Game Review: The Crew 2 is a sequel that needs a lot of work

The Open Circuit of Ubisoft returns to offer even more variety in terms of vehicles and features, but how does that play at launch?

We now warn you that this review will end with a casual admission that perhaps, at a nebulous moment in the future, it will become a good game. Ubisoft has an excellent track record when it's a good time. 39 is to support his online games and it is easy to imagine the best game that could be The Crew 2 with extra time and work. But playing right now is like visiting a theme park where only a few attractions work properly.

The idea behind The Crew has always seemed impossible: a worldwide racing game open throughout most of the United States. This is very small compared to the reality, and there is a general lack of detail outside major cities, but the impossible has, once again, been made very real. For your money, you get a persistent online version of the entire continental United States and you can explore it not only with cars and bikes but also boats and planes.

The French developer Ivory Tower is made up of many veterans of Eden Games, which you may remember from Test Drive Unlimited, a game as ambitious as The Crew was a spiritual sequel. Although it is obvious in this sequel that Ubisoft has their eyes riveted on Forza Horizon and is trying to create a multiformat alternative to Microsoft's exclusive arcade runner. But this is not a competition The Crew 2 is currently equipped to win.

While the original game featured a plot inspired by Fast And The Furious, the sequel is much simpler. . It's essentially played at par, as you take on the role of an xtreme runner seeking to become the next big social media star. This is represented with a heinous level of dudebro posturing not seen since DiRT 2 and is almost enough to put you off the experience. Most of them can be sent at the touch of a button, but this side of the presentation is extremely (very?) Fluffy.

The game has bigger concerns than this, most obviously the dubious handling model of the original. But this is an area where there is an unequivocal improvement over the first game. Crew 2 is an arcade runner, but this time physics is convincing both on the tarmac and off-road. And even if it's not very nuanced, driving is a solid foundation for the rest of the game.

Strangely, you can instantly change the type of vehicle, without a real explanation of how you spend your time. 39, one car to the other. plane. That's fine in a "I'm a video game, I do not need to explain anything," but it's strange that the racing structure rarely uses the ability . Only a few need it and you have the nagging feeling that it has been added so that the trailers look cool.

the plane is nevertheless decent, even if the sense of speed is quite poor; which probably explains why most air events are waterfall courses. The boats are probably the weakest link because the physics of the water is not convincing and unpredictable – as you often hit the waves like a brick wall or are turned 90 degrees just to approach them . We would blame water physics for being of low priority, but similar things can happen on the road, especially with motorcycles.

One of the reasons we are optimistic about the future of The Crew 2 is that its most serious mistakes seem relatively simple to repair. Or at least we hope that there is a switch to turn off the artificial intelligence rubber. For the moment, it's physically impossible to get a good head start on a computer-controlled driver as he will teleport behind you if you take the lead, as if the game were trying to pay tribute to Mario Kart 64. C & # 39 is horribly frustrating and it is almost amazing to see that a game of this size could have gone so far without anyone noticing that it is a terrible idea.

But there are many other design decisions that go against you, including the fact that even bigger than before, there is oddly enough. interest. You can now travel quickly to any event and this combined with the fact that there seems to be fewer races and challenges to discover by just going around the world map seems almost useless.

The last problem is the pure repetitiveness of the races. The Crew 2 is obsessed with improving your rankings and your car and that inevitably means a lot of repetitions. The original game already recalled Destiny, in that it makes you constantly repeat to crush the experience and loot, and this comparison certainly has not gone away the second time.

The Crew 2 rewards you for just about everything unless you look at the screen, but all the rewards are hollow once you realize that they are part of an endless cycle that just keep your head out of the water.

When playing with real humans The Crew 2 can be fun, although even in this case, the game has some weird omissions. You can not run directly against other players, in fact you can not challenge foreigners at all. Instead, all you can do is run the computer with other players who are part of the same team as you. There is also no way to create an ad hoc race yourself by placing, for example, a starting point and a finish point on the map. What seems to be the most obvious use of such a giant open world.

The comparison might not mean much for the owners of PlayStation 4 but The Crew 2 is the best advertisement for Forza Horizon that Microsoft could have hoped for. It has its own unique ideas, which show great potential, but none of them is used in a very sensible or engaging way. Maybe The Crew 2 will be a great game in the future, but that the race will be long and that our advice is to wait at the finish line rather than having your enthusiasm wiped out at beginning.