The Crew preview: cross-country motor mayhem

Have you ever wanted to road-trip across the United States? Ubisoft’s upcoming game The Crew gives you the chance to do just that (and a lot more). I got a chance to go hands-on with the racing game, which is due out this November, at PAX Prime in Seattle. I was pretty impressed with what I saw.

Visually, The Crew is nothing particularly special. I feel like I say this about all Ubisoft games, but it seems to be true: it looks good, but not great. If you’re expecting photorealism, you’re likely to be disappointed, but the game certainly doesn’t look bad. The Crew also deserves some credit for not suffering from any of the texture-popping that you sometimes come across in racers.

This game isn’t about visuals, though. It’s about depth, and it was clear even from my brief time with The Crew that this is a massive game you can do an awful lot in.

Ubisoft started us off in a four-player co-op mission that saw us chasing an enemy vehicle of some kind through the countryside, trying to smash it enough to destroy it before a timer ran out. There appeared to be a bit of a story surrounding this mission, but to be honest, it left no real impression on me.

I did enjoy the driving, though! Speeding through the countryside, whipping around trees, and smashing through fences is great fun, and because it was a co-op race, we were able to team up for some truly devastating double-smashes on our target vehicle. Although The Crew does have an open world—an Ubisoft rep told me it might take more than two hours to drive across it—it also has defined tracks for each mission. In this off-road mission, I flew off the track once and was promptly re-deposited where I was supposed to be. The game also has a “get back on track” button so that when you fly off course you can get back in a reasonable amount of time.

(See: Gran Turismo 6 review: is it better than actually driving your car?)

The other mission I got a chance to try was a co-op race, and we swapped the open countryside of the midwest for the sweltering streets of Miami. In that more confined space, we all found ourselves having a bit of trouble keeping up with our AI opponents, and I got pretty far behind thanks to some spectacular crashes. Ultimately, we lost the race, but at least we got to see some of seaside Miami before it was over.

I also got to do a little bit of open world driving in Miami, speeding around the waterfront dodging cops. The controls feel pretty typical for a racer, and as someone who doesn’t play many, I wasn’t able to pick up the controller and dominate, but I got the impression that with time it would feel pretty natural. I drove two different cars as I played the game, and they definitely handled differently, so it’s likely that you’ll need to take a lot of the game’s vehicles out for a spin before you find the best fit for your own playstyle.

You can do a lot of driving in The Crew: co-op and PVP/PVE races, demolition derbies, open-world police chases, etc. But another aspect of the game’s depth is that you can do that driving in a lot of different vehicles. The game has dozens of cars available, and each can be customized visually and upgraded internally. Visually, you can do things like change the paint color, add stickers, mess with the interior, and change your license plates. In terms of performance, you can swap out and upgrade virtually every part of the car. (Or if you’re like me, and don’t know much about cars, you can press a single button to auto-upgrade based on the highest-performance items you’ve yet unlocked.

My time with the game was short, but it was long enough for me to see that if you’re into racing games, The Crew is something you need to be paying attention to. It offers impressive depth in terms of track locations, racing modes, and car customizability, and it seems like the kind of game that fans of everything from Need for Speed to Burnout to Dirt might enjoy sinking their teeth into.

Disclaimer: Strife developer S2 Games paid for GiA’s travel and accommodations in Seattle. We accepted because we maintain full editorial control (we can still write whatever we want), and because we think our audience is genuinely interested in Strife and a bunch of the other games at PAX. For more information about our ethics policy, click here.

The post The Crew preview: cross-country motor mayhem appeared first on Games in Asia.

The post The Crew preview: cross-country motor mayhem appeared first on Games in Asia.