Exploring The Coast To Coast Possibilities Of The Crew

I want to get the only real bad point about The Crew out of the way, and this one isn’t even really all that important or particularly terrible: the companion tablet app doesn’t seem to have a purpose driving it.

It certainly looks nice in the demonstration setting, but its feature set both as a demo and also with what is planned for it seems surplus to requirements; a nice thing to have that offers little extra to the experience. It is, after all, little more than a glorified menu system, which let me pick the city I wanted to be dropped into, and then to customise the car I wanted to drive.

The 3D engine backing this up does a really nice job, and I was able to make my choices while the person ahead of me was still busy playing the game, but these are simple things which will be in the game anyway. The same could be expected for the social features which will come to the game.

These will out of necessity be achievable without a tablet, or their relevance to the game will be seriously diminished. It feels a long way from the inventiveness of the Watch Dogs and The Division apps, which add another layer of gameplay and invite people to actually play with the console gamers.

It’s a weak link, then, but the game itself is looking great, graphically and otherwise. The game world depicts the entirety of the United States, but cleverly only tackles a handful of major cities such as New York and Chicago, connected up by mile upon mile of cross country roads. You could, if you wanted, drive from one coast to the other and see the landscape change around you, and this huge world is a big part of why it’s a next-gen only title.

The cars are all designed for a lot of flexibility and customisation, letting you pick practically any car you want and tune it to the task at hand, with a variety of parts for nineteen different areas of the vehicle. In my case, it was more of an off-road car, which was quite lucky, as my sample event saw me splashing through shallow rivers and dirt tracks, on and around the main roads.

I was actively encouraged to check out the map, and this was a genuinely impressive moment, letting me zoom out all the way to see almost all of the USA. However, I could also zoom right in and see what was going on elsewhere, and I ended up looking at New York, to see the marker for the other demo unit’s player.

In fact, you can spy any of the many players which are populating your world at that time. There will be other racers playing the game, who might show up as you’re driving around, who you can race against, or you can watch from the skies as they go about their business.

Although you can play on your own, that wouldn’t really lend itself to the spirit indicated by the game’s name, so any of the game’s missions can be played in co-op, and this was another slick part of the game’s presentation. It let me drive around as a timer ticked down, loading some of the new environment in the background, so that a minimum amount of time was spent waiting, before I could take control again.

In the demo, our co-op mission was to take out a drug runner’s truck, kitting myself and the player in the other booth out with a car best suited to Miami’s beaches. Amusingly, this went very quickly for us, as I boosted up behind the truck, gave it a little tap which saw it end up fairly trapped, and then the two of us just slapped into it a few more times to deal enough damage.

Looking over other peoples’ shoulders as they played, the mission generally went on for quite a bit longer than 30 seconds, seeing the action shift from roads to beaches and back again. There’s a lot of people on those beaches, too, but I got the feeling that they were all flukily dodging out of the way, something which a beach-ball was completely unable to do.

Off-road driving is very tricky here, though, and the bumps and jumps would often see drivers crashing or losing ground to the truck they were trying to crash into. So there was maybe a little too much reliance on being able to reset the car and teleport closer to the objective, but this could have just been a slightly iffy mission.

Certainly, there will be a lot of variety jammed into the game. Missions will vary from pursuits to races, time trials and skill challenges, all spread across a huge and beautifully realised map, and featuring any number of heavily customisable cars. It’s certainly a very strong looking first attempt and new franchise from Ivory Tower.