Or as PC Gamer’s Andy Kelly so aptly put it: “Looks like a giant baby’s been sick on my Ferrari.” Snow sticks to the rear of vehicles in the same way as mud.
French restaurants advertise Italian dishes. Drive through a cornfield and the corn bends, then slowly returns to an upright position, like a relentless cowlick. When flying high above the map, the natural landmarks are muddy and lack detail, like when your friend Instagrams a blurry photo taken through a dirty airplane window. Ubisoft has pitched The Crew 2 as a tour of the U.S., but this virtual country is more Lynchian facsimile, an uncanny contortion of Americana. It is tough to understand why, for example, New Braunfels appears in Texas instead of San Antonio, and why this version of New Braunfels doesn’t feature its iconic water park and lazy rivers filled with drunk 20-somethings in inner tubes. (I kid! I love fried ravioli!) Even favorite locales lack internal logic. Louis above, say, places I’d actually like to visit. The Crew 2 spans the entire United States, yes, but it’s a condensed version of the country that curiously prioritizes Miami, Las Vegas and St. But like a good magic trick, it doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny. Yes, the original The Crew was similar, but the sprawl of the States is better appreciated when you have the option to see it by swamp boat, motorbike or farm plane - an option that game lacked.įrom the map view, you can select another mission elsewhere on the map, and almost seamlessly (on PC), you’re there. The world continues to move, the waves crashing against the beach, traffic moving through the intersections, people and animals leisurely passing by your parked vehicle. The map’s scale is astonishing, and finally delivers on the promise made by its spiritual predecessor Driver: San Francisco: basically, “Google Maps, but a video game.” When you pause and hold the left trigger, the camera pulls away from your vehicle to a view of the city block, then the neighborhood, the city, the state and finally the entire United States. The Crew 2 is a lovable, thirsty mess, and the sooner you accept it for what it is, the sooner you can appreciate all of the idiosyncrasies that make this racing game unique.
You probably know where this is going: In pursuit of doing everything, The Crew 2 struggles to do anything particularly well. Here is a video game desperate to please, one that would love to let you do anything practically anything you can imagine with any vehicle on the planet - assuming it isn’t vulgar! No problem: The Crew 2 will let you do that, too. Or perhaps you’ve fantasized about flying from Los Angeles to New York City, then skipping the traffic and dropping into Central Park in an indestructible Porsche. If you’ve ever wondered what a speedboat looks like falling from the clouds into Nebraska farmland, wonder no longer. The pièce de résistance: You can transform between them in real time. It’s an open-world game that spans the United States - from the regal Pacific Northwest to the dank swamps of Florida - and allows you to pilot not just cars, but motorcycles, monster trucks, planes, boats, hovercraft and a variety of other vehicles. It’s a bold statement of intent from a newly formed studio composed of some of the industry’s most underappreciated talent a spiritual successor to a cult classic and an official sequel to a AAA project that aspired to accomplish too much with too little. It’s a bit busted, a little sad and quite confused, and yet, every fiber of me wants to love it. The Crew 2 is the video game equivalent of cross-eyed puppy waiting in a cardboard box marked “needs good home” abandoned on the side of the road.