The Crew Review – PlayStation 4

Open-world racing games are by no means new to the console gaming scene.  Ubisoft Reflections introduced gamers to the open-world racing game with their classic Driver series, but it was really the GTA- spinoff Midnight Club franchise that gave gamers the thrilling sense of speed in a free-roam setting.   Since, gamers have been enjoying open-world exploration and racing in games like EA’s Need for Speed: Most Wanted and Burnout franchises, Atari’s Test Drive Unlimited series, and now in Ubisoft’s newest release – The Crew.

The Crew was developed by Ivory Tower Games with help from Driver developer Ubisoft Reflections.  This is fitting, as much like the classic Driver franchise; The Crew is a story-driven racing game that places gamers behind the wheel of an undercover operative infiltrating an underground vehicular-based crime syndicate called the 5-10 Gang.

The gamer plays as Alex Taylor, a skilled driver from Detroit who has already served five years toward a 13-year sentence in prison, after being framed for the murder of his brother, Dayton – former leader of the notorious 5-10 Gang.   From the expertly produced opening cutscene, the gamer knows that Dayton’s killer was actually the then vice president (the “V-6”), and now president (the “V-8”) of the 5-10’s, Dennis “Shiv” Jefferson.  Alex stood witness to the murder, but was framed by FBI Special Agent Coburn, who seems to have some in with the 5-10.  It’s for this reason that when Alex is approached by the attractive FBI’s Agent “Zoe” with an offer to go undercover and take Agent Coburn, Shiv, and the entire 5-10 Gang down from the inside, he jumps at the opportunity.

Sure, the story hackneyed and predictable, but the top-notch production quality – especially the excellent voice acting and character modeling – delivers an experience bordering on cinematic.  Sadly, that same quality in production doesn’t quite translate to the in-game experience which seems to try to serve too many features for its own good at times.

You see, The Crew is a grand experiment of sorts; much like Test Drive Unlimited, The Crew aims to be a persistent online MMO experience integrated within a largely single-player storyline.  And while this has proven to be a very successful approach in medieval hack-and-slash adventure titles like World of Warcraft and The Elder Scroll, it has yet to really succeed in a racing game – and not for want of trying.  The aforementioned Test Drive Unlimited twice tried to achieve the MMO-driving experience and was routinely stymied by network limitations that continually had gamers jumping from server to server, often booted entirely from the game which was obviously not suited for this amount of live traffic.

I completely understand the attraction and enjoyment of online racing, but the MMO and social aspects do not appeal to the single player story.  The game implies that within any given mission, gamers have the opportunity to team up with other online players to take on missions as a co-operative team, in a Three Musketeers inspired “all for one and one for all” system.  Basically, all it takes is for one “Crew” member to meet the mission objective for all crew members to receive credit, and while this sounds great on paper, it does not translate so well to the game.

For starters, the entire Crew-building mechanic is one giant distraction.  I don’t appreciate random folks getting in the way of me achieving my story mode’s mission objectives –something that frequently occurs in The Crew.  Even if their disruption isn’t direct, just the fact that the screen is half-filled with random names and icons at any given time is confusing enough – but having Crew members get in the roadway during a critical mission or being barraged with the constant requests to join in on other gamers’ co-op objectives makes the game virtually unplayable at times.

This isn’t helped by the fact that the game defaults every mission to being co-op, in which it asks all the surrounding players if they want to join along your story mission unless you consciously select to play alone.  While help from others could feasibly pay off in certain missions, more often than not I found myself hindered by having others play along who might not have shared the same interest in my success given that credits are ultimately allocated by final standings pitting co-operative players against one another within each race.  Frankly, I’m the type who would rather try my luck alone and reap all of the rewards for myself.

And that leads me to by greatest beef with The Crew – the fact that you absolutely must have an active online connection to the Ubisoft servers at all times to play the game at all.  Yes, an ACTIVE ONLINE CONNECTION TO THE UBISOFT SERVERS – I said that correctly – as everything in the game is reliant on that online connection.

There is no offline version of The Crew whatsoever – the game will absolutely not work without a live connection to the Ubisoft servers, and if any part of that connection is broken the game will not get past the Ubisoft splash screen.  Whether it’s your neighborhood internet connectivity, the PSN network, or the Ubisoft servers themselves – if anything is “undergoing maintenance” The Crew will not work.   This complete dependence on the cloud is utterly ridiculous in a largely single-player console game, and the fact that gamers are not given the option to play their game offline is inexcusable.

That being said the rest of The Crew isn’t all bad – it’s just not all that great either.  This will be especially applicable to folks who have played any of the many similar, and frankly better, games that have been released within the past decade.  The Crew is a passable racer and does a fairly good job trying to emulate countless games – it just never seems to achieve the depth or quality of any of them.  The Crew is not as fluid as Burnout Paradise, not as thrilling as Need For Speed: Most Wanted, nor does it meet the open-world sensibility of Grand Theft Auto.

But what it does nail is the size and scope of the good old USA.  From the upper Midwest of Detroit and Chicago down the East Coast from New York to Florida and all the way over through the Rockies and into Los Angeles, The Crew covers a lot of ground.  Granted, the map is a bit distorted (as a Michigander, I’m almost offended by the mutant mitten represented within The Crew) and scaled down to where a coast-to-coast drive takes about 90 minutes.  And they get it all very right – from each city’s familiar architecture to the varied landscapes across this great nation, gamers will really get a sense of driving cross country in The Crew.

On one hand, we have serviceable, yet annoying, MMO-style gameplay that aims high but just doesn’t land on target.  On the other hand, we have one of the biggest and best representations of the United States of America wrapped up in some of the highest quality production seen in a console game.  And all of it – good and bad – is entirely dependent on an online connection for its cloud-based servers.   The result is a game that that I believe every gamer should check out at some point but is hard to recommend at full purchase price.

Additionally, Ubisoft and Ivory Tower need to rethink the cloud-based, online-only requirement, especially in the light of the Holiday 2014 PSN outage which rendered The Crew unplayable for nearly a week (and counting as of this update).

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Author: Arend Hart
Veteran gamer and review writer, Arend has been playing and reviewing games for Game Chronicles since the beginning with more than 400 reviews over the past 20 years, mostly focusing on PlayStation.

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