The Crew 2 PS4 Review
Posted on: 2018-07-20
Our rating:
The Crew 2 is a huge improvement over the original, with more vehicles to mess around in and a lighter tone with its story. Give this game a go if you are a racing game fan or not if you just want to explore on the open road, skies and vast waters.
The Crew was an interesting concept back in 2014, with its open world stretched across a condense version of the United States. However for some reason they decided to tell a dark and gritty story where the main character’s brother is murdered, where he then helps the FBI to fight a street racing syndicate. The tone was all over the place in the first game, because you have these serious scenes where you would then step into gameplay and do 7 barrel rolls off a ramp. Fortunately The Crew 2 has a more chipper tone, where they get rid of the revenge tale and instead go for a light hearted tone where you are trying to be popular in a racing circuit.
The story of The Crew 2 is very minimalistic as the game focuses more on gameplay, which it should as it is a racing game as the crime thriller story of the first worked about as well as chocolate covered broccoli. You play as an up and coming racer who wants nothing more than fame and fortune, you start off as a nobody with few followers on social media, and the goal is to gain followers on your unspecified social media platform. It’s not deep as it just merely sets up the gameplay and pokes a bit of fun at millennial culture with the over reliance of social media.
You start off with few events, you are given the choice of three different clubs which have different disciplines within, you have street racing, off road and boat and air based racing. I like this as it keeps the game varied because when you get bored of one event you can move onto to another, so say if you are bored of standard street racing hop into a plane and take to the skies in an air race. This approach keeps things fresh and I found myself hooked and never got bored, as the game has a lot of variety with tight and responsive controls.
You can also roam around the open world and take part in various activities from time trial challenges to my favourite photo opportunities. What this entails is that you are given vague clues about photographs you can take for the game’s fictional interpretation of Instagram, it can be a lot of fun taking ridiculous pictures such as ramping off a jump as you see a heard of deer stampeding underneath you.
Visually the game looks fantastic for the most part, each of the condense version of the American cities have been capture beautifully from the sand soaked coast of LA to the neon lit strip of Las Vegas. The cities are not the only places that have awe inspiring visuals, the countryside vistas are a sight to behold from the baron deserts of Nevada to cyan waters of Florida as you tear across in your speed boat. However there are parts where the game looks washed out and akin to an Xbox 360 game with some roads and bits of grass lacking textures in some departments.
The only issues that got to me with this game are that loading times can be a bit of a pain especially on the title screen; this is due to it being constantly online but it is still unacceptable nonetheless. What was also disappointing was the fact that the game only runs at 30 frames per second, I do prefer a racing game to run at 60 fps, but I did play it on a base PS4 so maybe it is different on the PS4 Pro but I couldn’t tell as do not own one. The other one is that the Hyper Car challenges are rather tedious because all you do is drive in a straight line, yes it is exhilarating at first to floor a Hyper Car at 200 mph down a road but when it lasts for nearly 20 minutes that is when it starts to test my patience.
The Crew 2 is a huge improvement over the original, with more vehicles to mess around in and a lighter tone with its story. It is a lot of fun just drive around and explore a miniature version of the United States, as the locations are varied with lots of different and fun activities to participate in. Give this game a go if you are a racing game fan or not if you just want to explore on the open road, skies and vast waters.
4/5 by Sam Coles, Bristol gaming reviews.
Article by:
Sam has lived in Bristol all his life. A keen cyclist he speeds around the city but video games are his bread and butter. Whether the old Nes and Snes games or the XBox One and Playstation releases he loves them all. Sam runs his own gaming blog called Bristolian Gamer where he had been reviewing indie games, doing retro reviews and venting his anger at the industry when it does wrong since 2010. Sam joined the 365Bristol team in December 2014.
