The Crew 2 is really a miserly thing.
It doesn't start out this way, sure. The first dozen hours or so are all abundance and generosity as you're set free in the sprawling, glorious open-world map of the United States with almost no limits. Pick the style of racing you would like and the car that suits your likes. The first is on the house. And, heck, why stay with just automobiles? Now, planes, boats and motorcycles-the last of which managed to get into the first game as DLC-are available almost immediately.
Nothing in The Crew 2 is more lavish delightful map. Though I didn't pore over everything, developer Ivory Tower seems to have kept its funhouse version of the contiguous U.S. pretty much unchanged from the last entry. There are more ramps and verticality in the urban areas, some of which appear to have shifted layouts a little, and more waterways to support boats, however the main issue stuff is the same. The list of regions and cities is identical to my eyes, as are the way they mesh together.
And that's fine. Ivory Tower has a knack for capturing the design of the country in a way that works beautifully when you are speeding past landmarks at 100 miles per hour. Yes, should you slow down, you'll start noticing some silly decisions and a few cut corners, however it remains among the game's greatest strengths. In scope, in diversity, and in flow, it's still unrivaled among open-world racing games.
If anything, the biggest change in The Crew 2 may be the variety of event types, which feel directly associated with the range of the map. By splitting everything up into distinct disciplines, the sport is able to provide events that feel not the same as each other. That obviously extends to the boats and planes, each of which control well and provide an unexpected quantity of mechanical depth. It's also the case with events like Monster Truck, which sets you loose within an arena full of ramps and half pipes to smash point pickups and pull off tricks, and Drag Race, which mixes up its sprints having a series of timing-based minigames which are true enough to the real-world version.
The capability to switch between vehicle types on the fly is another treat, though you're only really going to use it freely if you're goofing off in the open world. It almost never is necessary to complete any sort of objective, outside of a few showpiece races that force you to make changes at prescribed points. But it's still entertaining to, say, divebomb a speeding train in your air race plane and swap to motorcycle simply to see if you can land safely over the boxcars. If only the sport gave you something structured to achieve that took advantage of it.
The story framing all this is-well, it's bad. Thankfully, it's mercifully unintrusive compared to the last game's cops-and-robbers nonsense, which injected laborious police pursuits to help keep the narrative chugging along. This time, you're racing for any fake GoPro-style company, teaming up with Good Guys to drive faster than a Bad Guy rival in each the 4 different “families” of racing disciplines. It's fluff. The dialogue and voice acting think of a low-tier JRPG from the decade or two ago, all inexplicable philosophizing and stilted melodrama. One rival exclaims mid-race, “At last, the purest form of racing.” Another character gives you this gem: “Psst. Without a doubt a secret. The bounds to freedom-don't exist.” But, hey, you are able to skip all the cutscenes, and it's rare to get this much unadulterated cheese from a modern game. There's an easy charm into it, if you squint.
Once you've vanquished your last rival and won the big finale of FauxPro's racing show, though, the interest rate from the game shifts remarkably. This would, obviously, be a natural spot for the game to end and, speaking from experience, this is when you are able to and really should stop playing.
The Crew 2, though, doesn't want you to definitely do this. There's no credit roll. From the unlocks to the trophies towards the defined objectives in the game exist to remind you that there's still more to do. At this point, it's likely none of your cars is going to be anywhere near to max performance level (or Perf, for brief) and you'll hardly have any of these inside your garage. There's still money to earn, followers to acquire. You're not done yet.
Case in point: there's a menu that shows the randomized loot drops and other rewards you can get for earning experience (styled because social media followers) and reaching higher ranks called Icon levels. The final unlock comes, serious, at Icon level 9990. At this time, with more than 40 hours of playtime under my belt, I'm at 66. At my current pace, I'd need to place in at least another 6,000 hours to get to no more that menu. There is a similarly audacious page of perks you can unlock while using points you get for raising your Icon level. The benefits for investing in a point are extremely meager-you can earn 0.1 % more followers for everything, or improve loot drops by 0.1 percent-and there are plenty of slots to fill that you will have to rack up dozens, otherwise hundreds, of levels before any of them have a substantial impact on your experience. There will always be more boxes to tick in The Crew 2.
It's important to note at this time the game doesn't feature any sort of competitive multiplayer component, if you don't count the ubiquitous leaderboards. Ivory Tower intends to then add type of PvP in after the year, but it's an unexpected omission since original game launched with it. As a result, the only thing you can do to keep climbing is replay races and skill challenges to earn better loot and check out the “hard” versions of every race.
Those two things, as it happens, are closely intertwined. Hard races offer higher quality gear, but they also come with recommended vehicle levels significantly greater than the standard versions-much higher, actually, than the vehicles you probably own by this stage. If you can make up some of that gap with skill, the only way to reliably compete would be to gain levels the vehicles you have or buy more powerful versions.
In my case, I was in a position to immediately purchase a vehicle high-level enough to leap in to the hard races in a single discipline, Street Racing. In another, Hypercar, I got close enough that I might make in the disparity with skillful driving. For the others, the very best vehicle to buy-assuming you even have the cash-is well underneath the recommended level for hard races. The only option would be to grind normal-level races you've already beaten for better parts.
To put some numbers to the issue, let's look at the environment Race discipline. All the hard events recommend an airplane at level 230. My trusty standby, the Harmon Rocket HR III, finished the campaign around 140. Since the priciest plane at the shop was only at 151, and I didn't seem like spending another of all of the cash I had for this type of minor upgrade, I acquired to work with what I already had. An hour of uninterrupted grinding (with all my Icon level points set to improving loot drops) got my HR III to 192, enough to eke the hard form of the race despite still being substantially underleveled.
And grinding in The Crew 2 certainly isn't rewarding. Each improved part you find is going to be enough to raise several on the menu, but you won't spot the effects right away. Even though you get a rarer part with special perks, called Affix, you're unlikely to identify any difference, because each one is so small in magnitude. Unlike loot-and-shoot games or action RPGs, where special gear can introduce another kind of gameplay or a status effect that completely changes your strategy, here you're getting a new exhaust pipe that recharges your nitro boost a couple percent faster. Whoopee. You're constantly making progress, to be sure, however it never feels like it within the moment.
Keep in your mind, as well, that you could only get loot for that vehicle you're currently in, and all the parts you receive are tied to vehicles within a certain discipline. Should you gain levels a Drift car, you are able to transfer those parts to any other Drift vehicle, but if you have to gain levels a different sort of car-or an airplane or boat-you'll have to start the procedure all over again. Considering that all the disciplines save one have just five to 10 events apiece, you're going to redo exactly the same races a great deal. And once you have got decent enough parts, the AI stops offering any real challenge or surprise. You're just trading time for loot.
In order to get a fuller picture from the grind, I kept choosing the HR III. After another hour . 5, I hit 230. Yet another hour-three and a half total, if you are keeping track-got me just 13 Perf levels higher, to 243. I gave up at this point, since the pace slows considerably as the level increases. Eventually, you'll attempt getting parts worse than the ones you already have, which could mean you spend your time and effort on the race for simply no reward.
Well, that's not entirely true: You helped bump up Ubisoft's player engagement stats. And you're definitely going to put in much more time to get those parts because you have already come this far, and you need that trophy, that unlockable car, that just right the leaderboards, and all sorts of your pals play this game too so you can't get behind. Soon will come the limited-time events and the regular flow of content you will won't want to lose out on. Now's the era of games as a service, once the line between fun and obligation grows ever fainter. We do not beat games anymore. We simply keep playing until they've beaten us.
I want to make sure I don't minimize the real good which comes together with that. Ivory Tower has promised a year's price of significant updates, liberated to everyone. And unlike the first game, the monetization here isn't heavy-handed. The different options are real-world money to unlock cosmetic customization items and, yes, stronger cars. Still, even the priciest vehicles aren't too far in front of the ones you can easily buy with in-game currency, and they're nowhere near max level. You're shortening the grind a little, not eliminating it.
But all a player-friendly business model can give you is more of the identical game as it is designed today, and anybody who plays The Crew 2 the way it really wants to be played will find it anything but friendly. To some casual player looking for a racing game to dump a few hours into and then move ahead, you could do worse. If, god forbid, you want it enough to wish to keep playing, though, you are in for disappointment. The more you ask of it, the less it has to give. The deeper you receive, the shallower it becomes.
After two bites in the apple, I believe Ivory Tower needs to reconsider something fundamental about its approach. The Crew 2 clearly sees itself in the mold of Destiny or GTA Online, however it can't muster the wealth of content, the replayability, or the dynamism that keep us returning to those games. Most likely the solution is an enormous volume of events-whether developer-authored, community-created, or procedurally generated-so you're not just repeating races you've already seen. Whether it's a greater set of tunable difficulty settings that allow you to keep upping the task in exchange for improved rewards. Maybe it's a larger focus on multiplayer, including actual PvP.
The Crew 2 doesn't have such answers. For the generosity of its early moments, all it can offer by means of an endgame is a slog using it . quite happy with no end around the corner, save anticipation that things might improve months down the road. That's damning in any game, but particularly so because of the genre we're dealing in. A race needs a finish line. Otherwise you're just driving in circles, forever.
