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The Crew is a mediocre at best 2014 racer developed by Ivory Tower and published by Ubisoft. It's up there on the list of jankiest racing games that I have played (and that list includes Moorhuhn Kart 2) and - it's really fun. I always loved cruising around in a 1:36 recreation of the United States of America that's jam packed with long straights to speed through, evading cars, then brake testing as one enters curvy sections that require braking accuracy, and dealing with the whacky geometry issues and general physics jank that produce the funniest interactions, at times randomly flinging you across the map as you reconsider your life choices. One of the most fun things to do in The Crew is planning ahead for all the small jumps that one will be making. For example, if one wants to take the racing line around corners in The Crew's urban environments then one will be cutting over sidewalks. Sidewalks in The Crew are slightly elevated and will add upward momentum to the vehicle. Most low hanging cars will actually briefly lose contact with the ground, which means the player will have pre-empt some of the turning so that once the car regains contact to the surface it steers and brakes more. Braking early and drifting into the sidewalk to fly past the corner into the perfect race line around it is extremely satisfying, and the game is littered with these things. Even the off road cars that handle surface height differences more easily will gain that upward momentum and reduce their grip slightly, briefly.
When not going around corners, the player will be going fast, and given the right car they will be going 400km/h fast. Every car, even the slower ones, seem to have a perfect handleability, which means they feel responsive but always have a turning radius that makes it challenging - yet doable - to properly react to what's coming. Collision physics in the game is quite janky in general, but one actually gets used to it as some point and plans around it/uses it to ones advantage. It's an engaging experience in its own right.

I have been playing The Crew ever since its release and I've grown quite nostalgic to it. While The Crew was there during some of the most important phases of my life (so far), it was always there as a neverchanging, neverjudging companion. It's like that one person who was always there in your life but you never really got to meet. It's like you have shared a big part of your life with them without ever actually sharing anything with them. Now that you realize this, just their presence alone makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside. You learn to appreciate the unchanging nature of their presence. A grasp at a little bit of continuity.

Gameplay

So, you've got your most average racer ever, perhaps even below average because of how boring the cars handle. Crappy story, mediocre progression system, acceptable multiplayer. It's why I say in the lead and my own review of the game on Steam that it is “mediocre” and should be avoided. I believe that the average person probably will not appreciate the specific facets of the game that I like. Because, I like the game mostly for very specific, hard-to-put-into-words things. I guess the best way to put it is “I like it because of it's sandboxy feel”. I like the game because the world and the physics are built in a way that encourage experimentation. The game encourages you to take skips over a grass field or even entire mountains.

Really, just watch the video and pay attention to the minimap to see what the game suggested is the route I should take versus what I ended up actually driving, ehem, “driving”. Now, this was a major example, worthy a YouTube upload, but for me essentially the game is just series of much smaller of these optimizations, and it's in figuring out and executing these optimizations that I find a lot of fun (beyond just the general racing experience).

Planned Obsolescence

Now, ever since first playing the game and understanding its Always on DRM I knew that one day it would come to be that the game - the full game - would be shut down. Unlike other games like Mario Kart Wii where Nintendo would cease support for multiplayer, The Crew requires a server connection at all times, even for solo play, and because Ubisoft is not going to run the servers for eternity, it was clear from the get go that playing The Crew was going to be limited to whatever date the execs at Ubisoft were willing to pay the servers for. Apparently, this date has now been hit and they released a blog post announcing the official delisting of the game from stores and the cutoff date by whenst the servers will be shut down, making not just multiplayer inaccessible but the entire game. You will not be able to get past the title screen.

It is probably one of my earliest lessons in learning not to get too attached to things, and I am glad I didn't. As it was certainly an experience to try to subconsciously ignore that one day everything I made in this game (except for the memories) will be lost, I am not too strongly invested in the shutdown. It was predictable, the whole thing, including the community outrage that was sparked with the announcement of the shutdown. While I do hope that a community-made offline patch for the game will be made, I have little hope that yelling at Ubisoft will make them reverse their decision about not making one themselves - including but not limited to for legal reasons, right? The blog post mentions licensing issues and I could see that that would be a valid argument. Assuming the licenses were limited to 10 years then it would hardly be worth the financial and legal effort to extend them just to support a game that's long died and was never a big hit to begin with. But other games had licenses and those are still playable - I don't know how much that licensing claim would actually hold up.

Anyhow, the hope is that the community (excluding me - I just barely got into video game extraction, I'm not going to get into hacking anytime soon) will figure something out. Apparently there is technically an offline mode in the game already, and there are arguments being thrown around that it must still be in the game because an “offline” mode is “used” at the start of the game? Maybe.

Ramblings

Table of Contents

Gameplay

Planned Obsolescence