Hi everyone.
So today we're taking a look at The Crew a title by Ubisoft.
Now we had a look at this game during beta and there was an awful lot of
problems with it,
mostly on the technical side of things. Now
one thing that is always good to see is that those technical issues seem to be
have been alleviated, although not without the odd strangeness,
in the way the car performs as a result. Now this is an open world driving game where
you and your friends
can join together into crews to complete the various events.
You'll have to level up your car by gaining
new parts that you'll get from completing events and races
across the world. Now they have done a fantastic job
at realising this open-world. It plays
all the way across America so there's plenty of driving you can do
but the world map is not as big as you might expect.
In fact it actually feels quite small when you're driving across it in
relation to how big America is. It's probably something like a 1:92
ratio at from what I can tell online.
Well that means that this is a big world but don't quite expect the expanse of
driving that the trailers may have led you to believe.
It doesn't quite feel as big and expansive as that when you're actually
playing it. The graphics are
well middle-of-the-road in my opinion. They very much feel like Watch Dogs but just
with a better lighting model.
Do you remember how Watch Dogs was originally intended? That's kind of how this feels,
graphically at least anyway. The missions are reasonably varied as
are the cars. But I can't escape the feeling that it's not really achieving
anything particularly spectacular here. If anything I would say
everything's just a bit meh, it's very middle-of-the-road.
The cars are middle-of-the-road, the driving
physics is middle-of-the-road and the kind of excitement that you
get from racing is very middle-of-the-road. It doesn't try to
do anything
to kind of stretch you at all. In many ways that's the greatest compliment I can give to
The Crew is that it doesn't really screw up in any particular way
but it doesn't excel either. It's a very safe release from Ubisoft
and to be honest with you they really needed a safe release this year.
You know something that isn't trying to break-the-mould particularly and will
just sell quite well.
It's a competent game but it never really excites in the way that
other racing games of its type have. Things like Forza Horizon 2 where you
get a real sense of speed
and excitement and exhilaration while you're playing, seems to be just missing
from The Crew.
Perhaps it's the world, it's all very grey
even in the greener areas everything just feels a bit
grey and dingy. The kind of light and colour and vibrance just isn't there to kind of
pull you into this world in my opinion.
I don't mind the game mechanics although
they feel a little bit ham-fisted. Your car never really feels
like you're in perfect control of it. Always a bit too heavy
or too slippy, it's never quite right
even with the various upgrades out there. It just seems that all of the cars are not quite as
well
tuned as they need to be or partly, perhaps it's the kind of game they've gone for
here that is a kind of
high action driving game but mixed in with kind of some of the more
traditional simulator aspects but it doesn't quite blend as well
as in other games. Where The Crew unfortunately falls flat
is in its use of multi-player which I have to say this year
if I see yet another game come out with such
poor matchmaking I am going to go
crazy. It's not hard to come up with
a matchmaking system that means you can press a button and you'll be brought together
with other players who also wants to do multi-player.
What we have with The Crew and with a number of other games which doesn't work
either, things like Forza Horizon 2 is this idea
of meeting up at an event you want to do, pressing a button,
searching within your local session, as it were, which might be
30, 40 or a 100 players, who knows
and then it will match you to play people who want to do that event
or potentially other events. Unfortunately it just falls apart
miserably. I've never been able to get into a race with more than one other
player,
and that took an awful lot of time.
A lot of going to different races and finding nobody wants to play, nobody wanted to
play.
Could not connect to the server. could not connect to the server, and so on and
so on and so on
and unfortunately for The Crew to be something that is meant to be about your friends or about the
multiplayer aspect, to find that time and time again you can't actually
play with your friends or hell, even just random other people who want to do
multi-player
is frustrating. It seems this year we've had far too many games launched with
always on multi-player and actually it's completely compromising
the overall experience of the game. Get rid of the always-on multiplayer
and just have a multiplayer component people can jump into, actually that works
would be a really big boon I think this year. Obviously 2014 is over with,
hopefully 2015 a lot of developers will have taken some lessons from the debacles of
multiple game releases not working with multiplayer properly
in 2014 and 2015 will be a slightly different approach.
No, I didn't think so either but anyway for The Crew
things aren't all bad. It's not a terrible game
but at the same time it's not a game that is going to excel
in any one particular area. If you're interested in a driving title and you
don't want Forza Horizon 2, and you don't want Drive Club then The Crew
is actually a good buy. If you're on PC it's your only buy
from a driving game point of view. It's not a bad game
but don't go in expecting something that's truly revolutionary.
What it does, it does well. Where it fails unfortunately it fails quite well as well.
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