The Curious Case of The Crew 2

Ubisoft has uniquely positioned itself as the kings of support over this console generation. Lowly launches from games like Rainbow Six Siege, The Division, and For Honor were staffed with large support teams listening to player feedback and continuously buffing out the hard edges leading to games with strong and adamant fan bases. It’s not to say that these games didn’t sell well out of the gate, but a high budget Ubisoft game already has a pretty secure built-in audience.

The original game was a surprise sleeper game amongst the fervor of new consoles back at E3 2013 looking to blend RPG mechanics seen in many of Ubisoft’s open world games with arcade racing games that seemed to be on the brink of extinction. The big budget of Ubisoft mixed with their studios’ experience of crafting open world gameplay havens gave The Crew a very promising vibe. Unfortunately after delays, The Crew released to lukewarm responses at best, disappointing all of those that were hopeful in the summer of 2013 with a blandly lame story, muddy car controls, and simplistic RPG components. When The Crew 2 was announced, most people were surprised that the game would get a sequel, but it also brought a glimmer of newfound hope for the series that captured so much attention back in 2013. Ubisoft has a history of hitting the promise of a series on the second go around so why can’t The Crew 2 follow suit. Though there was hope there was also serious doubt after the initial reveal of The Crew 2, as it was showcasing the fact that it will now feature arcade flying and boating to go along with driving and it that it was reinventing the story from the first game to something more outgoing and fun. For a game that got the driving part of the driving game wrong, adding more vehicles wasn’t what I was personally looking for, Instead of trying to add on, they needed to perfect the main mechanic of the game. And the story took a turn into the social media fueled culture that is garnering a massive wave of new skepticism in the real world of 2018.

With this knowledge in mind, after what seemed like months of betas, Ubisoft’s latest has hit store (and virtual) shelves. With an odd Friday release (and the ability to play on the more traditional Tuesday if you were for whatever reason willing to fork over $100 for the super duper edition) the much anticpat… the much malign… the very averagely, middlingly thought about sequel to The Crew is now playable for all. The two main differences, as mentioned before, are the additions of flying and boating and the tone shifting overhaul given to the story/style of the game. Adding planes and boats isn’t the issue for The Crew 2, though it seems like this game is trying to win with quantity over quality in the gameplay department, the planes and boats are fine enough to capture some enjoyment from. The real issue with this game is the tonal shift taken from the first, which has extracted the scrapping husk of humanity for an inscrutable horror show based around gaining “followers” as you complete tasks and generally do things in any of the three racing vehicles. All the worst, it doesn’t seem to actually mean anything. There is no biting commentary on the reliance on social media numbers going up to provide pride in oneself (not that that was expected), no fake Twitter or Facebook posts providing side missions. It’s literally just a word swap from points to followers. Instead of earning points you are “earning” followers.

The Crew 2 feels like it’s an alternate dimension world where the X Games era of the early 2000’s got like Minecraft/Fortnite popular and this is what their version of 2018 looks like. Gated off waterways off the coastline of Los Angeles and a canal system linking all the Las Vegas Strip hotels together fixed with ramps are permanent structures because everybody is racing jet boats out there. Everyone owns or has access to personal stunt planes and can happily do corkscrews under the Golden Gate Bridge. All competing for the affection of the people tapping a thumbs up to make your number go up. The game seems to be stuck in the mud not going fully in any direction too. If the idea was to make a bombastic, crazy, X Games alternate dimension, go full board. It just ends up being a weird combination of real-world car brands fighting with fake branded everything else. If any game should have tried to go hard with brand deals, this is the one, as it would tie in perfectly with the lust of raising your follower count, I mean who on Twitter doesn’t like brands. Everything from the "snack" branded snacks in vending machines to the races and missions to side quests should be branded to make this visualization of this world work.

So, The Crew 2 suffers from insufferable new changes to the tone and story, but the faults of its predecessor rear its ugly head too. The driving is still bad-to-OK and the bizarre rendition of the United States is still omnipresent. The Crew 2’s adaptation of Las Vegas is the best example of the whorls of this game as a new thing, but with similar issues plaguing the first one. First off, Las Vegas is like in Southern Idaho or maybe Western Wyoming or something, which I guess is just a stylistic choice they wanted to carry over. It also exposes how badly they needed to just cram this thing with real brands because all the famous hotels have fake names like you should be talking to the Blue Man Group for side missions and doing deals with The Luxor to aide in your everlasting event of gaining social media popularity. Also, they introduce but never maximize the coolest thing in this game which is the mid-race transformations. Being able to transform from a car into a boat into a plane like a realistic Diddy Kong Racing or Sonic Racing Transformed is only utilized in some events. Make this a vehicle-based triathlon game, make unique puzzle around starting on a dirt bike and having to transform into a speedboat for a handful of seconds only to form back into a car.

Ubisoft has some work to put in to flesh this product out and make it into their next Rainbow Six Siege and I’m really curious if this game gets the same treatment that Siege, For Honor, and The Division received. As it stands right now, the concept of The Crew 2 seems as vain as the open world is empty.