Have You Played… The Crew?

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.

The Crew [official site] isn’t a great racing game. The car handling of this open world “MMO racer” isn’t great, there’s UI vomited at you from every corner of the screen, and it launched with so many problems that we never actually gave it a full review. It annoyed John a lot. But Ubisoft have this thing they do. Step 1: Release a mediocre game. Step 2: Make one hundred sequels of it. Thus, The Crew 2.

I’m being cranky. It’s really a good thing, because the first game still had something wonderful to it – a scaled down map of the United States complete with well-known landmarks like the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley. That alone was enough of a hook to make Adam and I embark on a cross-country race (but, er, only during a free weekend). Nevertheless, the school of incremental improvements of which Ubi is so fond will doubtless get applied to this sequel. And that's good good.

It would have been nice if they’d expanded into a new territory, though, rather than sticking to the U, S and A. I’m not totally sold on the need for airplanes, either. But if they can just sort the handling of the cars, get people connected easily and swiftly, and dial back the usual Ubi busy-ness, I’d happily take another long drive across the States.