Review: The Crew 2 is a fun, varied racer that doesn’t quite meet its potential

DISCLAIMER: A review copy of the Gold Edition was provided by the publisher before launch.

Platforms: Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC

Publishers: Ubisoft

Developers: Ivory Tower

MSRP: $59.99

Introduction:

In 2014, Ubisoft reentered the racing scene with The Crew, an ambitious open-world racer that took place across a streamlined version of all of America. While it had a mixed reception at launch but Ubisoft is looking to try again in 2018 with The Crew 2 and get people hooked at the starting line. Did they succeed?

The answer is a bit complicated. For starters, The Crew 2 just feels a lot more lively and engaging than the original. Cars feel smoother and have a fine balance between an arcadey feel and the weight of a real car, the world feels more detailed, and it’s far more varied.

Ubisoft introduces new mechanics that they don’t take full advantage of:

Instead of limiting themselves to just cars, developer Ivory Tower upped the ante by adding air vehicles, boats, bikes, and variations on cars like monster trucks and an F1 race car. It sets itself apart from being ‘just another racing game’ or feeling too similar to a game like Forza Horizon which is ultimately its direct competition. Not feeling the road anymore? Take to the skies and quickly fly to another city. Get bored on your flight? Transform into a boat mid-flight and dive down toward the open water to continue your journey down the Mississippi or whatever body of water you find yourself in.

Changing between vehicles takes a snap of a finger and it’s by far the most fun mechanic to use in Ubisoft’s racer. The biggest bummer is that the game rarely ever takes advantage of this in its races, transforming vehicles is pretty much exclusive to free roam. There are a literal handful of missions that use this mechanic but they’re so sparse that it feels more like a wasted opportunity and when they are used, it’s nothing super extreme.

With a system like this, they should be trying to show it off as much as possible to keep players engaged during races. The idea of doing a motorsports version of a triathlon that has you start out speeding down the freeway in Ferraris, hitting a ramp to transform into a plane which sees you flying through a valley, and then capping it off with a boat race through some rapids sounds absolutely thrilling!

Ultimately, the races are what you’d expect. There’s a mish-mash of street races, off-road time trials, stunt plane missions, proper races that you’d find in something like Forza Motorsport, and much more. They don’t really take risks, though. Granted, the game didn’t promise to take risks but with something as intriguing as the “Fast-Fav” system which allows you to transform into different vehicles, it feels like no one realized its true potential.

Varied gameplay that caters to a bunch of different racing fans:

The core activities in The Crew 2 are quite fun and some take some practice to really master such as the drifting challenges. You’ll enter a course with a specially modified version of a real car made for drifting and attempt to navigate it in the given time while racking up as high of a score as possible. It introduces it’s own unique handling for these cars and takes a bit to get used to but when you get a handle on it, it’s incredibly fun to blaze through courses, skimming corners while kicking up clouds of smoke as your tires screech. This is just one of the many different and unique racing mechanics featured in this motorsports ensemble.

There’s really something for everybody in The Crew 2 (so long as you have at least a mild enjoyment of driving games) and that should be applauded. Many of these games in the racing genre alienate people for being too hardcore or perhaps too arcadey, The Crew 2 makes sure that just about everyone is catered to in ways that are both familiar and unique.

As you tackle new races in this frankly beautiful sprawling world, you’ll earn followers and become more and more famous in-game. The problem is this is all just told through some numbers on your XP bar and occasionally someone calling you up and saying how cool you are. You’re not seeing much of a reaction from the world itself. You don’t have fans in the world rooting you on, there’s no in-game social media where you see tweets popping up to support you or talk crap to you, it’s just a half-baked concept that Ubisoft laid heavily into in the initial reveal and trailer featured at the start of the game.

You get fancier apartments but they’re really just garages that all have identical layouts in different spots in America (namely Florida and California). Perhaps portraying this fame would be hard to do in an always online world since different people wouldn’t be seeing the same thing but it also made me question why the world is always online in the first place.

Half-baked online functionality and customization:

Outside of MAYBE driving past someone, your core interaction with other players is just seeing their name tags in the distance as they speed as far away from you as possible or seeing records on leaderboards. While I did play the game before it was widely available to the public, there doesn’t seem to be a purpose for having this always online world at the moment.

Unless you party up people, you seemingly can’t interact with other players. All of the races are strictly offline or only available through partying up with your friends and in that instance, it’s more of a team race than a competitive one. The PVP mode for The Crew 2 wasn’t ready for launch and won’t be added to the game until December making the online component of the game feel quite hallow.

When you’re not out seeing the sights or burning rubber, you’re likely popping open the hood on one of your cars or doing some customization on your character. When the game begins, you’re asked to select a pre-made character. They’re all incredibly lifeless and I would not recommend looking into their eyes when going into photo mode, it’s absolutely terrifying. You can customize their outfits but it’s nothing too significant which is fine given you’re in a vehicle for 99% of the game.

That said, the customization for the cars is a tad barebones as well. You can customize some very surface level exterior visual options, it’s not terrible, it’s serviceable and has enough to be worthwhile but it’s not exactly impressive either. On the other hand, when it comes to actually upgrade the vehicles, it’s massively disappointing.

Terrible loot-based mechanic for performance upgrades:

All of your upgrades are handled through loot drops. Don’t worry, you can’t buy microtransactions or loot boxes or anything, these are handed out upon completing races and leveling up. However, this means you can’t really tune your car to how you want. You’re not buying suspension upgrades, tweaking the engine, replacing tires or brakes, it’s all random drops.

Your car’s performance is at the mercy of an RGB system which gives out three different ranked items. Common (green), rare (blue), and epic (pink), a fourth one will be added in September which is known as legendary. I was genuinely shocked to learn that they messed up one of the most basic aspects of a racing game this bad. You earn all this money but you can’t spend it on creating a better car suited for your personal playstyle? I personally suspect there will be some backlash to this once the game officially drops so maybe Ubisoft and Ivory Tower will pull back on this system in favor of a more traditional marketplace for upgrades.

A world of bugs, big and small:

Another thing Ubisoft will hopefully clear up pronto is some of the bugs and glitches in the game. I personally had some severe game-breaking bugs which prevented me from actually completing some of the activities in the game and buying vehicles. I was unable to purchase any vehicles for two days because I get stuck in an infinite loading screen that forces me to reboot the entire game.

I even had a couple bugs that crashed my Xbox One X. I’ve been assured by both Ubisoft and other players that I spoke to that this is a very isolated incident and I’m seemingly the only one with issues this bad, I was able to reinstall the game on my console and it began working so maybe it was just an issue with the console but it’s something to make note of regardless.

Aside from those more intense issues, the game does feature some pop-in and low texture items in the environment when in the open world. I found this to be most common in foliage such as trees, some of which floated in the air instead of being planted in the ground and had blurry models. Again, this is on the Xbox One X, the world’s most powerful console, so it’s a tad concerning but there may be a good excuse for it.

The Crew 2 features the ability to basically go from one end of the map to the other in an instant. Fast travel has literally never been so fast and it’s shocking to see that in a game of this size. It seems some sacrifices had to be made with some textures and rendering but ultimately, it keeps the massive world from being plagued by long, frequent load times. These graphical issues aren’t appalling or anything and you won’t notice a ton of it since you’re speeding through the world but it’s present nonetheless.

Where the graphics shine is in The Crew 2’s extensive photo mode. I absolutely adore The Crew 2’s photo mode and couldn’t stop taking pictures, I was going to make all of the images featured in this review be taken with the photo mode but the game deleted all of my in-game pictutres before I could capture them with the Xbox screenshot feature. I presume this was a casualty of me having to reinstall the game. Regardless, you truly get a taste of how beautiful the world is (minus the occasional graphical error) when you stop and take a moment to capture a cool picture.

The Crew 2 also features a video editor which allows you to string together racing moments with cinematic angles and editing tricks. It’s not as perfect as the photo mode but it gets the job done and can allow you to make your epic photo finish or sick drift look all the better.

The Verdict:

While there are issues big and small with The Crew 2, it’s still a lot of fun thanks to its varied content offerings and massive world. It almost comes close to meeting its full potential but it’s still an enjoyable follow-up to Ubisoft’s first entry in the racing franchise. There’s clearly a foundation for something much grander and I hope Ivory Tower can learn from their shortcomings here and deliver the ultimate racing game that rivals the likes of Forza Horizon with The Crew 3.