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The Crew 2 Review

Factors
Rating
Description

🎮Gameplay
8
So many vehicle choices that you will love atleast 1-2.


📷Graphics
7-9.5
Hit or a Miss depending upon the track.


🎧Narration/Audio
9.5
Broad soundtrack playlist with good character narrations.


😮Variety
10
Selling factor.


🎰Re-playability
9
Easy to repeat and pretty much endless.


💲Price
6-9
6 on base price and 9 on sale.


My impression of the game kept on changing at each progressing 5 hours interval. This review was framed after investing 30+ hours into the game and concluding the final rivalry races. The initial hours were so repulsive and full of meh impressions. But once you get a hold of a particular vehicle type and its handling, it’s all fun and excitement.

📝Story/Plot:

Just a generic plot setup to give your grind some motive and goal. A rookie entering the world of racing and guess what, some organizers see his potential and gave him a chance without even seeing him race beforehand. Just be #1 all around the events and conclude your journey after beating the top dogs who were the organizers too.

🎮Gameplay:

Initial impression-
Imagine a hot girl with no personality. That’s the first 5-minute impression of The Crew 2. Starting off with high budget cinematics and performing short lap segment races while shifting to a new vehicle again and again. Sounds cool right? Wait until you see the whole f*cking world curve like in the movie Inception and Doctor Strange. At this point, my jaw was indisputably touching the ground. But just after completing a normal event race, it hit me with gloom and awkwardness. All that cinematic brag of “Speed is Life” and bla bla comes down to a slow race with the road looking like a low texture road. Like WTF?
Mechanics/Controllability-
I know it’s not a real sim racing game, nor advertised as a pure arcade. It’s unique on its own. But I feel like not giving it a category works as a bypass for some faulty mechanics. Cars feel slightly slow and weigh a ton on the controller. The purpose of a racing game is to acknowledge the speed atmosphere, which was only endured with top cars. Cars are not at all hard to control, rather easy and amusing. It’s the damn AI that makes all the races so tryhard. You are in lead for 97% of the race and suddenly an AI got a God’s hand and achieved supersonic speed. If you are thinking of bumping into them and play dirty, well have fun bumping a rubber band. All these aspects are blades of the same sword. AI feels difficult- what a tryhard game/Thank God it’s not cheap easy. Perspective matters here. I am not against it. Surely it’s sometimes annoying, but it iz what it iz.
It’s easy to understand how ground vehicles operate, steer, brake, drift, boost. But you are not familiar with aeroplane controls. Despite that, the first intro race makes you race an aeroplane. Instead of crossing checkpoints with my plane, I was crashing into enormous buildings and respawning. A terrible scenario that gets fixed in later event races where they teach you all aeroplane controls bit by bit.
Open World-
Take on the American motorsports scene as you explore across the entire USA. Being able to drive different vehicles like cars, bikes, boats and planes in the same open-world means not only you are free to drift your car on street roads, tread speedboat through the waterways but fly high across the sky too. Befitting pillars for the open-world statement. Now we know there are no restrictions, but what about interactables? Unfortunately, that’s a guessing game. Oh, I have a sharp turn incoming and I have to drift? Let’s do this then. You are halfway in your drift airmailing all those bus shelters, mailboxes, lampposts in space, but suddenly you see a bench in between. That’s your stoppage. These randomly placed objects like benches or parked cars don’t follow Newton’s Law. They just wanna remain stationary no matter how hard you hit them. Trust me, these little objects ruined a lot of my lap times.
Variety-
You can use the astonishing top-notch live map, which single-handedly increases the game score by 2. Like how they even made it render the entire game in a 3D model just by a single click. Moving forward, the complete map contains various types of events/races you can take part in. Just for clarification, there are not AI vs races only. You can take part in a race against time, drifting, freestyling and a lot of car chases too. As I said, you are buying a complete package of the racing genre with multiple vehicle types. But there seems to be a hollow part of the story. During cinematics, you can easily see the top-quality work put together and the exciting race descriptions they narrate. But in reality, you won’t find those races in action. One cinematic had an image of a monster truck jumping out of a plane with a parachute, but there’s nothing present like that. They escalated the expectations through cinematic dialogues but disappointed us in the end. It’s not completely devastating as the default variety is already more than enough.
PvP/Grinding-
Sadly, you can’t run away from the “Look, there’s a level 1 guy with lvl99 car” scenario. It’s Ubisoft, which means expect a lot of transactions. Buy bundles, buy a season pass (Motorpass), or add in-game currency and get any high-speed car you want, but if you don’t wanna spend a penny, good luck grinding your a*s out. Be a part of a crew and evade the boredom of grinding alone.

📷Graphics:

Enjoy a pizza full of delicious and uplifting toppings added on a half-cooked bread base. Now all your bites will have a random taste. Some will please your tastebuds, and some will taste like cardboard. The object detailing in the open world is great, but their textures, Oh Lord. Never expected to witness those low texture brick buildings from a 2018 game. Like, come on; all the vehicles, roadside objects, even dirt tracks look so good. Then why the buildings and gravel roads look like a dusty mirror. To avoid these bad graphic races, I played air and water races the most.

📝Main Pros and Cons:

Pros-

Big Open-world.
Character and vehicle customization.
Good chunk of playable time.
Multiple vehicle types.
Varied races and challenges.
Offline or Online races.

Cons-

Grind vs PayToWin is real.
Semi cooked graphics.
Annoying indestructible objects.
No dynamic weather in the open world.


🏷️Tips to new players:

Keep in mind, you can drift your plane. Without this, you are going to kiss the land whenever you take a flight. Don’t start PvP races until you reach at least the Famous rank. There are no restrictions on which racetrack to follow. So cut the track however you want. The first one to cross the checkpoint is the winner. Change resolution to borderless. Otherwise, whenever you will Alt+Tab, the game will start re-syncing, which wastes 4-10 seconds of your life every time.

😇Honest Rating:

If you are looking for that NFS arcade or real sim racing like Assetto Corsa and Project Cars, then just buy them instead. It’s nowhere perfect or overly marvellous. But I can assure you, if you invest enough hours into the game, you will adore it even as toxic relation. Only buy on big sale!
Rating: 8/10
Best world bending I ever saw.