First Impressions: The Crew Beta

Just some small disclosures before we begin. I didn't play the The Crew beta (gosh, what a terrible name) for very long, mostly because I didn't enjoy it very much, and because the much touted multiplayer features (e.g. the name of the game) didn't work with my particular group of friends. Obviously everything at this point is still in beta so isn't representative of how the game might turn out, but at the moment it's not looking good. Not a glowing start to the preview clearly, and it doesn't get a lot better from here.


Leading with some positives before the inevitable storm of negativity, the world looks absolutely gorgeous, and on a slightly ridiculous scale. It's not Arma 3 by any means, but for a fairly low minimum spec game on a relatively large map, it looks great. The lighting effects in particular are excellent, making dusk and dawn the best times to play the game. If I were them I would take out their in-world clock and just have it alternate occasionally between the two times. The environments are fairly standard affairs - lots of woodland, some cities, some deserts - but they all blend nicely and realistically together, and do a good job of setting the scene for your driving escapades, helping relieve some of the dullness of driving from one place to another.

The major problem is, however, that the simple act of driving just... isn't very good. It occupies an awkward middle ground, and one that the Need for Speed series has also been loitering in for a while, between being a proper, weighty racing game like GRID, and being something lighter and sillier like Burnout. In the end it comes out as neither, lending your car a floatiness most of the time but leading it to suddenly kick out occasionally on corners, sending you swerving all over the road. Increasing the sensitivity of the steering made it somewhat more responsive and enjoyable, but it still didn't work for me. I usually like both ends of the driving spectrum. GRID and Burnout: Paradise are two of my favourite racing games, and even Driver: San Francisco's slightly odd mix of racing styles created a fun and exciting game. Something about The Crew's driving model just left me feeling cold though. It lacks a sense of speed and weight, and I found I didn't really want to play any more of it.

Maybe all of this would be alleviated somewhat if the story was good, but, unfortunately, it isn't. Told mostly through cut-scenes and the occasional voice-over during a race, the story is a tired repetition of pretty much every Need for Speed game for the past 15 years. You're framed for murder - not terribly well I might add, although judging from their pursuit techniques the cops in The Crew are far from competent - and your only possible escape is to race your way back into your gang to take them down from the inside. Zoe, your handler, is one of the most annoying characters I've encountered in a game. It's not the voice-actress's fault, she's perfectly fine, it's her incessant attempts to get you to do stuff. The most egregious example was when, ten seconds after I'd started a mission and was heading over to her to start a race (or something), she lambasted me for attempting to escape. At least give me a chance to escape before you accuse me of it!

The missions themselves seem a bit rubbish as well, beginning with simple, entirely unchallenging races, including one particularly odd mission where you have to arbitrarily race to a meeting location within a minute and thirty seconds, resulting in a standard amount of experience and money for essentially no effort. If driving places was that easy and rewarding in real life I'd do it all the time! To the extent that I played of the beta, I wasn't troubled at all by the opposing racing AI, and easily cruised to victory in every mission.

The UI is a similar mess at the moment. Constant annoying pop-ups plague you as you're driving along, and, this being an always-online MMO style thing, you can't pause to look at what's popping up, but have to read it as you're blasting along at 100 miles an hour. Seems like that kind of thing should be illegal, but what do I know, I can't drive. Most of the menus are exceedingly unclear, with odd labels attached to things, meaning just selecting your car is a chore worthy of a game like World of Tanks' similarly obfuscated UI.

Maybe all this will change before release. At times you can see what they're going for, and it feels so close. When you burn past another player who's driving along, goading them into a twelve mile duel along city streets and open highways, you understand what this game could be. Unfortunately at the moment, The Crew just isn't that game, and unless they perform a major overhaul on the driving or do something ground breaking with the story, it never will be.