2. The Order 1886 (PS4)
3. The Division (PS4)
4. Until Dawn (PS4)
5. The Crew Wild Run Edition (PS4)
Why oh why ubisoft do you have to crap all over ideas with a ton of potential. Basically The Crew is a open world "MMO" racing game with a story line following a car game across a minaturized U.S. that is about 80 to 100 miles wide from east to west coast. The main story probably takes around 20 hours to beat and the extras and wild run probably double or triple that play time. However the game design is total garbage.
Games Problems:
1. It's got RPG elements for the cars. Which while sounding cool leads to one resounding problem how do you make a car work with an RPG system? Well in this case by making it drive like shit till the higher lvls
. There is also a huge problem with cars that are 20+ points above you nearly being unbeatable unless they make a mistake or you create your own short cut.2. Customization is crap as well. You would think that a racing game with RPG elements would have you putting alot of thought into tunning/customizing your car. However there is little to no visual difference between parts and as you earn parts their quality is solely represented by a single number and possibly a randomly selected bonus on the Silver/Gold parts.
3. This game has some of the worst car physics I've ever seen in a game we are talking about having to go all the way back to the PS1/N64 to find anything remotely similar to this low level of quality. Cars are basically attached to the road and when they do manage to get in the air the game on occasion freaks out. It's very similar to what you would expect from say a cart racing game just broken to the point that you can clip into stuff or get stuck in really awkward positions
.4. The rewards system is horrible for the main story missions there is no reward for anything less then first place. Either you win each story objective or you have to restart. Which happens a ton due to cheap AI tricks and pretty much any player error on the narrow traffic field roads knocking you out of a race.
5. The AI which is horrible. The AI seems to have a hard time interpreting the space around it. On many occasion I had AI T-Bone me in the middle of a curve because they didn't break at all which in the story missions usually meant a restart since it would buy enough time for 3-4 cars to pass you and get a solid lead and as I said before the mission ends the second the first car passes the finish line with no rewards for anyone not in first place.
Other times it will work to your benefit for instance one of the final races involves a narrow two lane road with some ridiculous curves that goes on for about 15-20 miles. During the race I would have stood no chance if not for the curves. My car was 20-50 points over every car in the race but some of the cars had insane acceleration and were launching past me on the open stretches. That didn't really matter though since on every curve at least 2-3 out of the 5 AI opponents were slamming into the guard rails, spinning out, or nailing a civilian car. The only thing that kept them in the race was the broken respawn system which thanks to Ubisoft is nearly useless for the player but respawns AI vehicles about 1/3rd of a mile ahead of their accident meaning vehicles will literally pop into existence in front of you on occasion when it's a close enough race.
6. Multiplayer I played the story completely solo since I figured grouping with a crew would make things even more chaotic and the one time I did group up early in the game it matched me with someone who was lvl capped and was only interested in events that were locked for me
. After hitting lvl cap and beating the story I decided to join some PVP lobbies, but didn't care much for it basically there are just general lobbies rather then specific ones for the different game modes. So games are selected pretty much at random basically everyone in the lobby chooses a game type / map and then the game does a little roulette spin and randomly picks one. When I was playing that resulted in playing a type of car tag king of the hill game which involved people ramming each other for the "crown" then having race around a rather restricted map trying to avoid other drivers which was fun at first, but got old fast. I really wanted to just do some races but I ended up in that mode another three times before I gave up.7. Navigation is an issue. Not so much because it's difficult but there is no real punishment for going off course. This is pretty funny late game because there are quite a few times "dirt" missions involving mountains with Curvy roads going down them. The game intends for you to take 3-4 s curves before reaching the bottom of most mountains, but the only thing you are required to go through are the check points which are really space out so essentially you can just steer off the edge of the cliff and just go straight down the hill saving yourself 20-30 seconds and totally destroying the difficulty of the time trial.
8. Damage is really off in the game. Your car shows physical wear but nothing short of ramming an object at 150+ mph or falling 200+ feet will actually result in a re spawn being triggered. Plus the vehicles abilities don't seem to be hindered by damage and they regenerate over time making the whole pay for repairs systems utterly pointless. There are also a few missions that involve you crashing an enemy which is really fun given that it take 4-5 solid rams to get someone off the road and you usually only have 2-3 minutes to do it which is insanely difficult unless you try multiple times and remember their path since they are always faster then you and have a tendency to make 90 degree turns frequently making you bleed away all your speed.
Things they did right:
1. The map is really nice. While there are many bland areas and the graphics aren't anything to right home about there is a pretty large map here that isn't randomly generated.
2. The online play is really smooth for the most part. There were always 10 or so other players driving in my instance of the world whenever I was in free drive mode and the few times I did try multiplayer the connections were really fast. Although like with the Division I was getting matched up with a ton of Europeans for whatever reason.
3. If you like challenges and leader boards this game is chalked full of them. There are hundreds of skill challenges all over the map and all you have to do is cruise through their gate while driving to trigger them. There is no load time or delay(unless you are restarting) so they are a very fluid experience and give you something to do while exploring the map.
Altogether though this is probably one of the worst racing games I've played in a few generations so unless you really want to just waste some time with it I'd avoid it. I paid around $16 for it and I'd say I wouldn't recommend it for anything over $10. Honestly most games from 2-3 gens ago are much better designed then this.
