The Crew is this month's free Ubi30 game for PC. Grab a no-strings copy here.

• Jump through the intro (if you like NfS: enjoy the cutscenes, if you don't like NfS: skip the cutscenes).
• Grab some early upgrades (random events reward upgrades) and tune your car (as the tutorial suggests) so that you fix some of the issues with no-spec vehicles.
• Fix the handling in the settings so it plays without heavy assists that add lag to your steering.
• Turn the radio up.
• Ride around weird USA for a few hours.

Bought it originally on PS4, free for PC is a great price!

Thanks for the tip!

I always wanted to check this game out. Nice one!

Thanks for the heads up. I have not fired up UPlay in ages (since I last played The Division, in fact) so knew nothing about this Ubi30 thing they are doing.

I caught the tail-end of the demo of The Crew on the PS4 but in the end (even though I was somewhat entertained) it didn't warrant a purchase in my view. Maybe I'll give this version a try at some point.

Are there only like 5-6 songs? I feel like on my drive to Seattle I heard all the songs that they have. Or am I missing a radio change button?

I think this game is knocking on the door of being something great. Sure it wasn't the best, but I had a lot of fun with it. I hope this is the seed for something awesome!

I think it's doing a limited selection for the intro (I know the exact same song has played when entering the city all 3 times I've played the intro but the radio should be on random).

There's random, off, and radio stations (in the phone UI). Google says 120 tracks total.

Ye, enjoyed the betas enough to think I'd one day grab a cheap copy, not enough to actually be proactive about that. Austin definitely touched on some of the weirdness of this game that prevents it really getting to be more than a great setting (weird USA) onto which a very wannabe NfS story has been attached with plenty to do (I also really like the parts upgrade system as rewards - drive well and always be getting new parts to slowly push your vehicle up in specs; level up to ensure no part gets left behind).

I do enjoy just cruising around (given a few upgrades to give the vehicles some kick - they really don't start with the best impression if you don't immediately take the mission to respec your first car to Street and grab a few upgrades along the way) when tweaking those sliders for handling to make it a bit more responsive. Totally unrealistic but it's cool to thread the needle so easily most of the time.

It looks like the engine was completely rebuilt from the ground up for Wild Run (the expansion but also the patch that is applied to this freebie - you don't get the added events but do get the new engine and dynamic weather) so it seems like Ubi plan to keep on pushing the game. The cops vs robbers themed 2nd expansion is out before the end of the year (and a GotY edition so I guess this is the last big update to this before the devs move on to new projects). I think they really fixed some of the biggest visual flaws with that patch and the game may never look as good as something like Forza Horizon 3 but it's now at the point where it looks pretty ok. No random low-res mess trying to do depth of field effects or aliasing flickering on and off. The original game had a look but also (even on the best settings with a PC) you could hardly avoid noticing the draw-in in the distance. I've also not seen any teleporting cars recently.

Thanks for the heads up man!

I'm getting absolutely horrible performance. I have a GTX 770 4GB model with 16GB RAM, and a i7 4770K CPU @3.50GHz with an automatic overclock that kicks in when needed to 3.80GHz. On Ultra I get 40fps but locking the frame rate to 30 it's a stuttery mess. Forza Horizon 3 is locked to 30fps but it's super smooth. On High, Medium and Low, I get around 50-55fps. I can't make sense of it.

@mrcraggle: My guess would be stuff designed for high end nVidia cards (percentage closer shadows, HBAO+) is not working out well on a slightly older card. I'd drop it back from ultra, maybe check the temporal antialiasing option they added to the end of the options rather than TXAAx4 (GeForce Experience even recommends FXAA to me, although I'm ignoring it because I can just about hit solid 60fps with TXAAx4 on).

The engine is not the best, although I was doing ok at 1080p30 with my GTX760 when the game first came out (but as noted above, this is effectively a completely different engine under the hood - the new one is new shaders for physically-based rendering and new textures to enable that).

There has been a known stutter issue with this new engine, although it was meant to be improved, if not completely resolve, by subsequent patches. So far I'm not seeing any stutter in my gameplay but you're definitely not alone in saying Wild Run isn't 100% for everyone.

Oh, and Forza Horizon 3? I assume you're talking the XB1 demo. Looking forward to seeing that running on PC in 2 weeks (hopefully at 60fps).

@shivoa: Restarted my comp, went with optimised settings using Geforce Experience, got 60fps. Woot woot and that's now with a bunch of options turned up. Maybe I was running too many programs before ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I played the beta originally where performance was trash but I've seen that it's been upgraded since then so hopefully when I go back to it for a bit longer, performance will stay locked at 60 and not stutter about.

As for Forza Horizon 3, yes, I'm referring to the XB1 version. Digital Foundry put up a video recently and that game just looks super smooth despite being locked to 30fps. Can't wait to see how that looks on PC. I'm sure someone can get it running at 4K60fps.

Man... As soon as I get The Crew for PS4 this becomes free. Sadly, I think this is one of the worst racing games I've played in over a decade. It feels as if 95% of the development time was put into crafting a huge condensed virtual United States and they just slapped all of the content on at the tail end of development. It doesn't even earn the always online requirement either. The co-op is just meaningless. Why is it even there? The story missions range from garbage (every non-racing mission) to mediocre with the races just checkpoints placed through random roads in the open world. "Here's a track. Yep. That'll do." What's sad is that there isn't even enough story missions. They obviously put no effort into making the tracks, so why didn't they just go all out making a ton of races since they can literally just place checkpoints anywhere? The PvP is absolutely abysmal. You just get smoked by players with cars a thousand times better than your own. Hope you got real money to spend on microtransactions to race competitively without grinding. Half of the Skill Challenges are almost exactly the same. (Follow the line, follow the gates, follow the other gates, follow the road) Why do I need to drive for 5-10 mins between every story mission? It's so damn tedious. To top it all off, it has the most half-assed AI I've ever seen in a racing game. I hesitate to even call it AI or even rubberband AI. They aren't consistent whatsoever in what game rules they follow. They just seemingly randomly gain massive speed boosts for no apparent reason (like catching up to the player as rubberband AI should do) or suddenly becoming idiots and having all opponents crash at the same time. They also don't seem to be affected by physics. It's as if they just magically float along the ground at certain speeds to give the illusion of driving a car on the ground.

I just had to get this rant out. The fact that I could have saved money on this piece just frustrates me. This game in retrospect makes me respect Test Drive Unlimited 2 much more for what it accomplished back then.

I just happened to watch that Steam Friends tour through the game a few weeks ago, now I'm happy to get in on that road trip action. Game's currently still available, by the way.

If anyone wants to add me on Uplay, I'm under KovieGB and hopefully I'll be lazily playing for awhile. Or add your name here. It's actually kind of neat to see the open world populated.

@kovie: Do you have a link to that? I've barely scratched the surface of the game and I'm trying to wrap my brain around it.

@williamflattener: The video? It's in the first post; but I don't think it's going to demonstrate the game's features much beyond leisurely driving and fake ads.