The Crew Review: Driving With Friends (The Geek Culture)

A few years ago, Ubisoft released Driver: San Francisco, an interesting open-world game that provided a unique wrinkle for the series, one where you could literally jump from car to car, all in the name of pursuit. It was a fun game, albeit a little under-marketed in favor of bigger titles from the company – which is a shame, because the potential was definitely there. Now, while we don’t have a Driver game for this new generation (at least, not yet), we do have The Crew, the latest effort from the team at Ivory Tower.

This time around, you don’t get to jump from vehicle-to-vehicle, but there is an interesting wrinkle here as well, one that has reliance on having friends jump in and join you to unleash vehicular chaos. It’s a rather handy factor to consider, especially with pursuit missions, when a bugger of a driver keeps making the slip on you and getting that much further away from getting bumped. Okay, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s rewind. In The Crew, you’re Alex, a driver wrongfully accused of murder who’s given the second chance to get back on the road when a government agency approaches him to go after a kingpin.

What follows is an open world racing adventure where you chip away at his empire piece by piece, completing missions and basically getting the most out of your ride in the process. It’s an interesting set-up, but the story kind of takes a back seat to structure as you complete missions. And here’s where the game begins to run into a few problems. On the one hand, the open-world missions are pretty cool, and some of the mini-challenges you’ll stumble across along the way are fun, whether it’s racing through slalom challenges or finding hidden radar stations to uncover other parts of the map.
On the other, there are these missions that can take forever due to poor decisions with programming the game. Some races can actually take upwards to an hour (!), an uncommon trait for a racing game. Furthermore, the AI is unbalanced, with some drivers proving to be incredible dynamos with cornering. And for some reason, the police are extra relentless in this game. Even after making a few fancy maneuvers, they stay on you like glue, and when the mission is to actually lose them, it’s frustrating as hell. Ivory Tower should’ve taken the time to balance this over a little bit. Okay, a LOT.