“The Crew” Review
I saw an announcement a few weeks ago that “The Crew” was immediately being delisted from all digital stores and was scheduled for shutdown on March 31, 2024. I vaguely recalled owning the game and was able to find a copy of it on my Uplay account, but just recently saw I also had it on my xbox, which would have been a better experience for me, but only just barely. It’s a great racing game with some rough edges that are easily overlooked due to how snappy and enjoyable the racing is and how great the environments are. The general story is that you witness your brother’s execution by someone that wants to take over the family car club, then that same someone frames you for the murder. This all happens during a pretty lengthy prologue that I think took me two play sessions to get all the way though, but after it’s done you enter the game proper and it’s a full 5 years later and you on the hunt for the bad guy going by the goofy name of “Shiv”. That entire prologue the game was trying to get me to redeem a free paint job for my car, but giving me an error saying that I had to finish the prologue before I could claim it, but I think that’s actually the last real bug that I ran into.
I actually played this via my laptop in my office on my living room TV using Parsec on my ten year old living room media center that’s just barely to play games, but the Parsec stream was no trouble for it. As I later found out, I didn’t actually have to go through all that trouble, because it was on my neglected xbox, which I really should have played it on.
I never really figured out how to manually upgrade cars, opting instead to just apply all parts as I won them, the story was pretty silly (but made sense!), and I accidentally did 2 hour race across entire country, but I stand by my stance that this is a solid game that if you have the ability to check it out before it goes away for all time, you should take the opportunity to. The MMO aspects of the game are minimal at best and I never once actually used any of the multiplayer stuff in a way that made me feel like it added much to the experience, so it’s a damn shame to see it being shut down. There’s two more “Crew” games out there though, so maybe one day I’ll check those out, but judging by the racing backlog I have on my console, that’s going to be a minute.
