The Crew 2 (PS4, 2018)
The Crew 2 is an open world racing game set in a condensed map of the United States. Lots of major cities are recreated. As well as St. Louis. You can unlock vehicles across a range of racing and driving disciplines and compete in races and various events, earning money to unlock new ones and adding "followers" for doing... other stuff.
It's a bit odd for me to jump into a Ubisoft open world in 2024, but there is a reason for this. The new Test Drive Unlimited game was released recently and Ubisoft responded by putting The Crew 2 on sale at 79p. I'm not one to jump to the defence of anything Ubisoft do but this is top, top trolling and I was in the mood for a completely mindless timesink, so I jumped right in.
There are several different racing and driving disciplines to choose from. Boats, planes, bikes, monster trucks, demolition derbies and various kinds of racing all feature. There is a seemingly endless amount of events for you to compete in, with user-created content an option as well as online racing. I think I finished around 75% of the base events and I played the game for 45 hours. If you're a genuine completionist you can go up through two additional difficulty levels on each event, though this doesn't earn you anything except marginally more money.
Each type of vehicle you drive brings its own challenges. Powerboats are different to jetboats. Supercars are different to hypercars and touring cars are different to open wheel cars. The open wheelers are a bit disorientating though, if you spend a bit of time driving one of those then switch to anything else you'll go straight off the road or into the nearest wall because suddenly the brakes and steering don't work the way you're used to. Skill issue, I think the kids call it.
That said, some vehicles are just unpleasant and make the game feel like it's spread too thinly. Hovercrafts bring to mind a Jeremy Clarkson quote - "if you see anything in front of you, you will hit it." And you do. The AI doesn't have any difficulty in handling these though which is quite exasperating. The demolition derbies in particular are hilarious as the AI difficulty seems to be set to about 500%, bashing you around at will. That's the joy of the modern open world game though, if you don't like it you don't have to do it, so you just go somewhere else.
This is terrible though, obviously. And it actually sums up the biggest problem with The Crew 2, that being the sense that everything possible is being thrown at the wall to see what sticks. I said there's a lot to do and, well, there's too much. There's so much in fact the game can barely present it to you. You start off with a few events available on the map depending on what vehicle(s) you have. You gradually unlock some as your "follower" count goes up and as you buy new ones. Every time you do the game brings up the map and shows you all of the new icons that pop up until the map is covered in them.
This isn't so much overwhelming as incomprehensible, and a classic modern open world problem. You can't for one second limit the sense of freedom for the player, so instead of any sort of guidance or direction, let them do whatever they want before they've figured out how to do it. The game gets around this by listing every event by discipline and sorting them by difficulty in the pause menu, but if like me you use this you miss out on actually driving around the open world. Isn't that the point?
If that's the biggest problem, the second biggest is the upgrade system. I'm going to focus on the cars here because I know more about that and because the differences are starker than in boats and planes. All in all there are several hundred cars in the game. All very different, all very unique.
When you finish an event in the target position (either top 3 or 1st depending on difficulty) you'll unlock upgrade parts. There are seven different types (tyres, exhaust, gearbox etc.) and applying them makes your car perform better. There are colour-coded rarities for each part, and as you earn new ones the level on them goes up towards a maximum for each discipline, until eventually you get maxed out at whatever the limit is.
This means two things. One, the car you drive makes absolutely no difference. The parts you have applied are the only thing that matters and the actual difference between two fully upgraded cars in the same class is so miniscule it can only come down to personal preference. Two, there's no need to actually focus on driving or (the very limited) setup, just look at the parts when you're done and pick the one with the highest number.
I realised about halfway through my time with this game what it reminded me of. It's Borderlands with cars. Bounce around a big, largely superficial map while the occasional voice talks in your ear, look for colour coded objects after finishing missions and equip whichever one has the highest number. Great. At least you'll be stuck with whichever car you pick in each class anyway because they're all quite expensive and the rewards for winning races are not rewarding at all.
On that note about voices, the game is loosely centred around the premise of you being some upstart racing driver out to upset the resident leaders of their respective fields. It's all meaningless. Partly because you'll win every race with no problems if you keep upgrading, partly because none of them have a personality, partly because the bland character you pick doesn't have a personality (you're silent and nameless) and partly because if you switch between classes rather than just focus on one type of event you'll have different people talking to you all the time and you won't know who any of them are. I was never able to figure out the significance of 'The Crew' either. There are some people who purport to help you in game but absolutely nothing would be lost if they weren't there. You can join with people online, but you don't even get increased rewards for completing events with other people.
That reminds me of another problem. The game is always online. Why? It doesn't have to be. It's unnecessary and the backlash to the first The Crew game going offline and becoming unplayable shamed Ubisoft - shamed Ubisoft! - into creating a provision for when they eventually turn off the servers for this. The notion of always online gameplay and people losing access to things they've paid for and online spaces they spend time in is a debate which can be had at great length and it's not one I'm going to shoehorn in here, but I really don't understand what this game gains from having to be online. The servers aren't even very good either, I got disconnected quite a few times and this is several years after the game came out.
By the end of my time with The Crew 2 I couldn't quite decide if I liked the aesthetic or not. Oddly, the game's overwhelming and confusing menus offered a slight positive. It was many hours in before I realised there were several radio stations on offer to listen to. The game makes no mention of this at all (another victory for digital releases and no instruction manuals), so I spent most of the game listening to about six different songs on the ambient station. By the time I realised this and got to hear the others, I realised I was better off. The "rock" station is a particular lowlight, with everything sounding like that overproduced, inauthentic American garbage that was everywhere to start the 2010s. The Black Keys only have one song featured, but everything else might as well be by them. Stick with the default tunes.
There are lots of locations featured on the map and this is probably the game's most impressive feature. You can fast travel anywhere on the map instantly, with virtually no loading time. I don't think I heard my PS4 make a noise at any time either which these days is a genuine achievement. The miniature versions of various American cities all feature enough detail to be recognisable, although I found the range of off road courses in between more rewarding purely because of the greater sense of variety. When you're racing round one city, you might as well be racing round any of them. That said if you treat the game as an adventure, something to explore, it is presented engagingly.
The other problem with this concept is when you do recognise landmarks and layouts your mind starts to wander. I've driven around New York and Los Angeles in Grand Theft Auto and it was better than this. I've driven around Miami and San Francisco in Driver and it was better than this. I've watched Frasier a million times and Pearl Jam is my favourite band, I know Seattle better than this. Maybe it's a symptom of me playing too many video games over the years but the cities I was familiar with just made me think of other games that did them better.
Ironically the game contains its own example of the problem in Las Vegas. Las Vegas is a city built on simulacra. It gathers the world's landmarks and reproduces them in tacky miniature form. So does this game's Las Vegas. This Las Vegas features things already otherwise in the game. Ultimately while the idea of recreating the landmarks of a country as vast and diverse as the US is an interesting one, I don't think it's possible to do it deeply enough to feel worthwhile. The game doesn't feel empty - there's traffic and pedestrians and wild animals, though you'll just phase through the latter two which never stops being jarring - but it all feels like it's barely beyond surface level.
I will give the game credit for one thing in this regard, since I usually criticise it when it doesn't happen. The game has a photo mode. In fact it features several photo challenges to take pictures of certain things in certain places. When you enter photo mode you can change the weather and time of day, everything, but most importantly there's a rewind option. You don't have to pause the game exactly when you want to take a photo. Well done, points for that.
At 79p I can't really complain, but I'm not going to be in a rush to play The Crew Motorfest, which solves the location problem at least. I don't regret my time with The Crew 2, but I don't really think anything of it either which is probably a more damning conclusion.
