While this means you’ll be doing plenty of grinding, it works as an incentive to explore the rich open world and rewards players who rack up the miles. The fastest way to rank up is to complete the bite-sized skill challenges littered across the map: challenges range from weaving around slaloms to test your precision driving, following a path that sticks to the racing line or simple speed tests. Instead of spending your cash on upgrades, performance parts are gradually given to you as you rank up your car whenever you complete a story mission or challenge event. The Crew bills itself as a CARPG and the Pokemon of car games – a tagline that’s wholly justified.
The Crew’s unique car upgrade system also sets it apart. You can of course fast travel to any location you’ve discovered, but that would be doing Ivory Tower’s efforts a disservice. Games that require extensive driving between missions are often a chore, but The Crew makes the journey worthwhile – no other game captures the sights and sounds of the United States so masterfully.
Cruising with friends online, discovering new locations and embarking on extended road trips is a sublime experience. No other game can take you from the backstreets of Detroit, to the hustle and bustle of Manhattan, the sun-swept beaches of Miami, to the desert canyons of the South and beyond in one sitting. Its diversity is unequaled its sense of freedom is liberating.
It’s a realisation of all your American road trip fantasies rolled into one. Indeed, the sense of scale and is unsurpassed: The Crew’s map is so expansive, it’s bigger than several other open world games combined. While most racing games are set in a single city, The Crew crams condensed versions of several US cities into a map so monumental it takes a whole hour to drive from coast to coast. The Crew’s stunning recreation of the United States is still by far the best open world you’ll find in any racing game. Looking past The Crew’s flaws revealed a deep, unique and rewarding game. Ivory Tower also collaborated with Ubisoft Reflections, a studio best known for Driver: San Francisco which was one of the better open world driving games of last-gen. The Crew was developed by an ensemble team responsible for some of the best open world racing games ever made: the Lyon-based team at Ivory Tower (which was recently acquired by Ubisoft) is made up of veteran developers who worked on the legendary Test Drive: Unlimited, an MMO racer that laid the foundation for The Crew to build on. The Crew had the potential to be a huge hit for Ubisoft, especially when you consider the talent behind the wheel. Releasing The Crew against the goliath that is Playground Games’ superb open world racer Forza Horizon 2 probably didn’t help, either – asking players to choose between an established, reputable racing franchise and a new unknown IP with a silly name was never going to end well. Reviews rightly panned it for its dated graphics, infuriating AI and a shoehorned story that made The Fast and Furious look like Oscar material. The initial release of The Crew was by no means perfect, mind you.
And that’s a shame, because while it’s a game that requires a lot of time investment to reap the rewards, it gets better the more you play it. Despite its lofty ambitions, Ivory Tower’s open world MMO racer The Crew was criminally overlooked on release.