The Crew 2 Review

After 30 hours, The Crew 2 has left me with many great memories. They're not filled with the kind of story that springs from exploring the open world and its systems, nor are they moments that involve messing with strangers - The Crew 2 is lacking in both aspects. Instead, my memory is filled with incredibly curated vehicle and track activities: the unrealistic, the impossible, and the fun. It's surprising to see how much The Crew 2 differs from the original game. There's been a marked shift in some of Ubisoft's open-world titles, moving toward a focus on player-based development – ​​lots of optional activity options, non-linear structure, rewards for doing anything – and The Crew 2 benefits significantly from this direction. The grisly crime angle of the original game is gone, and instead, The Crew 2 picks up reams of pages from the Forza Horizon book. The game center at the national sports festival where you, a rookie, are ready to become the next big star. While the setting is conventional, and the focus on social media fame is obnoxious, what this game brings is a colorful and cheerful vibe, an impressive variety of disciplines, and excellent arcade driving on land, water and through air

Despite the game's focus on real-world branding and televised motorcycles, The Crew 2's greatest asset is its willingness to be silly. Racing in The Crew 2 might involve jumping your street race car from a skyscraper, or your friend's powerboat from the Hoover Dam. They might include making high-speed touring cars go head-to-head through the tight, windy hills of Hollywood, and motocross bikes taking jumps across freighters and highways just before you transform into a propeller plane like some kind of extreme sport. It's a game that would cover Los Angeles in three feet of snow for no logical reason other than the cold roads making for more thrilling street races. Abundant nitro boosts, uncomplicated drifting, and generous rubber bands also help keep the ride interesting when things are relatively tame. As a game with an Open World, races and challenges are naturally discoverable and begin when you find them at certain points on the map. However, playing The Crew 2 with Open World exploration as your primary means of moving from activity to activity reveals the game's big downfall: it's too big, and all the interesting activities and locations are scattered around as well. The game hides a number of boxes with vehicle components throughout the map, which you can hunt using a distance tracker, but even this feels too few and far between.

But with that in mind, The Crew 2 thankfully makes it easy to cut your way through player-friendly shortcuts. The game has the option of viewing all 120+ major activities and countless skill challenges (featuring things like escape, slalom, and helpful photo modes) in a categorized view of categories, with the option to not only set waypoints to them, but get started right away wherever you are in the world, free of charge. Loading times in The Crew 2 are impressively short all around, so if you want, you can churn through races and back-to-back challenges very quickly and efficiently collecting progression points, earning money, and establishing a leaderboard position from the moment you started. This is a convenient choice and gives the impression that the game is time conscious. Likewise, any activity can be restarted or canceled in seconds if you experience poor performance, and there's a quick back-on-track feature you can use at any time. When you're not at an event, you can switch to any vehicle you own immediately, without penalty, and without having to go anywhere. That on top of being able to assign favorite land vehicles, boats, and planes to your right analog stick to allow for a momentary shift during free-roam exploration, which provides its own kind of fun, for example, flying into the stratosphere with your plane buddy before switching to a boat and back to Earth. Every vehicle available for sale is also available for a test drive buddy at a moment's notice.

The variety of different vehicle disciplines in The Crew 2 is truly impressive - each of the 14 styles is very unique from the other. Whenever I get tired of one method of competition, I can quickly jump to another which has a completely different feel. Each is placed in one of four "Families" that you are free to move between to capture your overall progress: Road (street racing, drift racing, drag racing, long-distance hypercar racing), Offroad (cross-country raids, motocross, loose surface rally), Freestyle (airplane aerobatics, jet sprint boating, monster truck), and Pro (power boating, air racing, touring car, and grand prix). While The Crew 2's disciplined execution may not completely satisfy those of a particular style, it does a great job of making each feel accessible, fun, and unique. I'm usually too intimidated by grand prix racing to try it in any other game, and I would never even consider the idea of ​​playing a power boating game. However, Crew 2 encourages you to try a little bit of everything, and that's easy thanks to the game's approachable arcade-style mechanics, as well as the prospect of seeing even more beautiful, ludicrous tracks.

The tracks are of course another highlight of the game, as there's nothing new attached to virtual tourism in The Crew 2. You'll probably recognize the iconic structures, but there's also enough abstract detail that contributes to the atmosphere and character of the city. And, like the original game, The Crew 2 does a great job of building a smooth, recognizable American version to drive, whether it's a defined top-to-bottom endurance race or a self-tendered recreation of a trip you took a few years back. . Travel across the country feels down to earth, as you drive through cities turned industrial estates and farmlands, into plains, deserts, forests and rural areas, occasionally flying with a small town now and then.

And whether you're driving, boating, or flying across The Crew 2 America, it's a mostly scenic ride. The natural environment of the game, especially the bodies of water and sky, looks fantastic, as do the weather effects like snow and rain. Everything is upgraded to stunning heights with great lighting, though the continuous day/night cycle and weather can be an occasional inconvenience during some events - whether it's the afternoon sun in your eyes, snow blocking track obstacles, or having to fly through tight canyons. in complete darkness. Where visuals seem shaky is in dense urban areas. You probably won't see the buildings when you zoom past them at 200 km/h, but it's slower and you can't help but notice how innocent they are, especially in broad daylight with clear skies. Character models, on the other hand, always look very basic, no matter the situation.

The game's RPG-style vehicle upgrade system returns from the original game, though it still doesn't feel very meaningful. You'll receive loot after each race in various rarity stages (common, rare, rare, epic), and each corresponds to a specific vehicle part and has its own power number, which contributes to your vehicle's overall power number. There are a few minor benefits to this system - all vehicles of a given class, despite having different power levels in their stock configuration, will maximize the same amount, meaning you can stick with your favorite car all the way up to and through the end of the game.

But while some pieces come with unique gameplay benefits, and more professional tuning options eventually become available, I found the upgrade system pretty easy to overlook - simply equipping the one with the biggest numbers was all I had to do to stay competitive. However, if you have multiple vehicles in a certain class and decide to switch between them at some point, stripping one vehicle of all its strong parts and reinstalling it in another is an annoying annoyance. The overall gear system feels like it's there to act as an additional roadblock to ensure your progress to the higher levels of the race remains gradual, There have been a few times where I've felt the need to replay a number of previously won races to gain parts- higher class sections to give myself a reasonable chance at a later date. Another obstacle is the cost of the vehicle that you have to buy to be able to participate in certain disciplines. Buying a vehicle to gain access to an advanced discipline like aerial racing or a grand prix is ​​expensive, and will usually empty your in-game wallet completely. I don't need to dip into the game's real-world currency equivalent of progressing during my gameplay, but those looking to keep the garage stocked with lots of different cars will likely have a tighter time with the in-game gameplay.

The Crew 2 allows you to form a party with three other players to explore and participate in events together, however, at the time of writing the game doesn't offer a meaningful way to interact with players outside of your party, despite their apparent presence in a different world. always online. Other than manually inviting them to your party via the list menu, there's no way to officially challenge them to a race in any capacity. Ubisoft has stated that the player-versus-player lobby is planned as a free content update in December, on top of new vehicle disciplines and other updates, but they're not in The Crew 2. Crew 2's open world feels too sparse to be interesting enough for anything other than some light virtual tourism, and it's easy to underestimate it for that. But it also provides the landscape for the most memorable experiences in the game, and this can come quickly and quickly, if you so desire. There's always a laughable twist or spectacular moment, whether it's sliding off a cliff in the snow-covered Grand Canyon before turning into a boat to storm the Colorado River, or gliding down a mountain at a spectacular sunset in a rally strike.

Conclusion

The Crew 2 is big, confident, and filled with arcade racing action - land, sea and air. There's no doubt there's still something interesting about racing games that let us drive an F1 car across the Golden Gate bridge, fly a Spitfire through the Grand Canyon, and crash a monster truck through Central Park, but the uneven presentation, lack of events that use the best features, and The PvP absence is disappointing.