The Crew: Cruising Around the Closed Beta

If you’ve played

Click above for images from The Crew closed beta.

This structure allows you to easily hop from place to place provided you’ve already driven once to the area you’re visiting. Occasionally, I bounced from one city to another using the quick travel system, but I enjoyed driving across the beautiful stretches of midwestern farms and towns, even though those expanses are far smaller than their real life counterparts. (I drove from Chicago to New York in under ten minutes.) There are moments, however, when I long for a thematic thread to tie The Crew together that’s stronger than the neverending quest for more powerful cars. I suppose the story is Ubisoft’s attempt to ground The Crew in a theme, but at least in the beta, it is absolute nonsense, full of ridiculous dialogue that lacks the gung-ho silliness that could have made it mindless fun. It’s a parade of meaningless characters floating around a protagonist with the face of Gordon Freeman, the voice of Booker DeWitt, and the personality of a used tissue.

As for the driving, I admit I am spoiled by Need for Speed: Rivals‘ slick handling. In The Crew beta, vehicles don’t behave consistently, sometimes careening off of the smallest objects as if they’d bounced from a trampoline. Making contact with other vehicles doesn’t always result in the collision you expect, but rather might send you ricocheting away as if the cars were covered with a thick layer of rubber. There’s undoubtedly plenty of time to tune up the physics, of course, but it was hard not to notice the quirks. In The Crew beta, the driving is serviceable; it’s the sheer variety of tasks and the constant call to group up, to go to a different city, to do one of a dozen available challenges that keeps you on the move.

Lest I sound overly judgmental regarding a game in closed beta, let it be said that I’m looking forward to seeing how The Crew blossoms as the game nears its full release this November. It’s a big and ultradetailed game that in its current beta state comes as across as random and unfocused. A few major tune-ups could make The Crew an appealingly smooth ride, and one that you could put a lot of miles on.

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