The Crew is not a lost cause
I have now 100% completed The Crew 2 and The Crew: Motorfest & I wanted to share some of my thoughts.
I want to preface these with the following;
The Crew was free at one point and the game hooked me. I bought The Crew 2 well before any controversy & after 100% I did not like it enough to buy Motorfest. It's a 70 dollar price tag as well - I am highly against this sudden rise in game prices so I do not buy games priced at over 60 out of principle. Motorfest was gifted to me by a good friend who knew I played a lot of these games.
There are major things to criticize about the games but I do want to give positives and credit where they are due.
Skip this box if you are familiar with 'The Crew' and what it is
The Crew is not just an arcade-style racing game.
Rally, cross-country, track racing, drifts, drag, street racing, boats & flying.
In the original Crew you could have 1 car that was part of many classes - a feature I found charming that they for some reason stopped from The Crew 2.
You could have a Mustang & have a Street, Drag and Drift configuration for that car ready. These are different 'classes'.
The point of the game is to buy/unlock cars, upgrade them and race said cars in whatever class they belong to. The game is always-online so you drive alongside other players in the open world.
Upgrading your car is an MMO-style RPG-drop system. You have 7 part slots, each race rewards you with random rarity items for those slots with random stats and random set bonuses.I have absolutely loved my time in The Crew & I really genuinely hope Ubisoft do better with it moving forward.
The developers deserve so much praise for these games – they are fun and an excellent experience despite it being wrapped in poor UI and predatory microtransactions.
Yes they are 'arcade-style' which a lot of driving purists hate. However, for someone like me (who does not devote their time and money into perfecting laps & simulation hardware) all of the different racing styles are fun & require different driving styles and skill sets for you to succeed.
Most of what I am writing here relates to The Crew: Motorfest as it’s been a while since I completed TC2.
What I loved:
📈The Progression System – I am a sucker for slot, set & socket-based RPGs and having it in a car game is surprisingly fun.
🗒️The Variety – Going from track to street to dirt in the same session sounds like a simulation purist’s nightmare but I absolutely love it.
🎁The Rewards – Slightly tied to the progression point but I am a loot whore, so when I find a treasure chest in the open world or win a race and get a massive list of Yellow, Purple and Blue loot my brain fires off.
🤡The Difficulty – You can adjust your car technologies and the AI difficulty to your hearts content. It feels really good to progress away from racing lines, ABS etc. Etc. When you get better and better.
👫The Friend Pass – Your friends can join you for free. The game is a million times more fun with your friends.
What I liked:
🍿The Amount of Content – There is an absolute shit ton of races to do in these games. I only put it in ‘liked’ because I don’t necessarily value games in hours played & the way it is set up holds the game back (more on that later).
🏎️The Cars – Perfectly serviceable amount & variety. A lot of cars have no customization options for some reason & they removed the multi-class system on stock cars which was a let-down.
⛰️The Place Settings – TC2 takes place in the entirety of the United States & Motorfest takes place on Hawaii. Can’t go wrong, Motorfest has massive summer vibes & feels really nice to play over the winter.
🖌️The Design Choices – The Crew doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s got a nice vibe, the animations & look of the game is all quite stylish & only in Motorfest does it sometimes suffer from the ‘Grey box, white text’ syndrome.
🛠️The Engine (pun not intended) - Racing does feel good & you can really get to know the physics & the car after racing a few times. I encountered maybe a handful of glitches over hundreds of hours.
What I disliked:
🌫️The UI – My word. Motorfest especially suffers from the ‘Free MMO’ virus of user interfaces. It took me way too long to get used to find anything & it is absolutely not intuitive.
🤐The “Plot” elements – The NFS games had better actors & some of these people mouth off to you, during a race, non-stop. There may be an option to turn that off or down somewhere in the settings but I just wanted to drive man. The only time this was cool was when a narrator was talking you through the history of certain car manufacturers as you literally drove said history. Less of the mouthing off, more of the actually interesting stuff..
😈The Online Play – People have either min-maxed the absolute shit out of the game or are cheating. People pull some ridiculous speeds and turns but I am unsure whether it is the netcode making mistakes or players pulling shenanigans.
📉The “EXP” System – You can unlock ‘passive talents’ with XP. This system is not explained at all, the terrible UI does a bad job of showing how this works & it is half baked. The only reason it is XP based and not story/progress based is because of the live service element.
🛩️Boats, Planes & Automobiles – In Motorfest the boats and planes barely get any content. It makes unlocking gear for them extremely boring & ultimately pointless when you only have a handful of things to do with them.
Furthermore – Certain classes get dropped completely until you unlock custom versions of the playlists. I think I raced a Rally class once or twice.
What I absolutely hated:
❌The Online Requirement – Need I say more? It killed The Crew 1. Do better.
🧑💼The Battle-Pass System – Unnecessary implementation based on an Online Leaderboard meaning that 99% of the time you get the participation awards. Specific cars get locked behind the Gold or Platinum tiers which min-maxers always push casual players out of.
👯“The Crew” - There is virtually no point and minimal extra rewards for being in a crew. This needs to be reviewed and done better.
🤢Micro Transactions – Puke. You’ll never trick me into spending real money to buy a virtual car.
I hope this all makes sense - did you play any of The Crew? What are your thoughts?