Buy The Crew 2

Released a few years ago, The Crew was Ubisoft's attempt at taking on the Need for Speed franchise by giving players an open-world setting to race in with a crew of online friends at your side. The story was pretty terrible, but the racing was decent. Even more impressive was the truncated open world of the U.S., which included loads of landmarks and scenery changes that were compelling no matter how fast you were going. While people disliked it at first, it eventually got better thanks to expansion packs that slowly improved the game. The Crew 2 is a sequel that few thought would happen, and it trades in the action movie plot for something more fun-loving and ambitious. Unfortunately, the whole thing is too ambitious, and instead of simply continuing the trajectory of the first game, the sequel is content to reset everyone's feeling about the series.

You play the role of a racer who's trying to make it in the world of motorsports. Despite the many opportunities provided by social media, your career isn't going anywhere. Luckily, you catch a break with a new TV show that's spotlighting up-and-coming racers, and your fortunes are turning around. Now your job is to get in good with the country's major racing disciplines, winning races whenever you can, and generally amassing social media followers to become a racing icon.

Depending on your real-life opinions on the topic, you'll either think of the social media followers mechanic as something that feels natural or cringe-worthy. It's still a much better premise than what you'd get from the side stories in the various race disciplines. Each of the four disciplines has you go up against a rival, but the game doesn't do a good job of making you care about beating him or her. Likewise, each discipline has a guide but no reason to care about their philosophies, both during races and in cut scenes. Either way, it becomes meaningless fluff.

The disciplines give the game the widest variety of racing vehicles ever assembled in this genre. Street racing gives you the expected modified street-legal race cars in regular races and drift events. Off-road racing takes a page from the original game's Wild Run expansion by giving you trucks, both regular and monster varieties, as well as bikes, so you can carve your own path for checkpoint racing. Professional gives you access to high-speed cars and boats, ultimately leading to F1 race cars. Finally, Freestyle gives you access to more ground vehicles and planes. The good news is that after you complete the introductory course for each of those disciplines, you're free to tackle any race you want in any order. You'll eventually have to complete almost all of them in any given ranking to gain enough followers to unlock the next rank and the associated events.

No matter which event and discipline you choose, you'll find their structure to be the same. You're given a placement or point threshold that you need to meet to win, and winning results in more followers and cash as well as randomly assigned parts for any vehicle in your possession. The parts are assigned ranks designated by color, so you want to repeat races to try and get better gear the next time around. Interestingly, the thresholds for each event are low, so you won't encounter a challenge until the events toward the end of the game — unless you switch off the difficulty right away. There's also no benefit to go beyond what is asked of you, so placing first in a race nets you the same cash and followers as getting third place, which is the typical requirement for these events.

One disappointing thing you'll notice is that while there are plenty of cool stunts you can pull off, they don't benefit you in any way. You can jump off a ramp to go over a bridge or take a flying leap over a hill, and it'll look great, but that's about it because you don't get any extra followers for the stunt. It doesn't seem like a big deal until you compare the game to the Forza Horizon series, which already had a follower system that rewarded players for doing things in official events. In that respect, The Crew 2 feels stingy for not following suit.

If that were the only disappointing thing about races, then it wouldn't be so bad. Unfortunately, there's a whole host of other things that will leave you frustrated. The excessive rubber-banding for the AI will leave you especially infuriated since it seems to kick in at the most inopportune times. Take a bad turn, and a pack of opponents immediately comes up and overtakes you, and you'll have no easy way to do the same in return. Get into that final turn, and there's a good chance someone will sneak up behind you and snatch the lead. It happens so often that getting first place is a miracle, and you'll be happy that getting third place is usually good enough.

One of the other reasons you'll hate racing is because of the physics. Piloting a boat or flying a plane are fine, but the road racing is bothersome. No matter which car you drive, they all feel heavy, so turning corners means you'll either wreck things or use your opponents as buffers to help with your turns. Wrecking things is a crapshoot, as the game is inconsistent with what can and can't be damaged. Hit a street sign, and you may be fine, but a downed parking lot gate is as solid as a brick wall. It also doesn't help that the map system is barely noticeable, and there's no racing line to help you get a better idea of where you can and can't go. There are enough frustrations that you'll restart races often, but even that process is cumbersome because you have to bring up a specific racing menu and hold down a button to get the race restarted instead of just hitting the pause menu and restarting from there.

In between you cursing out the racing system, there's a big, open world to explore, a hallmark from the first game that was carried over successfully. The map tries to cover the 48 contiguous states, but it's really is a truncated version that shows some major highlighted cities connected by short spans of dirt and highway. Traveling from one city to another with no load times is the game's real trick, and it does that very well. In addition, the game lets you switch vehicles on the fly with no loading screens. With the arcade physics in play, it's common to take your plane and transform it into a sports car while in mid-air and landing safely.

The Crew 2 is so proud of this accomplishment that it even has a robust photo and replay editor built in. The game is always recording the last 10 minutes of your gameplay, and that includes events you've already completed. At any time, you can pause the game to go into the editor and see the pathway you carved up in that time span. You can take your shot with multiple angles and throw in some filters to make the shot more dramatic. The system is easy to work with, and sharing those creations is also easy to do.

An open world like this absolutely beckons for some side activities. It's here that the game fails to do what its competitors have already done better. There are missions where you get extra cash for taking specific photos, and while some of them are completely reasonable, most ask you to find something akin to a needle in a haystack. It takes so long to find the targets that it feels like wasted time. Drops reward you with new parts if you find them, and there are also the prerequisite speed traps and jumps that can yield bonuses. The issue is that all of those spots are so far away that you never get a constant rush of things to do. There also aren't immediate leaderboards for the special sections, so you don't immediately want to try again since you don't know how close you are to the next leaderboard rung. The only thing you will want to do is random things, like donuts and loops, to grind away at getting followers, but you'll just use the map to warp between events instead of enjoying the depiction of the country.

For a title that's supposed to be about racing with real people all the time, the design betrays that concept. You can still call up your friends to get together and take on the AI in races or roam the world, but the campaign doesn't seem designed for crews and puts the focus squarely on driving solo. While you can get a crew together, you can't battle other crews because that feature isn't in yet. Finally, if you want to see other people online, that's a difficult task because the people in your world are either far away or leave just when you meet them. For a game that requires you to be online to play, it feels like the "online" portion is an afterthought.

Graphically, The Crew 2 is mostly good. As mentioned before, the fact that the whole world is displayed with few to no loads is amazing. There's a nice amount of detail to the vehicles and buildings, and the game is pretty decent about populating the world so it doesn't feel too empty. However, the graphical issues are tough to ignore. There's a ton of pop-up no matter where you are. From the city buildings to the rocks and trees, there's always something that has its level of detail just pop in. The lighting in places is also problematic, especially dark areas where your headlights barely do anything and you can't see more than a few feet ahead of you. The frame rate is locked at 30 but has a tendency to pause every once in a while. Finally, the character models look very bad, especially the dead eyes and emotionless faces.

Sound-wise, The Crew 2 could have been better. The music is fine, and while it isn't as arresting as other racing games in recent years, it gets the job done and done well. The effects are also fine, but what will be grating are the character voices. The delivery could either be flat or overblown, depending on who's speaking, but no one sounds good. The dialogue is also cringe-worthy, adding to the desire to skip all cut scenes when possible.

With Ubisoft's newfound focus on making singular games into long-standing experiences, there is hope that The Crew 2 gets better. In the here and now, it is a very difficult game to recommend. The use of multiple vehicles and presence of different disciplines is grand, but it doesn't help that the physics and handling for some of the vehicles feels off. The open world remains impressive but less so when there's barely anything fun to do. Although it's designed for constant online play, good luck trying to find someone who stays long enough for you to engage with, let alone someone who can witness the sweet decal job on your vehicle. It may get better in a year's time, but for now, The Crew 2 is more of a chore than an enjoyable experience.

Score: 6.0/10