The Crew is kind of a bad game with one great gimmick. The map.
The Crew is a (mostly) racing game that takes place on a compressed map of the contiguous United States, covering everything from Florida to Oregon, albeit shrunk down to a manageable size. You play Alex, a car guy who watches in horror as his benevolent gang leader brother is gunned down in front of him and he is framed for the murder, only to be pulled out of jail by the FBI to help them take down a corrupt agent and the evil gang leader who murdered, and has now replaced, your brother.
If this sounds incredibly stupid, I am, if anything, underselling just how bad the story and writing in this game are. Every mission, and there are about 60 of them, starts with some kind of story intro and many have post mission cut scenes too. You travel from region to region, working your way up the ranks of the gang to get at the leader, and meeting various baddies you have to take down on the way. That’s okay, though, because you’re also building your own “crew” of allies to help you, including a mechanic, a hacker, and a stunt man.
It's all shallow and stupid. You basically talk to a single ally in each region, who provides such helpful advice as “stay in first place during a race” while you do your missions, and a bunch of dumb and cliché game stuff happens. A bad guy tells you to meet him at a certain location, you show up, and oh noes it was a betrayal and now you have to escape his minions. Packages get air dropped into the desert and you have to run over 80 of them within the time limit to damage the operations of a rival gang. You could write most of this stuff yourself and it would be better.
Now of course most racing games are not known for their stories, so I don’t really think that this hurts The Crew, but it is worth noting because it reaches levels of stupidity rarely seen in the history of gaming. At one point the hacker character informs you that she’s smart, really really smart. At another point the stunt man, who you’ve known for all of 12 hours in game, tells you to abandon your quest for justice for your brother because your “crew” is your family now. Dire stuff.
While the bad story doesn’t really hurt the game much there are some deeper flaws that cause a lot more damage. I should note here that there are technical issues (I had several crashes playing on my Xbox Series X, which shouldn't happen at all, let alone in a game this old). There are also issues with microtransactions. I didn't really notice those because I wasn't interested in collecting cars in a game that will be unplayable at the end of the month, and you can upgrade the "free" car to be good enough to do all the single player stuff pretty easily, but they bothered a lot of people, and hampered the game. I'm not going to defend them except to say they weren't a factor for me, personally.
The mission design is also all over the place. Most of the missions are fine, if a little boring. Win a race against other cars, finish a checkpoint course before time runs out, things we’ve done a billion times in racing games. The course design is pretty mediocre, probably because the map seems to have been built to be a cool map of the US first and as a fun racing playground second, but these types of missions mostly work (a little more on that later.) However there are also missions where you have to chase and smash up an enemy car, and these are among the most frustrating experiences I can remember in recent gaming. Everything about them is inconsistent, from the damage you inflict from collisions to the other car’s speed and maneuverability, to the fact that the other car can crash into things and even get hung up on them but takes zero damage from doing so, so forcing it into oncoming traffic is actually a bad thing as it harmlessly and safely pinballs away from you. They’re terrible missions, I had to replay most of them several times to learn the route and get lucky on some of the hits, and I had no fun. There’s maybe nothing in gaming less fun than lining up behind a car to deliver a big hit with your nitro, only for it to accelerate away from you even though it was already going at top speed. Unless that’s trying for a big sideswipe only to get dodged at the last second and end up hung up on some piece of geometry as your quarry speeds away.
And those are not the only bad missions in the game. There are also races against rivals that require hairpin turns and shortcuts that seem literally impossible to win without the right car stats. Which means you end up grinding. In a racing game. That’s right, The Crew, despite being a gritty crime story, is also actually kind of a CaRPG, where your cars have stats that you can raise both by leveling up in general and by collecting loot that you equip for stat bonuses. Unlike most car games, like Forza or Gran Turismo, we’re not talking semi-realistic car loot like “racing tires vs street tires” that give some kind of semi-realistic performance boosts to your car but rather randomized stuff with actual stats attached, so you could get a new “gold” level 33 motorcore that somehow improves your car’s grip by 14. It’s an incredibly strange system that seems to be designed to encourage microtransactions but for me just made me go do random ‘challenges’ dotted around the environment. These are repetitive Ubisoft map vomit tasks like a slalom course that appears on a stretch of highway, or trying to drive as far away from the start of the challenge as you can in a time limit, or staying on the road and above a certain speed for as long as possible. They’re…mostly kind of fun, and after every successful run where you get at least a bronze medal (they go from bronze to gold, and then up to platinum after you reach level 50 near the end of the campaign) you get a car part for your current ride. So if you have an event that requires a dirt car and your dirt car isn’t high enough level you can grind it up until it meets spec. That was the only way I was able to get past certain missions and for a driving game it feels cheap and stupid. You don’t feel accomplished for raising your car’s level to the point where you can win easily, and frankly this would have stopped me from playing any more of the game if it weren’t for the fact that the grinding activities themselves are fairly enjoyable.
They also encourage you to engage with the one thing the Crew really has going for it. That map. You start out in the Midwest before moving to the East Coast, down to the South, and then making your way West through the Mountain States and to the West coast, doing a dozen missions in each region as you go. The Midwest kind of sucks, mostly being bland and flat, but once you get to the more urbanized East with some additional variety and then especially the South onwards you end up with a lot of great environmental variety, from salt flats to bayous. The road trips between the regions are perhaps the best thing in the entire game, these long stretches of highway where you just drive and soak in the environments as they change around you and do the challenges doting your route. It’s Zen-like gaming that you rarely get in a racing game, much more grounded than something like Forza Horizon (which encourages you to plow across fields and through obstacles) and thus much more chill. I even used the cockpit view for some of these drives and they reminded me of actual long drives I’ve been on in my life, and the feeling of calm you can get on the open road.
The layout of the map and the number of environments is great but as an actual reflection of the United States it is, of course, quite limited. There’s something charming about its various fake roadside businesses and generic advertising, but of course the game only had so much budget behind it so regional differences in architecture and building style all get erased in favor of reusing assets. There are “landmarks” dotted throughout the map that you can go on for a small XP and cash bonus, but they’re unimpressive, as are the cities, which feel closer to small regional cities like Stamford Connecticut than sprawling metropolises like Vegas or New York. It’s an impressive map and can be fun to explore, but the game’s roots in the 360/PS3 generation are clear in its limitations.
The true limitation, however, is in the gameplay. I’ve already mentioned the hit or miss mission design and the RPG elements, but the base racing is mediocre at best. I played Need for Speed The Run, a game with a similar tone and story, a few years ago, and while I probably liked The Crew better overall I think even that game had better handling. There are five types of “tuning” in the game, ranging from circuit cars to dirt specialists, and most vehicles can have at least a couple different types applied to them. The upgrades mean the cars feel different but not distinct because their stats area constantly changing. Couple that with the parts that upgrade individual stats and you end up with a handling model that has way too many variables, with sometimes disastrous results. While you can play through the whole game in just your initial car (which can be tuned in all five styles) I decided to get an SUV for the dirt courses just to have a little variety. This was a disaster. It steered like a boat. On one optional mission the race course went over a wooden bridge and my car would spin out and flip whenever I drove over it at speed, even going completely straight. This made the race unwinnable and was…not fun. The same thing happened in a different car in the desert where I crashed on a small rock I never even saw, but at least there I could just steer around it. Finally, the random traffic on the roads is a huge pain in the butt and can ruin races or challenges by creating severely disruptive obstacles at random. When everything is working well the Crew is a passable racer, but I’d say that only happens 70% of the time, and it’s very frustrating the other 30%. Additionally, it can be hard to tell what obstacles are destructible at first glance (bus shelters yes, some roadside railings no) and cop chases can be very frustrating because like the cars you need to chase down and crash the cops can do ludicrous things, like easily keep up with your dirt tuned racer while driving their street tuned interceptors cross country. They have helicopters too, and we all know how villainous video game helicopters are.
So as a single player experience The Crew has a bad story and below average racing that’s partially redeemed by an excellent map and an engaging challenge system. There are other niggling problems too, like how if you have the DLC your FBI handler will call you up to tell you to go do DLC races and forcibly change your waypoint to direct you to them even if you’ve set another destination. You can change it back, but it’s impossible to overstate how much I loathe this kind of thing. Developers who decide that they know what you want to do better than you do should stop making games and go do something else with their lives. The game also has EXP and perk systems, but they offer disappointing benefits like making your nitro 2% faster or slightly increasing the radius of the map your car uncovers around it as you travel.
Maybe it’s unfair to focus on these single player issues, though, because The Crew is, in some ways, intended primarily as a multiplayer experience. Coming to the game so late I wasn’t able to get into a PVP race, let alone find a “crew” of fellow enthusiasts to co-op with (and the whole main story can be played in co-op) but I’ve played enough racing games to know that this one’s handling issues and progression systems would make it a very mediocre choice compared to better handling games. The base issues with the racing wouldn’t be solved by having a “crew” and if I wanted to roam around a map with some bros I’d just play Forza Horizon. It’s worth noting that even in its prime this doesn’t seem to be a game that people primarily played in multiplayer. The most basic multiplayer trophy for completing a mission in a “Crew” has a 26% completion rate on PlayStation. Other multiplayer trophy and achievement rates show that the majority of people played this game as a single player experience. This is true for a lot of these games that claim they need to be always online in order to facilitate player interaction. The only real interaction I had was when I stepped away from the game to pee and a griefer drove up behind me and pushed my car down the road quite a way just to mess with me. Thanks for the always online fun, Ubisoft!
The Crew received poor reviews at launch and has now been delisted in anticipation of being shut down at the end of the month. That’s why I played it when I did. Ironically, if not for the shut down I may never have pulled it out of my backlog. The thing is, divorced from its initial price and context it’s not an awful game from the early XBONE/PS4 era. The map gives it a unique hook even if it could have been better and had more interesting things to find and do. The challenge system makes it a decent game to just drive around in playing little snippets of gameplay for CaRPG rewards. The awful story can be amusing at times. It’s the kind of game that’s ideal for booting up when you just want something to grind away at or a virtual space to spend a little time in. Since finishing the story I’ve gone back to polish off some achievements and in 30 minute sessions just trying to finish off some random objective it can be enjoyable despite its problems. Are there better racing games out there? Lots. But The Crew isn’t awful, and it is unique. It deserves to be discovered by people delving into the games of the past or hunting through bargain bins for random games to have a little fun with. It deserves to be inaccurately labeled as a hidden gem by someone who just really likes the admittedly cool map. It deserves to still be a game after the end of this month, and it won’t be.
I’m glad I played the Crew before it shut down. I put over 25 hours into it all told, and even though it’s not a great game it scratched that arcade open world racing game itch I get from time to time. It’s not as good as any of the Forza Horizon games, or even the modern Need for Speeds (we don’t have to discuss Burnout Paradise here because…well…) but it’s doing something a little bit different. If the multiplayer servers nobody really used were shut down and the game was stripped back to its single player missions, challenges, and that map it would probably be something I at least think about going back to from time to time. Instead I won’t be able to. It’s getting shut down for good and it will become lost media. All those cute little art assets and carefully constructed map areas will just be gone. No kid will find a copy at a flea market and pick it up for $10 and enjoy laughing at its dumb story or wring some enjoyment out of polishing off all its Ubisoft map vomit content because they’re bored one summer. No old person, like me, will be able to look back it because they were always curious, or because it holds good memories. It will just be gone, and it didn’t have to be. It will be gone because Ubisoft doesn’t care about games except as products, and built in an expiration date. Come March 31 we’re all going to be kicked out of the Crew, and the whole world they built will be lost like tears in the digital rain.
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