I hate multiplayer games. I hate people online, as they will either stick to you like glue for no reason, hit your character model even in co-operative mode, or try to kill you. I’ve never found the enjoyment in multiplayer unless I can swear at the person and they are in the room with me. So I guess The Crew 2 is an anomaly in this case; an online-only, multiplayer game, about things I have no idea how they work. For all I know, an engine could be a tiny trapped unicorn being fed beans and their farts propel your car.

Other than my own lack of knowledge of how a car truly works, my only connections to cars are shows like Top Gear and The Grand Tour, and the Burnout series. Driving cars responsible is not in my blood. Either I’ll stay where I am, or I’ll drive there in a crumpled up mess that legally would have been called a car: before I touched it.

I’m a games journalist. I don’t need to know what torque is, I have to remember that Empire Interactive (now liquidated) made a game called, Sheep. No one really knows what horsepower is. it is a made up number so people who get excited about cars can say, “My car has 600 bhp!” and their genitals will feel oh so fuzzy that evening.

The Crew 2 is somewhere between a casual game and a game for people who think they know what Brake Horsepower is. Fun and light, while also featuring a place to set your brake balance; which I still don’t understand how this will help in a race. Though you don’t just have cars to customize and admire, now you have speed boats and stunt planes also. Once you have your vehicles, you have the map to think about. America! Or I should say, an America that has shrunken to one seventy-fifth the size. Undoubtedly, this has put one or two people off of the game. It is either too large or not large enough, possibly too casual, or not casual enough.

Don’t let that dissuade you. What should is a weak attempt at a story, the lack of variety in the map, and how much the given microtransactions and season pass content breaches daily enjoyment. If you want the truest experience of the full game, you will require the season pass, as signature cars are locked behind a season pass and a premium currency. This credit is called “CC” which I can only presume means “Car Credits“, neither of which I have bought. Nonetheless, I have still enjoyed The Crew 2.

I’ve had a long-standing affinity to open-world games. I have this odd obsession with sitting and watching people in both games and daily life. Open-world games allow me to be creepy without going outside. I can be creepy, drive at ridiculous speeds, and do stupid things I love in The Crew 2. Then there is the creative nature of the photo mode and video creation suite. These don’t remove the given flaws, however.

The map may be shrunken to a dizzily smaller size but it still feels open, barren, and very much a wasteland after a nuclear bomb. The monuments and grand scenery are hard to gawk at when they almost look like a cheap tourist knock-off toy; almost as bad as an Eiffel Tower on an American red, white, and blue flag. The Grand Canyon is so small you’d find your contact lens when you lose it. Route 66 is not the jewel of driving anymore, it is a collection of highways overlooking cornfields, atomic wastelands, and nothing else. It is sad to say, but one of the best selling points is missing, even in this sequel.

Many important cars are locked behind paywalls or premium currency, which is more scarce than usual currency. To buy several top cars, Lamborghini, Ferrari, Bugatti, Maserati, and even Porsche, you need to amass over 100,000 CC; which is the cheap end of the deal. The Porsche 911 Turbo 3.6 is locked behind the season pass, an iconic car (as far as I know) can not be bought by a standard purchase of the game. Unless you fork over another $20 to get a few extra cars “for free”, which is a lie as you paid real money for them.

Let’s all be honest, what we all want is a Volkswagen Golf GTI, right? A car I found in the UK selling for £17,959, yet in The Crew 2 sells for a whopping 130,200 BC (I presume BitCoin). To make my point clear, the CC price is closer to real-world figures at 18,600. So you can work as hard as you like to build up enough money for cars that you’d pin up on your wall, but in the end, would you rather just get that car by spending an extra forty bucks? This is my main issue with these premium currencies. They give you the quick option or force you to grind to make over two and a half million in in-game currency.

The loose attempt of a story is laughable. I’ve heard the previous game played you off as this kingpin of the streets. I have also heard that people found this stupid, and did not like that particular aspect of the previous game. In The Crew 2, there is an attempt to say you are a new driver coming into the racing scene, facing off against big (generic) names across America in several disciplines. My issue is that this doesn’t improve or devalue the game in any way, it is just there to propagate the idea there is something to work towards. After almost one hundred hours of in-game time, I still have not come to a credits scene and I doubt I ever will.

The issue I have with that is when the servers go down in the next year or two, all my progress was for not. I have cherished my time with The Crew 2, though I know there will be a point that everything goes away. Not in a corrupt save file sort of way, I mean there is no way to play the game after that point, which is sad.

The only game I could compare The Crew 2 with is Forza Horizon 4, a game that takes a small section of the English countryside, a quarry in Wales, and Edinburgh castle, to make up the map. I could cross that beautiful Great British landscape in moments; it takes about an hour to drive anywhere in The Crew 2. That is what I love, not just that it is a sandbox, but a huge one at that.

The reason I’ve played so much of The Crew 2 is the ability to drive from Los Angeles, through the redwood forests, and up the coast of California. This is one of the most beautiful sections of the world, with winding roads up and down cliffs and in amazing cars, is just what I want. Sure, everything looks a bit charred from thermonuclear war, but the graphics of huge games like Earth Defense Force and The Crew 2 aren’t the point. The point is to do something you can’t otherwise.

Speaking of which, after getting bored driving around doing nothing for a while, I flew to the top of a mountain in Montana, turned into a monster truck, came roaring down the mountainside and roads leading to Las Vegas. Then I converted into my Corvette Stingray dragster to fly across the Bonneville Salt Flats at 340 MPH. If I did any of that in real life I’d be arrested, dead, or feigning diarrhea; possibly all three at once.

The driving in itself doesn’t feel as tight as Grand Theft Auto 5, though it doesn’t feel as slippy as another Ubisoft title, Watch_Dogs. Depending on your degree between casual and professional video game race car driver, you can make everything feel like you are on ice; The Crew 2 on ice. As I said toward the start, you can alter some settings including brake balance, traction control, ABS, ESP, and several other specifics. If you are a casual player, these will annoy you if you turn some of them off. If you view yourself as a pro racer, you will still hate them as you take a corner and fall of a mountain like Wile E. Coyote.

There are planes and boats, which I can enjoy for ten minutes. I have played a total of an hour and a half in boats, and almost four in a plane. To put this into distances, I’ve flown 440 miles and sailed 101 miles. Neither of these is my favored mode of transport, as I’ve driven over 4000 miles, which is almost the real-life equivalent to America: I’ve shown favor to cars and bikes.

With so many hours and miles driven, I must have listened to something. Yes, unlike the Gran Turismo 4 engines, cars in The Crew 2 don’t sound like hair dryers on the third speed. Though solely listening to an engine can get boring, so rightfully there is a full soundtrack. However, it is bland. There are two or three tracks of notability outside of the Classical Essentials station. I’d suggest opening your Spotify and listening to some ZZ Top, Foghat, or The Allman Brothers Band instead.

In conclusion, I have put one hundred hours into an open-world online racing game full of idiots, myself included, and people who want to be glue. I have also mostly enjoyed that time. I don’t regret a single moment, and I hope there is a patch before or after servers shut down that will allow players to continue their enjoyment offline. The Crew 2 is flawed, but still enjoyable if you want to drive across the post-nuclear America.

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The Crew 2

$30.99

6.5

Score

6.5/10

Pros

• Huge Open-World
• Fun Cars to Play With

Cons

• Microtransactions
• Season Pass Focus in Places
• Blanket attempt at a story

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