No wait, not intimidating, what’s that other word that starts with I? Oh yes. Irritating.

I hope you’re following along because right now we have a snitch of a hipster Hero, a hillbilly of a Villain, the worst thing you can do to anyone in this world is “drive fast.” No, read closely: There are moments in this game where characters will pull their guns on other characters, fire the gun, cause a Mexican standoff and the one gun toting character will say to the other “You know what I’m going to do to you now? I’m going to drive fast.”

Who the hell wrote this?

And please, The Crew, shut the fuck up. I will get back to doing the main quest when I feel like it. I don’t need a character dialing in every five minutes with “HEY BUDDY, I NEEDJA T’ DO THIS THING FOR ME.” I’ve had girlfriends and my parents, nag me less than this fucking game does when it ‘urges’ me to get back to it and see Ivory Tower’s incredibly crafted, masterful story that they didn’t just rip off from Fast and the Furious and Need for Speed.

I’m not going to give a whole lot of extra article space to this wondrous map where you journey sea to shining sea. I’ll only say this: buy one postcard for each of the most well known U.S. cities. Now find an incredibly long, featureless hallway, the longest most boring hallway possible with paint drying. Now every ten yards or so, put a postcard up. Now walk through the hallway, look at each postcard, go “ooh that’s nice”, then continue to be bored the next ten yards until you get to the next postcard. Congratulations, you’ve just recreated the experience of driving through The Crew’s America.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Terrible Tuesdays, it’s that a lot of the games don’t actually want you to participate in their main gameplay model. Go! Go! Nippon! doesn’t actually want you to explore Japan, Beast Rider doesn’t actually want you to ride Beasts, and The Crew doesn’t actually want you to race cars. I’m not talking the typical “challenge” most games throw at you to get in your way, to deliver a sense of accomplishment once you win. I’m talking “So you want to drive cars and go fast? Well fuck you. Here. Here’s the AI cheating so you can’t win. Here’s some rubberbanding to make sure a car always catches and passes at the finish line. Here’s a car that’s about 500 levels too high for you to challenge right in the middle of the campaign. Fuck you for wanting to race cars and play with your friends. Fuck you for buying this game.”

“Fuck you.”