The Crew 2

The original The Crew promised so much but failed to really deliver, so when The Crew 2 came along I was a little hesitant to jump into UbiSoft’s muddied waters again. But because I am ever hopeful that some one can challenge the dominance Fora has in the racing genre, I decided to give The Crew 2 a chance.

The first thing that you’ll notice about this sequel is that Ubisoft have turned everything on it’s head and have delivered what can only be called a Forza Horizon clone. And this is the best thing that could have happened to The Crew.

But it’s not a competitor to Forza’s dominance just yet.

After my first session with The Crew 2 I was left happy that the game was following the Forza Horizon festival formula, giving you many options as to where to start and what to focus on. One of the beauties of Horizon though is going off road and exploring. There is always something to find. With The Crew 2 however, because the game is a massive open world of the entire United States (scaled down of course), when I decided to drive to my next race location, I soon got bored driving through what was essentially an empty, uninspiring landscape. In trying to create a massive open world of an entire country, rather than designing a mash up of the best parts, The Crew 2 had managed to suck the fun out of open world driving.

But then after a couple more sessions with the game, and trying a few more different vehicles, including airplanes and boats, the game started to warm on me.

So I decided to get serious and work may way through some street racing.

And this is where things got frustrating again. With the street racing courses being filled with ramps and obstacles, it was far to easy to stray a little off course and get stuck beside a ramp, causing you to have to back out, and take another run at the ramp knowing that you’d never be able to make up the lost time and you would have to re-do the race, mimicking the frustrating style of street racing that Need For Speed is known for.

But street racing was only one option, from a varied list. And whilst the inclusion of boats and planes sounded a bit gimmicky, they do add some much needed variety.

The game looks amazing, though probably due to the large open world, collision and environmental destruction seem to be turned off for the most part, which really kills the immersion. Take a vineyard for example. Cut through one in Horzion, and you’ll leave a trail of destruction as well as amassing a multitude of points. Do the same in The Crew 2, and you’ll magically driving through the vines like they are holographic.

And I think this is the games biggest issue, that the playground is just to big. It’s too big to be populated with things to do and destroy, and it’s to big to make driving between events enjoyable, making it’s open world nature irrelevant at best.

But this is a great leap in the right direction for the series.

If Need For Speed style racing is your thing, but you want something more varied and a massive albeit fairly empty world to explore, then The Crew 2 is certainly worth checking out.

Rating: PG NOTE: Parental guidance is recommended for younger viewers.

GAMEGUIDE rating:

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