Jack of All Trades, Master of None | The Crew Review

The Crew is an ambitious project that tried to appeal to everyone and while it sounds great in theory, things didn’t necessarily work out that great. On one hand, you have a game with an extremely varied terrain that can be accessed easily within a few minutes of driving. Theoretically, you can race all across the country and doing so with friends was a great idea on paper. Unfortunately, The Crew fails more than it succeeds and you are left with a lot of broken promises and underwhelming leftovers. Sure, there is some fun to be had somewhere deep down, but getting there just isn’t worth the effort.

The Crew is all about a massive, open world and a racing game all existing in the same space. You start out in the middle of the country and your map is full of points of interest that range from story missions all the way to street racing and even smuggling missions. The sheer number of activities you can do is immense, and frankly a little overwhelming. There is no pressure for you to continue the story at any point so you can do one story mission after another or stop and do some side racing for the time being. It is certainly different for a racing game to jump in between story and leisure races at will, but for the most part, it works.

Racing in the crew is the main focus of the game, as it should be, but you’ll find that a lot of the content in the game is locked out to you. You will be required to do some leveling up to get your car to the level it needs to be to compete in that specific race or event. While that may not seem like a big issue, grinding for experience in The Crew is a boring venture to take on. You’ll find yourself replaying some of the story missions to either finish higher or finish faster to get more experience and better race ending rewards. Having to repeat content you’ve already finished isn’t a very appealing venture, yet that is generally the best way to get your level up to get to the content you wanted to start with.

However, the real problem with The Crew is that it has a feeling of being too sparse for its own good. This stems from The Crew’s perpetually online world. You must have a connection to the internet at all times and if you don’t you can’t play the game. While that may not be a problem for some, it becomes a major problem when connecting to servers becomes difficult. We encountered a number of connection issues from the start and just when you get going, you’ll get kicked out and have to reconnect. This immediately takes you out of the experience and that is the first cardinal sin of gaming; always keep your audience in the game world.

These connection issues stem out into PvP and multiplayer races. Poor connections to the server tend to lead to choppy multiplayer games and even giant pile ups when all you want to do is race. This makes the game extremely frustrating to play because one minute you’ll be drifting on an opponent and the next you’ll be spinning out of control into a guard rail because the server hiccuped at the worst time possible. This problem is made worse by having to watch a short cut scene if you take enough damage which slows down the race even more. If you take enough hits, you’ll have to get the car repaired and that is just a drain on your resources, which isn’t fun.

The Crew is not a very good looking game either. It seems that the perpetual online world sacrifices some graphical fidelity for online features, so don’t expect bleeding edge graphics if you pick up this game. The textures are often muddy or jagged, and more often than not, they will pop in and out during gameplay which is unacceptable at this stage of the game. It shouldn’t be too much to ask to get a consistently good-looking game, but at this stage, The Crew is just not there yet. Especially if you own an Xbox One, there are better looking racing games out there and The Crew is going to have a difficult time keeping up with the more modern look of these games.

Another major issue in the game is that The Crew is almost exclusively meant to be played with other people. Sure, you can play this game by yourself, but you’ll get far less enjoyment out of it until you bring in your friends. While that isn’t necessarily a problem, it is certainly worth mentioning. However, with the connection issues present, finding other players to play with has been challenging. With this problem present, unless you are bringing all your friends with you, you are going to have a very lonely experience.

Overall, The Crew was a very ambitious project and you can see the potential behind the curtain. Unfortunately, this game was just not ready yet and it feels like many of the things that were going to make this game awesome were just half baked. With some more time in making this a better looking game, ensuring that players can connect consistently to the server with a solid connection for their entire experience or just making sure that players have easy access to other players would have went a long way. While we don’t argue that with some work either via patch or update The Crew could be a great game, at this point in time this game just isn’t worth investing in.

This review is based on a retail copy of the PlayStation 4 version of The Crew published by Ubisoft