The Crew

It's hard not to like The Crew because beneath the tiring police chases, clunky physics and so-so graphics, there's a really, really great racing game, with an amazing open world to explore.

Great map and coop mode, but shows poor controls and some technical issues.

Ubisoft's Social racer arrives as a notable first attempt. There is some initial fun to be had in the game, however, there are some mistakes that we can't ignore that heavily bring the game down.

The Crew isn’t perfect, but it doesn’t have any game breaking bugs and the framerate is stable. It’s an enjoyable game when playing alone, but comes to life with multiple players in your crew. There’s a ton of content, a humongous world to explore and the addicting level system will keep you coming back for more.

The Crew is a huge racing game with an extraordinary setting and tons of contents that sometimes seriously lacks of fun due to an awful mission design and a bad balance.

Ubisoft’s familiar structural pitfalls like microtransactions, online-only play, and other trappings hinder rather than enhance, but those things have become par for the course by now. Thankfully, they don’t mar the overall experience, and that was an overtly positive one for me.

For all its structural successes, The Crew is also slightly bland and lacks of a deep control scheme or mission variety.

Online play is very rewarding, but is over-emphasized at times. With such a massive world to explore, and an addictive leveling system, fans of this genre will be busy for months to come.

The Crew is a successful open world race game with RPG elements. Its only downfalls are the simplistic storyline and the absurd micro-transactions.

The Crew isn’t a revolutionary MMO, nor is it a revolutionary racer. It is however a fun racing game that happens to be in a persistent online world and has a ton of replayability. Simulation fans won’t necessarily love it (cars magically heal as you drive, for Pete's sake), but fans of Need for Speed, Test Drive Unlimited, and so forth will find a lot to like. Ubisoft claims they have big plans for the game’s future, and even more for additional entries down the line, and I’ll be watching. Ditch the lame story, work in more customization and more exciting races, and The Crew is solid roadwork for what could be a fantastic MMO ride.

The saddest thing is that The Crew isn’t bad, it just underwhelms to such a degree that it’s impossible to recommend right now. If the UI gets a bit of an overhaul and there’s some tweaking done to make it more user-friendly, then that could change.

The Crew promises much, but fails to hit the goal. Horrible rubber-band AI, wobbly handling and outdated graphics eat away from the wonders of exploring the States. The multiplayer side feels overly hyped, other players are too often a rare sight.

The racing component is fun, the US map is really huge, and the sense of progression is very good, but in the end The Crew falls short of its own ambition, torn between a single-player arcade racer and a full-flegded MMO experience.

The Crew on the PS4 is a highly ambitious game that succeeds on some levels and fails on others that results in a standard racer.

Take away its vast environment and The Crew is decidedly mediocre. But the enjoyable story and great sense of actually driving, whether alone or solo, means there's plenty of fun to be had all the same.

The Crew is a social coast to coast trip in a brilliant, virtual version of the USA. Perhaps it is a little bit too arcade-ish and not as beautiful as other recent racing games, but it drives over its flaws.

The Crew boasts a humongous game map, contains hundreds of mini races and has some RPG elements. However, highly skilled npc AI and frequent connection issues might drive people mad.

There's a lot to do and like here but ultimately, the questionable AI, disappointing story and annoying "always online"-policy bring The Crew down to a unnecessary "mediocre" level.

As far as road trips go, The Crew is about as average as they come. There are some fun times, but you may be surprised to discover that America is a pretty empty place.

The Crew is a vast, expansive driving game that packs a solid story mode and tons of things to do. However, much of its endgame content feels like repetitive filler.

Beyond it's magnificent Open World and it's very polished technical aspects, The Crew is an empty shell, lacking content and plagued by microtransactions that turn the PvP into a pay-to-win. Clearly a disappointment from the studio that gave us V-Rally and Test Drive Unlimited.

The fact that developers managed to pack the whole country into a game is certainly worthy of respect. But at the same time they managed to screw up in the most important aspect of racing – the behavior of the car. [Jan 2015, p.78]

The Crew is a symphony of poorly executed ideas, like that friend we had in high school that started describing an interesting idea and then killed it with a bad joke. It’s just a game that it doesn’t rise above average.

The Crew isn't as fast or furious as we want it to be, but it's an ambitious opening chapter to Ubisoft's super-charged racer. [Feb 2015, p70]

Despite a huge open world, almost the entire United States territory, The Crew lacks in the replay value of its multiplayer, a story full of cliches and not so next-gen graphics. The game has its good moments with scripted events during missions, but after a while, they become boring and repetitive. If you love to drive for hours exploring, doing random events and looking to outrun the police from time to time, this game might be for you, otherwise stay away from it.

There are many reasons why The Crew should get an F: steering the cars is iffy, the story is horrendous, the multiplayer options are weak and visually speaking the game is simply average. That being said, if you are a roadtripper, the gorgeously designed, huge gameworld makes up for that.

The Crew can be enjoyable for some casual cross-country joy rides, especially if you have some friends to drive along. However, it comes up entirely short of most of its goals, and makes a wreck of car handling and competition for the sake of lackluster MMO mechanics.

An ambitious hybrid of racing and role-playing that fails to deliver a meaningful story or make the most of its extraordinary setting. [Feb 2015, p.85]

The in game world is absolutely huge and it’s filled with a great deal of content – it looks brilliant at times too. Although the handling takes some time getting used to it does feel natural as the game begins to open up. Despite that, the driver AI can be infuriating at times, as with the traffic placement which I refuse to believe is a coincidence. The online doesn’t feel well integrated either and the story is uninspiring.

It may have the prospects to become a great MMO racer, but at the moment The Crew is not able to deliver ever a fragment of what Reflections promised it would offer with this racer.

The Crew is a mammoth title: Ubisoft wanted at all costs to bet on the vastness of the map and on the amount of things to do, but we would have really preferred events on a smaller scale than an area that turned out to be as wide as it is absolutely useless.

Ubisoft may want us to form crews and connect with fellow racing fans, but as it stands, we'd rather just get behind the wheel, turn up the radio and explore this staggering country by ourselves.

The Crew offers these moments of emergent gameplay for those willing to go find them but, tragically, doesn’t have them naturally stitched into its design upholstery. As such, the potential is too often unpicked by the game’s frustrating shortcomings.

The open-world aspect is one I found myself enjoying more often than not as having an entire nation to drive across was thrilling and quite memorable. On the other hand, unfair AI, an online multiplayer that is far from fair, and a spec system that kept me from wanting to experiment out of my comfort zone were just some of a few things that I felt are holding back The Crew from being the next great racing franchise.

I wouldn’t call it broken as such, it’s just so … meh. Not terrible, just far from mind-blowing. The big map is literally the coolest part of it. If you want a brilliant open world racer, go for Forza Horizons 2 instead.

Unfortunately if you attempt to play The Crew by yourself, are hoping for simulation racing with loads of detailed cars or state-of-the-art visuals, The Crew will likely disappoint on those items. This turns The Crew into an interesting experiment that only makes for a decent game.

Technical issues and shallow multiplayer waste the fascinating open world racer created by Ivory Tower.

If the Xfinity-branded hypercar race a few hours in is anything to go by, The Crew is an overt attempt to capitalize on the popularity of modern car culture, and it would seem entirely cynical if not for a few redeeming design decisions. In the world of modern racing games that's just not enough to earn a victory lap.

Somewhere buried in The Crew, beneath the bloated content and the MMO shenanigans, is a competent racer featuring the perfect road trip. But for a game whose primary strength is freedom, there should have been more objectives and more incentives to explore its world with friends, instead of copy-and-pasted skill challenges and missions tangled in a confounding plot that's hard to forget for all the wrong reasons.

Despite delivering an impressive playground that captures the spirit of America, The Crew struggles to build out a worthwhile game experience around it, resorting to frustrating missions, insipid storytelling, and off-putting microtransactions.

The Crew is an overly ambitious project that just doesn’t go the full mile.

It wasn’t terrible. Maybe I will play it again. And maybe I will wake up in a cold sweat after dreams of masochistic racing missions.

The world of The Crew is remarkable, but rarely has a great asset been squandered so tragically on a framework of dull grinding and insipid storytelling.

The Crew offers lots of unique road trips in a gigantic world full of content. But unfortunately we could not overcome the technical issues, sloppy graphics, bad driving behavior and other flaws this game has. It is awful to see all that potential go to waste like this.

The world is wonderful but the activities layered on top of it are awful. Wasted potential. [Feb 2015, p.74]

The ambition of The Crew is commendable, but either the concept is fundamentally flawed or the execution is way off. Either way, this is one race you should enter at your own risk. [Issue#252, p.58]

While moments of genuine beauty exist, they occur in the context of a game that otherwise simply cannot compete with its contemporaries when it comes to visual presentation - a symptom, perhaps, of the seven-year development cycle. [Feb 2015, p.104]

The Crew promised so much, but delivered so little.

From incredibly frustrating and punishing missions to overly perfect and maddening AI, this game pales in comparison to other offerings like Forza Horizon 2 on the market.

At its core, The Crew is one of the most ambitious games of the year. The problem is that the combination of bad design choices, poor performance and a certain lack of refinement also make it one of the biggest disappointments of the year.

A missed opportunity.

When The Crew puts you into races with good AI, and you get to race through interesting and varied environments, you get the feeling that you're playing a good game. When you struggle to find people to join your crew online, balk at the outdated graphics, and shake your head at the AI and the occasionally unpredictable physics, you realize: The Crew isn't that good after all. When you can't play due to server issues, you find a new game to play and leave The Crew in your dust.

And this is it with The Crew; it tries to do so much and excels at nothing. It falls apart on almost every level, and given the potential it had that is a damn, damn shame.

A title like The Crew has to be more than a glorified "Google Earth" simulator or a VOIP chat client - especially if it's advertised as a "revolutionary action car and driving game".

The Crew is a game filled with missed opportunities and unfulfilled potential.

I don't know what's more unfathomable: how all of these shortcomings made it into The Crew, or that they're piled high atop one of the most ambitious, masterful game worlds I've ever had the privilege of exploring. I've never seen a game deliver, dead to rights, on something that huge, difficult and elusive, then completely drop the ball on so many other basic fundamentals.

The Crew however lacks that indistinguishable something that other games sitting in the same genre have in spades, and without it my urge to play the game quickly dwindled to being almost nonexistent.

An odd mix of Test Drive Unlimited, Assassin’s Creed, and Destiny. And while the combination is tastier than it sounds it also has an awful lot of lumps in it.