IDG / Hayden DingmanĪt some point you’re going to run out of stuff you enjoy doing, and that’s when you’ll realize The Crew 2 is better when you’re doing nothing at all. Love street racing? Well, here are your dozen-or-so street races, and then it’s time to find something else to do. There are so many vehicle classes, each relegated to only a handful of events. Motocross bikes are the worst of the lot, controlling like a sack of garbage attached to a downed power line. Monster trucks are the only ones I’ve enjoyed, flinging them off half-pipes and driving up to the top of the Luxor Pyramid in Vegas, and so on. It’s a real shotgun approach to transportation, and most of it thoroughly mediocre. There are motocross bikes, motorcycles, monster trucks, and more. Needless to say, racing isn’t very interesting either. You can only do so many barrel rolls to liven up a trip. Any higher than 100 feet, and there’s zero sense of speed. Boats are just bad cars, and planes are only fun when they’re flying close to the ground. Neither boats nor planes actually control that great, though. You can swap vehicles seamlessly on the fly, driving through Manhattan for instance and then turning your Dodge Charger into a P-51 Mustang and flying off into the sunset. When you’re not in an event, this trifecta is pretty cool. Prior to release Ubisoft showed off two other classes of vehicles: Boats and planes. It undercuts the tension in a race just as badly as having a clear shot to first place.Īnd then we come to the part where Ubisoft just threw a million ideas in a blender and hoped one of them would impress people. It’s so obvious, though, and so artificial feeling. I get it-there are some 40+ minute races in The Crew 2, and you don’t want the player to pull out ahead in the first ten minutes and coast to the end. You could lead a race for 30 minutes straight, then take one turn poorly and watch your opponents zoom past. Even if you fell way far behind, it always seemed possible to catch up-and vice versa. No matter what you did, aggressive rubberbanding kept the AI within a certain range at all times. I’ve been on a lot of road trips-as a kid, sitting in the backseat while my parents drove us from East Coast to West, and later as an adult driving from San Francisco to Seattle, or to Los Angeles, or even just to Lake Tahoe. It’s the Las Vegas light pollution spreading across the Mojave Desert, or how highways weave in and out of the Rockies and the Sierras, or those vast arcing bridges connecting the Florida Keys to the mainland. And as such, The Crew 2 is at its best when it’s just you casually taking it all in, like the protagonist of Simon and Garfunkel’s “America” song. It’s not a sexy fantasy, but it’s a compelling one. I mean the type of all-American car culture that has people road-tripping in the old family station wagon. Real car culture, not the flashy street racing of a Fast and the Furious or a Need for Speed. The Crew 2, like its predecessor, embodies this fantasy. Transportation is in our lifeblood, black ribbons of tar crisscrossing the continent in unbroken paths that lead from the end of your driveway to Hollywood, to Manhattan, to Kansas City and Cleveland. Each day, millions of people drive to work, fly cross-country, take the ferry across its various bodies of water. I’m not sure it’s an unfair lens through which to view the United States.
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