14 DAY TRIAL // The Crew is Ubisoft's great hope of establishing a persistent online experience in the racing genre, and in order to do so, it's tapped into the strengths of developer Ivory Tower, which is made out of veterans who worked on Test Drive Unlimited, Need for Speed, and much more.
Already some really impressive details about the game have been revealed concerning its huge open world that covers the whole of the United States, the varied cars included in the game, not to mention the many ways in which you can modify them to suit whatever event you are trying to do.
In order to properly test out the racing experience, a closed beta kicked off earlier this week and now the NDA has been finally lifted, meaning I can share my thoughts about The Crew, complete with a gameplay video.
Does the new racing game have what it takes to muscle in on the crowded genre or should this crew disband? Let's have a quick look.
The words closed beta usually mean that a game might only bring a handful of features and options with very limited content, but The Crew's test phase is quite the opposite. You have the whole map available and quite a few missions to go on, not to mention plenty of cities to explore and challenges to complete.
This wealth of content factors in to its 15GB size, so you might want to clear up the hard drive before starting the download via Ubisoft's uPlay service.
The Crew kicks off with a pretty thrilling off-road escape from the cops and quickly transitions into a brief tutorial sequence about the game's world, its map, and how exactly players keep racing on it.
By far the most surprising new element is that the waypoint navigation doesn't show up on the road, instead hovering right above it. It's quite weird at first and is quite prone to squiggling depending on the position of the car, but you do get used to it eventually.
The actual driving mechanics aren't that great, unfortunately. The game goes into the arcade route, but the different cars feel like they're floating on the ground. The physics system still needs a bit of work, especially when you try to execute the stunt jumps, but overall the handling isn't completely bad. It just needs quite a bit of finesse to ensure a great response.
The huge world is, in a word, huge, but don't expect that much variety in terms of road layout. Environments do change quite a bit, ranging from the big downtown Detroit with its skyscrapers to the sand dunes of the Great Lakes, not to mention the many other things seen through New York, Miami, Los Angeles, and much more.
The story doesn't seem all that interesting, as you need to infiltrate a racing organization to help the FBI take down both its leader and a high-ranking corrupt agent, but besides a few sequences at the beginning, it doesn’t really make itself noticed all that much.
Mission variety is relatively good but the AI needs work. For example, in a mission I had to crash into a target vehicle but it constantly drove way faster than me and evaded almost all of my attacks. Another mission saw the delivery of a car with as few scratches as possible, but things were made quite annoying by the traffic that swerved in and out of lanes, causing me to crash.
In terms of visuals, The Crew looks rather nice but don't go in expecting the gorgeous graphics seen in other titles like Forza Horizon 2 or Driveclub. This is a huge open world game and the lack of loading times means a sacrifice in terms of effects. The framerate is stuck at 30fps and even here some drops are present. Pop-ins concerning smaller objects in the world, such as traffic cones, can also be seen in some occasions.
The soundtrack is decent, but the voice acting limits itself to some rather cliché voices that try to imitate Nolan North or even Samuel L. Jackson.
Overall, The Crew is looking relatively good in its open beta but it still needs a lot of work relating to the AI, the variety of the road network, the visuals, the framerate, and a few other things.
Check out a video and a few screenshots below.
