The Crew

The Crew is an online-only racing video game developed by Ivory Tower and Ubisoft Reflections and published by Ubisoft for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, with an Xbox 360 port co-developed by Asobo Studio and Ubisoft Shanghai.

Gameplay
The Crew is a racing game set in a persistent open world environment for free-roaming across a scaled-down recreation of the contiguous United States. The map is split into five regions: The Midwest, East Coast, The South, Mountain States, and West Coast. Each region has its own unique geographical features. Six main cities (one in each region, two in the Midwest) are featured in the game: Detroit and Chicago in the Midwest, New York City on the East Coast, Miami in The South, Las Vegas in the Mountain States, and Los Angeles on the West Coast. Various other cities, namely St. Louis, Washington, D.C., New Orleans, Dallas, Salt Lake City, Santa Fe, San Francisco, and Seattle, are also featured in the game. Over thirty smaller cities and towns line the countryside, such as Nashville, Norfolk and others. It takes approximately 45 minutes in real time to drive from coast to coast in-game.

The single-player campaign is up to 20 hours long, and entails infiltrating criminal groups with protagonist Alex Taylor (Troy Baker). Players can also participate in minigames called skills challenges that are peppered across the world. They are triggered when a player drives through them and involve completing challenges such as weaving through gates and staying as close to a racing line as possible for a period of time. Players' scores are automatically saved so friends can try and beat their scores, in similar fashion to how Autolog works in games of the Need for Speed franchise. Missions can be played alone, with friends, or with online co-op matchmaking. The multiplayer mode lets a maximum of eight players to compete in races and other game types. There are no in-game loading screens or pauses. Players can also build cars with a tie-in app for iOS and Android.

The Crew 's creative director Julian Gerighty has called the game a role-playing game with large-scale multiplayer elements. The multiplayer is not separate from the single player. Players can form "crews" to race together or against ghost records.

Though the player can play alone, the game requires a constant internet connection to play.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) At launch, the game suffered from client instability. Many users complained that they couldn't open the game and ended up getting stuck on a white screen.
 * 2) The game server is horribly unstable, which occasionally restart frequently. This also makes some players lose their progress in the game.
 * 3) Similar to most of Ubisoft's recent games, Uplay is mandatory to launch the game and save the game's progress. It also increases the game's open time to around 1 minute if you didn't open Uplay before playing.
 * 4) Small rosters of cars. There are only 40 cars in the base game with little customization. The rest of the rosters are being sold separately in overpriced DLC and season pass. Some of the car packs contain only 3 cars despite being sold for $9.
 * 5) *To make this matter much worse. Ubisoft later released the expansions The Wild Run and Calling All Units for the game, but it isn't given for free to anyone who purchased the season pass (which generally allow players to get upcoming expansions for free), which adds more insult to injury considering that the season pass adds only 7 cars (including 12 cars from a separate DLC pack).
 * 6) Microtransactions. Though there aren't as much as NBA 2K18, it's still unacceptable, especially for a game that sold for $70.
 * 7) Terrible physics. Cars drive like they're running on ice and also tend to flip a lot when driving off-road. or come to a dead stop instead of crashing when you hit a wall.
 * 8) Broken stats system. There is no speed limiter for your cars, meaning ANY car can reach a top speed of over 400km/h or less regardless of its real-life performance. It is possible to beat Ferrari or Lamborghini supercars with low-tier cars like the Ford F-150 SVT Raptor or even a Fiat 500.
 * 9) You cannot upgrade your cars in the garage. Instead, you have to collect performance upgrades after completing a mission, skill test or purchase the collected part from the specific spec tuner.
 * 10) Complicated user interface, which leaves new players (or even experienced ones) confused.
 * 11) The single-player campaign's story consists of various clichéd characters, countless plot/gameplay holes and a similar story to Fast & Furious. Overall, the plot felt incredibly forgettable and unnecessary, and the characters are highly forgettable. Even the game's main protagonist, Alex Taylor, is a living afterthought with no likable traits whatsoever.
 * 12) Unfair enemy AI. Even if they drive inferior cars, they can accelerate very fast and often outrun your car with fully-tuned upgrades in no time.
 * 13) Contrasting with the enemy AI, the police's AI is stupid. They'll try to ram your car but usually end up sliding off the track and crashing.
 * 14) Annoying crash cutscenes that take around 15 seconds, which is too long compared to other open-world racing games like Burnout or Need for Speed.
 * 15) Poor soundtrack consisting of boring and forgettable mainstream music.
 * 16) Lack of sound effect varieties. Many cars reuse the same engine sound, including supercars.
 * 17) Some races are extremely long. For example, there is one event called "Landmark Tour" that takes roughly FOUR HOURS to complete.
 * 18) Terrible open-world maps. There are only two major cities in the game; New York and Los Angeles. Both cities are small in size but take large amounts of area in their region (New York takes up 40% of the East Coast while LA takes up 25% of the West Coast). There are only a few places of interest in the maps, and various other major cities (Dallas, Washington DC, Miami) are depicted as small towns or even a single house. Thus, it completely ruins the immersion altogether.
 * 19) *Landmarks are missing in some cities leaving them sometimes landmark less, East LA is missing Whittier Boulevard, Las Vegas is missing the iconic Welcome to Las Vegas sign and Inglewood is missing The Forum.
 * 20) False advertising: Ubisoft advertised this game as a "huge Racing MMO game", while in reality, only 8 players can join in a single session.
 * 21) Some of the track featured in the summit (the game's TLE from the wild run expansion) were downright horrible with one that starts from Santa Barbara and ends at Mazda Laguna Seca Raceway and the worst, it has NO CHECKPOINT which caused players to take an alternate faster route off-road. First time was in perf spec Italian vehicles and the second and last time was with Japanese circuit spec vehicles!

Good Qualities

 * 1) While poorly programmed, the concept of MMO racing is interesting.
 * 2) The graphics, while mainly relying on shaders and shadowing, are still nice to look at.
 * 3) Decent voice acting for the characters in the single-player campaign.
 * 4) The sequel may be somewhat halfway of an improvement. However, it was still disappointing, especially because of Ubisoft's stubborn nature in making their sequel online only.

Reception
The Crew received mixed reviews from critics. Critics overall praised the game's immense world but panned the game's technical issues relating to its online-only gameplay, as well as its complicated user interface and use of microtransactions. Aggregating review websites GameRankings and Metacritic gave the Microsoft Windows version 72% based on 7 reviews and 71/100 based on 12 reviews, the Xbox One version 60% based on 14 reviews and 64/100 based on 18 reviews and the PlayStation 4 version 59% based on 37 reviews and 61/100 based on 60 reviews. The game also received mixed reception from Steam users.