The Crew Review

The Crew is an open world racer developed by Ubisoft which allows players to buy, customise and race cars against friends or in the single player races. The game is fully online but an offline option is to be available, the story races can be done either on your own or with friends as all races allowed for 4 spots to be filled by players online. The game we tried was part of the Closed Beta so everything is subject to change however the experience we had whilst playing was amazing to say the least. good points included the freedom to travel anywhere in America, the map is the entirety of America from East to West coast and everything in between. For an open world based around driving this is a dream world as America is one of the most popular roadtrip countries in the world. You can take some friends and cruise down the famous route 66 or take a huge across country trip fro New York to LA or anywhere in between. The customisation of the cars play a huge role in the game and the way the game handles this is fantastic, the car literally builds itself in front of you which looks pretty god damn cool. custom options are limited in the early game but as you complete races and challenges your player levels up, unlocking more upgrades for your cars a long with upgrades from the story. The graphics although not a major part to gameplay provide a whole new level of immersion with everything from high rise skyscrapers to the diners rendered in full HD for you to cruise past on your journeys. a full day and night cycle along with dynamic weather is included as we found ourselves covered in snow on our way up to Las vegas and then covered in rain on our final leg to LA. During our play test we completed the initial set of story missions which unlocked the freedrive mode and then checked out the car garage and customised ourselves a Dodge Challenger before hitting the road to check out the scenery. The game has a lot to offer from cruising in freedrive to racing friends getting bored of this game will take a while and with the possibilities of adding more areas of the world could we ever see ourselves driving across Europe in the next expansion? I took an independent drive across the map from New York to Las Vegas to Los Angeles and the full trip took around 45-50 minutes so there is a lot of map to explore and that was just a straight line, to go around the map fully, you are probably looking at a couple of days drive. The devs have really gone to town on this game, not to mention the cities look absolutely amazing with Las vegas being one of my personal favourites. Negatives on our experience included players spawning in the middle of the road and smashing into us which is just annoying, the controls seem a little jagged however we were playing on Keboard and mouse so maybe the controls would have been more fluid on a controller so not so much a problem. The AI in races seemed a little easy however the only races we took part in were early level races but there was no difficulty option so maybe this game is meant for online play to get the best from it. Obviously the social aspect of the game is a major part and unless you have friends willing to play or are going to make friends ingame you lose a lot of the social side of the game which is half the fun! There is also a premium currency in the game however it has not been outlines how these coins will be acquired whether through racing friends or purchasing. All in all The Crew is probably one of the best open world racing games around and this is coming from someone who doesn't really like racing games. It is definitely on my list for 2014 and with the release date on November 11th I will be straight down to my game shop to buy it. If i had to give a rating of my experience out of 10 based on the difference aspects i would say: Gameplay: 8/10 Graphics: 9/10 Overall Game Experience: 9/10 Total Rating: 9/10 For video reviews on the gameplay and the customisation check out the ProGamers YouTube channel. ~ Mike