The Crew 2

 

I usually dont play many racing games, but this one caught my eye for two reasons. It was $1. And it is co-op. You can play the whole story mode together with a friend. Despite the fact that its made by Ubisoft, which I generally tend to avoid nowadays, we picked it up and played through it. The Crew is almost notorious now for sparking this "Stop killing games" controversy campaign, because The Crew 1 shut down its live services preventing players from playing anymore. So we cant even play The Crew 1 if we wanted to. I don't mind much about that, I'm just curious to play a co-op racing campaign.

The game doesn't really have much of a story, though. It starts off showing you this overview of a map of America. And to my surprise, one of the first things I saw is that if you zoom in, it will just keep zooming all the way, going from a map view to a full 3D view just like if you were playing the game. So this means anywhere in America basically you can go from a like Google maps view, to zoom all the way in to the real view which I thought was really cool and one of the most definining features of the game for me. Now, when I say the game doesn't have much of a story I mean there isn't really a clear route to progress the game. It's an open world game, on the map you have all sorts of dozens of icons showing you different races you can do. It wasnt until a dozen hours or so into the game we even figured out exactly what we were doing and how to progress the game. There isn't really a coherent main narrative that blends the whole experience together. Its kind of like, you just pick random races, that all more or less feel like copy paste derivitive almost Side missions, do these short races enough times and you get a cutscene here or there telling you that you're making progress. Frankly the entire progression path and getting a sense that you're actually accomplishing anything in this game is terrible and was one of the most frustrating parts about it. Even after Googling stuff we couldn't exactly figure out what we have to do to get through the main campaign mode. To say its a "campaign" is probably overselling the idea. Its more like a bunch of , what would be in other games , side missions, and when you do enough of them you unlock a final boss race and then the category is finished and you move onto the next one.

The game doesn't just feature street races, which might be what the developer tried to set its self apart with. Instead, there are four categories of races. Street race, pro race, Off road, and Freestyle. Within these cateogries there are also Sub-categories. For instance, Street race has typical street races, but also has Drag races, and Drift races. And Off road races can have the sub categories of Motocross, Rallycross, and Rally raid, and so on. Now the confusing part is every single one of these sub-categories also requires its own specific category of vehicle. So at first we were going to save up money and buy a car we thought was really cool, but that would be a massive mistake because we'd blow all our money on a single category out of like 20, and be screwed for the rest of the races. So instead you're forced to holdon to the money you make and save it until you come across a category of races that is particularly challenging to spend the money on a vechile to help you progress in that category. This was sort of disappointing , but also I guess makes sense. Theres just too many categories and too many sub-genres of vehicles. Like why do I need a separate car for Drift racing and Street racing? Why cant I just tweak my Street race car for the Drift category temporarily or something? To make matters worse, you cant sell cars. It costs a lot of money to buy a car, say, 500k, and you only get around 15k-20k per race, and the car you buy might turn out to be totally useless or you might not even enjoy doing that kind of race, so its a big gamble. I know theres a Test drive ability, but that doesnt really tell you what you need to know it doesnt give you a racing context. Just the fact you cant sell vehicles, even back at half price, makes this whole thing stupid. And even worse, is the prices for buying cars doesn't make any damn sense most of the times. The cars work by something called Perf level. And it seems like simply the higher perf level, the better, faster, more successful the car will be. So all it turns into is buying a car at the cheapest price with the highest perf level, that you can tolerate looking at. This was stupid because frequently I would find 300k cars with way higher perf levels than cars that cost 1.3million. I don't understand? Why would I buy the million dollar ones? Just because I like how it looks? Well this game doesn't reward you for playing the cars you enjoy looking at. Its almost a psuedo-rpg. Cars have different loot parts you pickup, and you have to keep upgrading your cars gear with the new loot you pickup. The loot even has different color schemes according to how good it is, almost like Diablo or some shit. Every time you put on new better loot, your Perf level goes up. So its just this simplistic brainless thing of staring at the Perf number and putting on gear to increase it. Many times I would be kicking my friends ass in races, or vice versa, but it wasnt due to skill, just simply I had better "stats" on my vehicle and thats that. Kind of takes some of the fun out of it that the stats matter so much its almost a damn RPG. And even worse, the co-op part of racing isn't very well done or matters that much. For instance, if your co-op partner is in First place, it doesnt really give you any incentive to try to overtake him or do good yourself. You can come in last place the whole game while your co-op friend is in first, and you'll still win the race with him, but more importantly, it wont even adjust your rewards accordingly. You get the exact same rewards if youre in first place, or last place, what sense does that make? It just seems lazy. Like atleast give me some incentive to play good if my friend is playing good, more money, or something!

Hows the actual racing gameplay, then? Well its pretty damn satisfying. For the most part. Like I said, the game doesn't only focus on car racing. Theres dozens of different categories, some are wacky and insane like Monster trucks, theres even airplane flying trick missions like Tony hawks or something, with a points system. Motocross uses this too. But the pure on road street racing feels satisfying and fun. The sense of speed is exhilarating, you'll be driving cars that go upwards of 250mph at times, which can be exciting to control well. Its enahnced by the graphical fidelity of the game is visually appealing at many times. Like for instance the game has a very popping color scheme that is just nice to look at. The reflections on the cars, especially the Rain and water reflections , look very good too and add to the chill, zone out vibe of the races. The basic gist of the racing is as you'd expect, you step on the gas, use your break as little as possible just around corners, theres a handbreak button but I found more often than not it would screw you over than help you, so I kept it to a minimum. You press the A button for a Nitro boost, and this refills automatically. I found a little trick that if you just tap A the whole time for slight nitros boosts, it seems to be better than waiting for it to refill. Maybe this is placebo, maybe not, but it sure seemed to help me come in first place a lot of the time. The game has multiple camera angles you can drive from, including a behind the wheel view which was immersive and fun to play with at times. The graphics are rough around the edges, though, like you can't hit any civillians they just sort of glitch out of the way, if you zoom in on things they reveal very low quality janky aspects to them like NPC faces, or buildings and random objects around the world. Some vehicles around the world are stragenly static and smashing into them doesnt move them, others will move. Some vehicles even spawn halfway into a houses wall, just glitchy weird stuff. Sure, its to be expected in a racing game, but has to be said.

The game has multiple different radio stations, a few electronica based ones, a Country station, Classical station, Rock station, Rap station, Basically everything except the two electronic stations were terrible. Rap station full of literal "who?" nobodies, Rock station with terribly cliche, annoying music, etc. The two electronica stations BPM and Ambient were atleast tolerable to listen to, and definitely hyped up the game and made it easier to get in the zone of racing while listening to these. I even enjoyed listening to these stations and without it, the game wouldnt be as comfy.

So the gist of the game is just doing these random side mission esque races, going back to the map, and selecting the next one. This was fun, for the first handful of hours. But the game is LONG. By the time we finished the whole story, we had played almost 30 hours! I don't know about you, but I don't think theres a single racing game out there that I could enjoy for 40 hours to completion. What the fuck were they thinking? Its an absolute bloated mess of incoherent routes to progress. And yeah, I was having fun for maybe 6-12 hours. But by the halfway mark I was pretty miserable and just longing for this shit to end. At one point I was hype because I thought we were nearing the end, doing these "Live Xtreme" races, but it turns out after you complete these, you still have to complete atleast 50% of each of the four categories to unlock each of the category bosses. Then after beating each cateogires boss, you unlock the Grand Finale. Well after realizing that, I was pretty pissed. The game already wore out its welcome by that point, now I was sick of it and almost considered dropping it. But we pushed on, grinding out the same copy paste generic looking races and getting it finished. The core gameplay of the racing is fine enough, just everything around that fact sucks. Like the UI, oh man, the UI is terrible. Theres like 4 different buttons for bringing up menus. You have the Y button that brings up this menu for Aborting, restarting, quitting the game, and the radio. Then you have Select which brnigs up the Map. Then you have the Start button which brings up your Player and vehicles, then you have Dpad left which brings up this camera mode. Then you have another button that brings up this Emoji mode. Like what the fuck!? Navigating the menus was a real pain in the ass like why is it done like this? Just put everything under the damn start button! What the fuck are you doing! Can't tell you how many times I pressed one button only to bringup a handful of menus I didn't mean to bring up. Clunky annoying shit.  And while the driving is fun, like I said, the grindy, incoherent routes to progress makes it feel like you're not even accomplishing anything most of the time. Or it leaves you clueless as to what the purpose of what youre doing is. I had to search Google and Youtube to try to figure out what the game wants us to do to progress. I was worried that slamming out dozens of these random side missions was even doing anything at all. I had no clue. The game just does a terrible job of explaining its self to you how to actually go through its main mode, it just assumes you want to sit there and grind meaningless copy paste content for hundreds of hours. I don't. I want to see what the main thing you're offering, and if I enjoy it, in a very extremely rare chance I might play all the optional stuff, but If I'm not over the moon about it, I'll take the main course and leave thank you. But no, they want to draw it out as much as possible, making you grind, probably hoping that you get sick of grinding and just spend your real hard earned money in their microtransaction shop to buy all the fastest cars to get through the game easier.


Too much of the game feels like generic copy pasted races with no unique content behind them. There are a few rare moments where its like "Oh yeah, I havn't seen this before. This is unique, this is a main mission" but these are few and far between. Some of the Points based missions has these unique explosive arenas and setpieces, some of the boat races have some unique courses and setpieces too, but for the most part the races almost feel auto-generated, making the grind feel even more meaningless beyond the satisfaction of controlling the cars.
Not all of the categories of races are enjoyable, either. I rather liked Street racing, All the motorcycle stuff was fun, theres a Destruction derby mode which was one of the most unique modes that had its own branch of gameplay mechanics which was fun, but far too short lived. Only like 10 short missions for it! The monser truck mode was pretty terrible and as barebones as it gets. Drops you into a generic skatepark where you do backflips and pickup some point tokens and not much else. The boat races were fine, but I didn't love how you have to hold Back on the stick to go faster, its kind of arduous and annoying to play like that. The Grand Prix races werent very fun, the cars turn weird and if you go off the road for a split second you go slow as hell. The drag races are strange, in that its more about timing these button presses than actually driving. You just go in a straight line and press the bumper at the correct time to shift gears, not much to it, but I guess a decent change of pace. The airplane missions are...meh. You have a list of tricks to perform and it tells you how to perform them, but the problem is I found that the tricks just dont register when they should. Like doing the Loops in the airplane I would keep doing the loops but it just wouldnt register unless I was aligned exactly perfectly. No visual representation or anything, just annoying to play. So while the game does have a variety of gameplay content, probably half of it isn't really that great. So you know what, its like the game is a jack of all trades but master of none. I think the game would of been better if they just honed in on one vehicle type and really tried to hand-craft unique setpieces and races for every single race, had way less races, but more memorable ones. Oh wait, its an Open world Ubisoft game, we cant have unique interesting locations , gameplay, or set pieces, we just need dull, generic copy paste shit so you can grind for hundreds of hours and hoopefully get enticed to spend money in our microtransaction live service shop. Oh yeah.

The game does have cutscenes not infreqeuntly, but they're very, very dull, safe, devoid of character or personality. Its just some cliche racing nobodies telling you drivel about how much they love racing or how cool certain races are. Like sure, they serve their purpose to give you the concepts of the different racing categories, but how did they manage to make characters so uninteresting? I bet I couldn't make characters so boring if I tried.Oh wait, Ubisoft.

What else is there to say? Well, The Crew 2 atleast sparked my interest in racing games, as like I said, the core driving is pretty fun and well polished, just everything around that is done poorly. The game drags on far too long, I was happy when it was finally over. Theres no end credits or anything either, you just do the Grand Finale, do a series of short races which was oddly very easy, then it ends and thats the end of the "story" content in the game. Then you can just drive around griding out the rest of the content, unlocking cars, whatever. But no thanks, I'm good.

5/10