THE CREW 2
Live free, race hard in this buzzworthy, sunnier sequel
There’s a moment in the first race of the game, episode one of the Live Xtrem series – a sort of triathlon of motorsport races – when you approach the Brooklyn Bridge in your street racing car and the whole world folds in on itself Inceptionstyle, and you’re transitioned to a powerboat racing along the East River at high speed. That’s the moment when The Crew 2 boisterously proclaims what it is: a marriage of the sprawling environments of the entire United States with the highest of octane worlds of motorsports. But it’s also the only race in the game that does anything quite so impressive.
The game charts your rise from an insignificant, overlooked racer to a legendary one, codified by your social media followers – the true currency of 2018. Though, of course, there is also an actual currency – Bucks – for buying new cars (or, rather two currencies, as there is also Crew Credits, a premium one which you get for levelling up, but can also purchase with real-world money). You can gain followers simply by doing cool things like big jumps or drifts in Freedrive mode as you explore the world. But mostly you get more followers by winning events, which means you’ll unlock more Live Xtrem episodes and generally become a big deal.
FAMILY VALUES
The dark crime story from the first game is completely gone, and instead of having to move around in pursuit of a plot you’re given carte blanche to explore the entire map of the USA as soon as you finish the first race. The narrative is as loose as possible, split up among the four racing families you and your mechanic, Hiro, visit as you try to get that social media buzz going across the quartet of available motorsport styles.
Each of the four – street racing, freestyle, offroad, and pro racing – has its own mentor and rival figures, and a very basic storyline that you follow, which mostly involves them talking
about how cool their racing styles are and the sort of values they have. At first, each of these families offers you one racing discipline, with new disciplines becoming unlocked once you reach certain fame levels, to give you three to four for each. In all there’s a total of 14 different motorsports disciplines – a far cry from the exclusively street racing first game (which was expanded in its DLC). Finish enough of a family’s events and you can then challenge the rival in a final, climatic one-on-one showdown to unlock that HQ’s ultimate vehicle.
These events see you driving all kinds of vehicles on land, sea, and air – in cars, bikes, boats, and planes. But even within those vehicle types there’s a lot of difference and nuance. Street racing cars feel very different to drift cars, and there’s even quite a bit to distinguish aerobatics planes from air racing ones. You have to applaud the amount of identity Ivory Towers has managed to give each individual discipline, even if they’re not all created equal. The bikes feel weirdly stiff across the board, with the Motocross events being a standout weaker point in the game; and it’s clear that street racing, rather than circuit, remains the dev’s passion.
CRUISE CONTROL
The Crew 2 is quite an arcadeyfeeling racer, and it’s more about having fun driving, riding and flying than being a perfect simulation of any particular motorsport. Which can often be a great thing, as there are many colourful parts of the United States to compete in events in. It’s not really a game about crashing or buckling your rides, though there is a level of surface damage after a few bumps. Crash too hard and the screen will just fade to black before depositing you back on the track. Veer too far off course? Holding down both ou and will give you the same result, though sometimes the checkpointing for where the game dumps you can be a bit weird, especially on the races with very long, spreadout checkpoints.
As much as we love crashes, it’s okay with us if that’s not really what the game is going for. But it throws many ‘cool’ moments at you, like demanding you make some super-tight corners, or insisting your pull off many, many jumps, which make the bizarre stiffness of the cars very obvious. Jumps become a lot less fun when you just land with no real sense of impact. I’ve winced more when I’ve just lightly knocked another mug with my own by accident as I got it out the cupboard.
LAND OF THE FREE
Given the sheer number of events, and the way they’re so spread out across America from the very get-go, with more being unlocked periodically, you’ll find there’s little reason to cruise in Freedrive most of the time. Much less than in the first The Crew, which is
“IT’S MORE ABOUT HAVING FUN THAN BEING A PERFECT MOTORSPORT SIMULATION.”
something of a shame as the visual design feels much more vibrant this time. Skill events (small challenges that litter the world) feel much more sparsely distributed than before. What’s more, by only rewarding you with a tiny amount of followers and bucks, and no upgrade materials, they feel largely pointless, which doesn’t help make exploring the whole world any more appealing a prospect. With a lot of the events being fairly contained, you unfortunately miss out on feeling part of The Crew 2’s most impressive feature: that huge, varied world. After a while you’ll probably end up just selecting the events from a menu and instantly teleporting there anyway, with the end result that you don’t really appreciate where the events are taking place.
The Crew 2 is often at its best when it’s utilising its world to the fullest. There are not that many Live Xtrem events, but they do a great job at mixing up some of the environments – like skidding down the Grand Canyon in the snow. Rally Raid also does a great job of this by giving you very spread-out checkpoints, challenging you with how you plot your routes as part of the event. Only winning nets you loot rewards, so it can often feel hard to upgrade your favourite vehicles without grinding easier races, which does take away from the freedom a little bit. It’s not really a game that feels like it needed a loot system, and it’s most enjoyable when it’s just allowing you to mess around, which it doesn’t do quite enough of its own volition.
VERDICT
Zooming around highways, waterways, and skyways is a real blast, despite some wonky vehicle physics. And just soaring through the air is a soothing experience. Oscar Taylor-Kent