The Crew 2 Review - Too Many Ideas and No Soul

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key review info
  • Game: The Crew 2
  • Platform: PC
  • Show system requirements
  • Gamepad support: Yes  
  • Reviewed on:

The Crew 2 is described as an open-world racing game, but that’s not entirely accurate. A fairer assessment would be a generic racing game, but it doesn’t have the same ring to it.

One of the problems with racing games in today’s market is that they are finding it very difficult to innovate. Unlike other genres where there is some room to maneuver, racing is pretty much about the same thing, and that’s winning.

Since developers don’t have a lot of leeways when it comes the racing part itself, they often try to find other avenues for innovation. They also often forget that games don’t have to be unique to be fun, but it’s a never-ending cycle.

The solution to this conundrum is simple, but it also requires more work from the developers and publishers. They would have to focus on the racing part and forget about implementing keywords like open-world to justify a part of the gameplay that’s ultimately useless.

Story

While the Crew 2 doesn’t actually have a storyline per-say, it’s important to mention it because the little that’s implemented is bad. And it’s not bad in a way that makes it good. EA managed to hit that note a couple of decades ago with a couple of NFS titles, but that’s pretty much it.

So, players take the role of an unknown driver that, for some weird reason, gets free cars, bikes, and planes to race in all sorts of events. All of these events are sponsored by a television channel (or maybe online channel) called Live.

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They stress right from the start that the goal is to gather followers and make money. The more followers you have, the more money you’re going to make. This sounds like something that a bunch of executives, that have no idea about gaming, proposed in a meeting.

“Hey, what do young people like?” It seems that the answer, in their minds, is followers. “People are going to go nuts when they find out that they have to gather followers,” is probably yet another stupid sentence that was uttered during that meeting.

The goal is to gather followers by winning races if that makes any sense. It’s a ridiculous goal and it devoids the game of any meaning.

I want to paraphrase one of the characters doing narration in the game so you can understand just how bad the dialog really is. “People say we are criminals just because we don’t play by the rules. But we are more than that.” I rest my case.

Gameplay

Remember when Ubisoft was all about climbing towers? They got a shtick and implemented it all over the place, with all of the possible variations. It got so bad that in Far Cry 5 they had to acknowledge it and ditch it by making fun of themselves.

Now Ubisoft has another stick, and that is the power level. First implemented in The Division, the power level is determined dynamically by the gear equipped by the player. The same idea was applied in Assassin's Creed: Origins. Not that it’s a bad one, but I didn’t expect to see it in a racing game.

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While pretty much everyone is demonizing the name and the concept of loot boxes, Ubisoft wanted to make look boxes one of the core mechanics for The Crew 2. Every time you win a race or finish in the top three, you will get some loot boxes.

These are practically upgrades for various parts such as the exhaust, engine, suspensions, and so on. You only get some generic parts which serve to increase the power level of your car or you other vehicles. The higher the power level, the more races you can access.

Another focus of the game is the fact that players can control cars, planes, bikes, and boats. Each category comes with its own physics and control scheme, making them entirely different from one another. Furthermore, each group is separated into various subcategories. For example, there are drift, off-road, and racing cars. The same is true for the rest of the vehicles.

We also have to take into account the varying degree of difficulty for most races. The ones that take place in cities seem to be most difficult, and I could swear the AI is cheating most of the time. On the other hand, the races through the countryside or the ones with the bikes are radically easier.

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You might think that you’ll only drive the cars if you don’t like flying planes for example. Well, you can’t do that. Players are forced to play with everything in order to get enough fame and unlock more races. It doesn’t make any sense because vehicles also have a “power” level, which means that everything should have been available from the start.

Also, one of the touted features for The Crew 2 was the fact that you can jump from one vehicle to another in real time, but I found it to be rather useless. True, it’s best experienced in co-op mode, but the game would have been virtually the same without it.

Graphics and level design

There is a good reason to link those two together. The graphics in The Crew 2, on PC, is OK. It’s not bad, but it’s not something that will be remembered. It’s well optimized for the PC, and it should run at least decent even on older hardware.

Unfortunately, the textures and the world itself are bland, and that is a real issue for level design. In theory, the game is open world (and persistent as if it matters) which means that you can go anywhere. Why would you do that anyway? The cities are practically empty, the few people walking around are pushed away by the cars, and there is nothing to do.

The only excuse to hit free roam is to find the loot boxes that appear from time to time and to go through some of the possible challenges, like speed tracks or jumps.

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And this takes us to level design, which is mediocre at best and atrocious at worst. Because everything looks like everything else, it’s easy to make simple mistakes during races because the tracks are not appropriately marked. Some obstacles can be easily broken through, but others are just walls, even if they look very similar.

To make matters worse, most tracks have shortcuts, but sometimes the checkpoints are not in the right place. You’re happy to have found a shortcut, only to discover that you’ve missed the checkpoint. I think that at a point in the development cycle the studio decided to switch from the regular racing model to one based on checkpoints.

And while we’re kicking The Crew 2 while it’s down, let’s not forget the terrible physics engine. I understand that it’s an arcade game and that it’s supposed to be “fun” but it doesn’t mean you throw physics out the window. Cars don’t get any kind of damage, hitting stuff (with the exception of walls) doesn’t seem to slow down the vehicles, and everything that’s playable ultimately feels like a box with nice shapes. At least keep the appearance of physics.

Real money

It’s no longer surprising the Ubisoft implements microtransactions in their games, and The Crew 2 has them as well. Basically, there are two types of currency in the game, the credits you get from racing and the ones that you can buy with your real money.

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For the most part, you can use the credits to buy new vehicles and to customize them, but don’t expect to win so much that you can buy everything. Since I invested all my money and loot in the vehicles that I already had, I didn’t notice a problem with the number of credits coming in.

On the other hand, if you’re one of those players that want to own everything, you might find it quite tricky.


The Good

  • Works great on PC
  • Is fun in multiplayer

The Bad

  • Bland textures and level design
  • Vehicle transition is somewhat useless
  • The open world doesn't have a purpose
  • Stop trying to convince people that followers are important

Conclusion

The Crew 2 is a modest racing game that doesn’t know what it wants. It features an option to switch in real time from one vehicle to another with no real strategy to make it work, the racing part itself is rather bland and uninteresting, and the level design is not great, to say the least.

The only motivation to play the game is to get more loot and improve the existing cars. While it’s not all that glamorous, it’s undoubtedly a much worthier pursuit than getting followers. Despite all the cool features that are touted, it the end is just a soulless racing game that doesn’t excel at anything but also doesn’t really fail in any significant way.

story 4
gameplay 7
concept 6
graphics 8
audio 6
multiplayer 7
final rating 6.5
Editor's review
fair
 

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