The Crew 2 is an open-world racing video game that allows players to control a driver range of vehicles; these include airplanes, cars, motorcycles, and boats. Developed by Ivory Tower and published by Ubisoft in 2018, this game features both single player and multiplayer. You and up to three online friends can journey in an open-world environment designed as a scaled-down recreation of the United States. You could say it is the actual definition of an open-world racing game.
The Crew 2 allows its players to switch between several vehicles almost immediately. This is the game's most significant selling point; you can be cruising along the road in a car, then transform into a plane taking into the air, before changing into a speed boat, taking charge of the water. Being able to switch modes is fun and exhilarating, and this gives the player a feel of playing several games in one.
In The Crew 2, players are challenged to master several racing disciplines provided in the game. You'll find street racing, open-wheel racing, off-road buggies, speed boat racing, and several others on the menu too. These are all classified into four "Motor families," which are: street racing, pro racing, freestyle, and off-road. These families all have their distinct progression paths and loosely themed activities.
All the features of the Crew 2 seem great, but is the game satisfying? Well, let's find out.
The Crew 2 Presentation
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Starting with its presentation, let's talk about its visuals first. The game's visuals are great; Ubisoft's developing team put an incredible game engine that recreates the environment beautifully. You can drive non-stop between cities in your supercar, just enjoying the change of view around you and visiting several well-known landmarks, giving you a fun experience.
The world around you also doesn't feel too empty, as there are characters in the environment. Witnessing the weather change and the day/night cycle in an open-world environment is beautiful.
Speaking of the sound of the Crew 2, the music is fine, but compared to recent racing games isn't quite as capturing as others and could have done better. You can also switch the music off if it doesn't help or if you're not quite a fan of their tunes.
As for the voices, the effects of this game are fine, but the characters' voices are crappy and could either be too loud or too low, depending on the character speaking, none of which sound good. The dialogue isn't great either, and conversations seem somewhat childish, heightening the desire to skip all places where conversational scenes appear.
The Vehicles
There are over 400 vehicles featured in The Crew 2. They are beautifully designed, and do well with switching colors, depending on your taste; even the color of the interior can be switched, which is a really cool feature, but these vehicles look too good to be real. For example, if you hit a wall or run into another vehicle with your car, you'll find out that there isn't a single scratch talkless of a dent on your car.
This surely is not how things go around in the real world (although how we wish). Also, the cars in this game are heavy. This produces a delayed steering response making sharp turns around corners very difficult, and the fact that the map is barely seen also doesn't help. Talking about the bikes in this game; they go to fast and are a little too loose from the law of physics when they hit a ramp.
The controls of the boats and planes might be less than what you would expect. The bigger boats have cool weights, and you have the waves to account for; that sounds cool, but the planes designed for speed, on the other hand, are challenging to maneuver, and this can be frustrating.
Another very disappointing feature of The Crew 2 is its excessive rubber-banding for the AI; this seems to pop up at every point in time, so much that taking just one wrong turn will lead to your opponents coming up behind you and overtaking you almost immediately and the chances of you doing the same in return is fairly slim. This means that winning the game is a little tricky, and third place may become a more feasible goal. This could have been made better if there were to be a rewind feature, but the lack of this makes can be pretty frustrating.
The Storyline Of The Crew 2
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The narrative of The Crew 2 is almost non-existent. You'll get to meet several characters, but they are forgettable; they might even have no names and do not matter in the game.
The Crew 2 is designed so that you have followers that you need to gain to unlock other events in the game. You start from the "anonymous" status, and as you win more games, you get more followers.
Depending on your personal views on social media, you can either think of the "following" system as natural or cringy. However, a disappointing feature is that even though you can pull off real cool stunts like flying over a hill or twirling down from the top of a cliff, no matter how incredible your stunts are, The Crew 2 has no rewards for you; you won't gain a single follower with your stunts. This makes cool stunts less desirable since there's nothing in it for you (well other than the moment of fun itself).
While traveling through, you'd occasionally see a pop up on your screen telling you to discover a landmark or an animal. Still, you might as well not bother yourself about it if you're the type that wants to unlock new events because you'd need to travel fast and straight to unlock them.
Overall, the Crew 2 seems to be a decent game with several shortcomings. However, trying it out would not be a bad idea. There's certainly many worse games/simulators out there.