[youtube]http://youtu.be/LVDUbfdfBPk[/youtube]
The latest title in the all of sudden very crowded open-world racing realm, The Crew, is out now. The game from developer Ubisoft allows players to team up online and complete missions across the virtual continental United States. Unlike the other open-world racing titles (Forza Horizon 2 – Xbox exclusive, DRIVECLUB – PlayStation exclusive), The Crew is available on most platforms, including the Xbox One, Xbox 360, PlayStation 4 and PC.
Check out the launch trailer below and gameplay videos from Darin on both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4.
Are you purchasing the game? How’s the online experience?
I am still waiting to see if PC version has chat in game. Really enjoyed Darin’s game preview.
Btw, I think they are really missing an opportunity by not having the different platforms playing in the same environment. I know they can’t, won’t or whatever you want to call it. But imagine if all the players on all the formats were all competing… It would be something huge.
I need a demo to find out how is this game and how it runs on my PC … but no demo available … I really miss demo’s … what happened to demos???
I have played through the game and am max level now. All the storyline missions done, just a wide open world now in which you can drive along and see some of the sights.
The handling of the cars is very arcade, in no way does it represent any real racing like iRacing, Asetto Corsa or Project C.A.R.S.. That being said, the handling is tricky sometimes, and quite fun most of the time. Let’s break it down to what types of cars there are:
Untuned: to start, when you buy a car it is untuned, normal roadcar configuration. Nothing special, though they do tend to be a bit sluggish and hard to control at higher speeds.
Street: Simply put, a street config in The Crew is just the same car as a stock one, but with a little more umpfh, still nothing special in the beginning, though handling at higher speeds is a bit better, and you tend to have a lot more grip in the slower corners. Acceleration and top speed are marginally increased. They work best on tarmac roads and are still decent enough off road, though not at all fast.
Dirt: name says it, a dirt spec car is better off road, however, it fails to get decent grip on both off road and tarmac. I have not yet found any race type that could be improved by using a dirt spec car. To me, this is a wasted opportunity.
Performance: High speed, higher grip. Absolutely no traction off road. However the top speed is all that counts in these monsters. They are fast, have good braking, and the grip needed to weave through traffic. By far my favourite spec.
RAID: I was very curious to raid spec cars, they should be the monsters of off road driving, high torque, high grip off road, and high end top speeds. in reality they do not have any of these. They lack decent grip and decent high speeds. And while driving in a cockpit view, you cannot see anything during a race. All the other specs have decent cockpit camera’s, but raid spec just fails to deliver in that aspect. They are the strongest cars though, so when you try to take down another car, you can dish out the most damage with this. When the chase goes onto roads though, it fails horribly because they have no grip, and absolutely no speed on roads.
Circuit: A pumped up version of performance, maximum grip, acceleration and top speed. However, trying to use NOS in these cars will most likely just spin you out, even at maximum revs in 7th gear, you get tyrespin and you go off.
All in all there are a lot of pro’s and cons to the game, it is new, but it has had a lengthy Beta phase which would lead me to believe Ubisoft did not test thoroughly enough or just did not take the time to get everything working. A lot of features are broken (challenges, PVP, hardware support). And worst of all there is a big issue with people just losing force feedback right in the middle of the game. i have been disconnected a lot, even during a 2,5 hour race. So yes there are issues. It’s still fun, but more of a compulsory fun then a real challenging game with well thought out mechanics.
Last but not least, I will name one very important (to me) gamebreaker: there is a catch-up system in it. To explain a bit, here is an example:
All cars have levels according to power, weight, braking, torque and a bunch of other stuff. These ratings tell you if a mission is hard, medium or easy to do with your car. So I have a level 600 car and start a level 300 race, that should be easy, right? Wrong! The game shows your AI competition to have level 300 cars but they can still out-accelerate you and have much higher speeds when driving behind you. When you are behind them, they tend to make more mistakes, crash into traffic more often and drive slower in general.
The problem I have with this is simply: if there is no difference in performance when it concerns levels and parts, then what is the reason for upgrading your car? I like to drive a mission with a little more power than my competition, but the game just says “hold on let me just downtune you a bit, give the AI a boost, and not tell you about it”. This, for me, is a lazy way of making a game harder to complete, the challenge is not there because the AI just sticks with you in your general area, no matter the performance advantage you might have.
The same goes for police chases, have a circuit tuned Dodge Viper? Standard police car will be faster than you. Have a Dodge pickup truck? Standard police car can ram you head on without any damage and you have the feeling you just hit a brick wall, still recuperating from the slam you get arrested almost instantly.
There’s a lot of broken parts, and Ubisoft doesn’t seem to have a sense of urgency (according to the forums and facebook and twitter pages) to fix the many issues like non-working mirrors and glitching mechanics. The game does have beautiful scenery, and a lot of options to it, it’s just the broken parts that will not let you really enjoy those things to the fullest.
in my opinion, I’d say this is a nice potential of a game, but it is a shame it is done so poorly.