Man, did I get the old bait and switch on this one.
“Hey Arend, you like racing games – how about reviewing the new racing game Speed Crew?”
An absolute no brainer for Game Chronicles, because they know I’ll take any racing review they are dishing out.
I accepted immediately.
Now, before I go any further, here’s a question I would like to ask you gamers:
Who here has ever longed to be a member of a pit crew on a racing team?
Yeah, me neither.
Now I’m sure a handful of you thought about it and said “yeah, that would be pretty cool…” And if that’s the case, then I have the perfect pit crew member gameplay experience for you in Speed Crew for the PS5.
Now Speed Crew isn’t a highly synchronized, half-dozen guys jump over the walls lugging four prewarmed tires a beer bong of fuel NASCAR pit crew simulation by any stretch of the imagination. Rather, it is a whimsical but frenzied puzzler that has gamers trying to diagnose and repair a constant stream of racecars using whatever tools and methods each level has determined are appropriate. The goal is to get as many cars fixed and back in the race as quickly as possible before the timer runs out – with awards given out in a bronze, silver, and gold style award system based on the total number.
The initial levels are quite simple and can easily be played with a single crew member. It goes like this: a car skids into the pit and the gamer steers his cartoonish pit crew member to the computer to diagnose the problem areas which become highlighted on the car. Which, in the initial levels, are always tires. This means the gamer has to run and grab a jack, get it to the appropriate side, jack the car up, grab a wrench, wrench off the bad tire, run the bad tire to the rack and swap for new, run back to the car, put the new tire on the axle, find the wrench, wrench on the new tire, un-jack the car, take the jack to the other side, jack the car up and repeat the process.
Just typing that out made me feel a bit of anxiety – mostly because I know that as the game ramps up difficulty, and suddenly you have more than one car entering the pit in separate lanes, they’ve put the computer on a platform up a set of stairs, they start making you repair the tires rather than replace, they make you hammer out dents, they make you…aaaargh!
Like I said, the first couple levels are fine and dandy in single player. But as this difficulty ramps up there is simply no way that a single player can manage to get more than one or two cars repaired before the timer runs out. This is when it became apparent that Speed Crew is at heart a classic multiplayer cooperative party game that can be played with up to four players either locally or online. Since I don’t have four controllers (much less four friends), and my kids are all grown and gone – it was up to me to take this onto the interwebs. Sadly, there were a scant few independent reviewers like myself who were actually playing this at any given time. So sadly, I don’t have much to say about the higher difficulty levels which I simply couldn’t get to.
What I can say is that what I played was actually quite fun, and the cartoon-like presentation in the opening scenes, cutscenes, and in-game was on-point. I was immediately transported back to the golden days of the really fun and genuinely funny party games like Sega Soccer Slam, Kung-Fu Chaos, and whoever those two plumber guys are. Actually, I never though those two fellas were particularly funny – but I figured I’d mention them because I might get cancelled by fanatic gamers if I didn’t at least tip my hat to them. Regardless, Speed Crew’s cutscenes have that hocky 1970’s old-school look that just drips with style, and I was absolutely digging it.
Speed Crew might not be a racing game by traditional standards, but the frenetic take on getting as many race cars serviced in the time limit definitely did end up leaving me as white-knuckled and mentally exhausted as any racing game ever has. And in the end, I definitely did enjoy what I could manage to play as a my mostly single player situation could afford. But for racing fans looking for a good party game to play with friends, I think they will find Speed Crew a fun diversion.
And you know, maybe it would be kind of cool to be on a pit crew after all.
