The Crew 2 Review (Xbox One)

How do you prefer your speed fix? Skipping across open ocean at 150mph in a highly tuned powerboat? Blistering asphalt with a 300mph quarter mile from a dragster? Making the air itself shriek for mercy as you tear through with a highly tuned air racer? Whatever your preference, The Crew 2 would like to satisfy your fix.

In The Crew 2, Ubisoft’s development team seems to have taken a leaf from the development of Saints Row IV. Where The Crew followed the well-worn outlaw racer looking for payback and justice formula of a storyline, its sequel abandons all of that in favor of simply throwing a massive number of possible racing disciplines at players. From expected genre staples such as sports cars, drift racers, and Motocross; to wildly unexpected oddballs such as monster trucks and Jet Sprint boats; The Crew 2 aims to cover air, land, and sea from coast to coast of America.

All of this variety receives some structure from the concept of race families. All of the available race categories fall under the purview of four “families” which are generally focused on one type of racing. The freewheeling Freestyle Clan are the mountain hippies of the game, aerobatics, jet sprint racing, monster truck competitions, and hovercraft (coming with the Gator Rush content update) fall under their umbrella. Pro Racing is focused on pure speed racing, with powerboats, touring cars, air racing, and Alpha GP under their jurisdiction. A third family is focused on off-road. Naturally their domain is rally cross, rally raid, and motocross. Finally, there’s the street racers for the traditionalists: the outlaw street racing group that contains street races, drifting, drag races, and hypercar street racing.

Each racing family has their own storyline of sorts, a multipart explanation of their life philosophy that gradually unlocks as the player completes races and challenges. There’s also an individual rival for the player’s character to eventually challenge. Success in that final challenge will unlock a special ultimate vehicle from that racing family.

The capstone of these rival races, and the game’s other big race series, the Live Xtreme Series are multi-vehicle event challenges. The player starts off in one class of vehicle, a Jet Sprint boat, for example, then transitions to a different class part-way through. Rival challenges usually split between two classes. The five Live Xtreme Series races go even bigger, splitting the race up into three or more totally different segments.

The incredible diversity of racing options is both The Crew 2’s biggest strength, and it’s biggest problem. In terms of the variety available, it’s a huge strength, offering something for practically everyone. However, all of these options sometimes show up as a lack of depth. For example, if a player really enjoys Monster Truck challenges, there are only a handful of them scattered throughout the game. Granted each event can be replayed on a higher difficulty, and then replayed with an eye on the event’s online leaderboards, but it’s still the same handful of challenges run over and over again for higher scores and better loot.

The loot system plays an especially critical role in player progression. Every vehicle can be upgraded in various ways, with parts acquired from winning races, completing challenges, leveling up the player’s Icon status, and finding random loot boxes scattered around America. Parts upgrades will increase a vehicle’s point value, up to the class maximum. Functionally, this means that even the lowliest starter vehicle can ultimately compete with the best in its class, since the hard cap on points becomes an equalizer at the top. However, in the larger classes, the gap between a cheap vehicle and the top of the line is so great that only the most dedicated of players with a very specific favorite ride is likely to put in the effort to get a low point vehicle up to the top of the class.

While most vehicles race in fairly standard road, track, or off-road courses depending on their class, a few of The Crew 2’s classes get unique challenges. Monster trucks race in point score competitions across massive playgrounds littered with jumps, half-pipes, and loops. Aerobatic aircraft compete to beat a set point score by performing specific three maneuver set cards and freestyle moves. Air racers fly Red Bull Air Race-style courses through pylon gates to complete time attack challenges.

Oddly enough, The Crew 2 still limits the maximum number of vehicles in head-to-head races to eight. A number of special races, primarily Jet Sprint and a very memorable Monster Truck race through Miami, limit opponent count even farther down to four. Whether this is a design choice or a technology limit is difficult to say, but the lack of large race fields is a jarring difference from some of the competing open-world racing games released for the current console generation. One further indication that the game engine is being pushed to the limit was significant, noticeable terrain pop-in seen on this reviewer’s Xbox One console.

One almost inevitable compromise in a racing game with such a broad set of options is some simplification of vehicle handling. While individual classes of vehicles handle in distinctly different ways, handling within a class feels functionally identical, with differentiation only coming from increased performance score through add-ons. This should not be considered a knock on the specific classes, however. Slamming a monster truck through a loop is a hugely fun experience. Likewise blasting through an aerial course in an Unlimited class P-51 Mustang, sliding sideways through the dirt in a Rallycross car, or burning down a drag-strip at 300mph in a dragster.

The game world itself incorporates multiple racers. Players can join up with a group to race together, or simply see a few player names racing around nearby to give the feeling of not being alone in the world. Sound design is readily apparent when using a good set of headphones. Aircraft cockpits rattle at high speeds, wind rushes by both ears while riding motorcycles, and rotary engines in RX-7s scream appropriately. Unfortunately, players had better be happy with the default control scheme, because there’s no options to change it.

Players can also customize their vehicles both with cosmetic parts such as hoods and spoilers, and also with custom paint jobs and liveries. The paint and livery creator is very robust and similar to the system found in the Forza Motorsport games, though lacking some of the well-honed niceties of the latter games in that series. Players can create and share their liveries, and download other players’ creations.

All of this customization takes place in the player’s own home base, one of The Crew 2’s neatest and worst documented features. Comprising a house (mansion, really) in Miami and another in Los Angeles, the home base is a place to show off favorite vehicles, change the look of the player’s driver, and customize vehicles. However, vehicles can only be customized if they are on display. This leads to an unnecessarily convoluted process to change the look of a vehicle, where the player must go to his or her home, set the preferred vehicle to display, then perform whatever customizations are desired. This seems to be a repeating theme of The Crew 2: lots of ideas, not especially polished execution.

If The Crew 2 were a car, it would be a Lamborghini Countach (ironically enough, this isn’t one of the Lambos available in the game). Looking like nothing else out there, with a remarkable number of features (not all of them necessary), quirky, and rough around the edges. Also much like the Countach, it’s a game that no racing fan should pass up the opportunity to experience. It may not deliver the most polished racing experience, or the most nuanced driving model, but where else is a player going to experience a race that goes from sports cars to powerboats to off-road rally cars in a single run?

A copy of The Crew 2 and accompanying Season Pass was provided by Ubisoft for this review. Find out more about the game on their official website, or follow it on Twitter.