The Crew is now in Beta, and I’ve been playing around with it a fair bit. Ubisoft and Ivory Tower’s new open world racing game has a lot of interesting ideas. But how well does it actually play? Well dear reader, thats why this article exists! So read on for my thoughts on The Crew closed beta for PC!

The Crew starts out with an action packed chase sequence that has you driving a truck offroad in a bid to elude pursuing police. Once you lose them, you enter a race in the nearby city of Detroit. Then…your brother shows up and asks you to accompany him to a gang meeting? Then he gets shot? And you end up in jail until an FBI agent offers to let you out in return for helping her take down a corrupt agent and your brother’s murderer? If this sounds like a rejected plot for a Fast & Furious movie, then you didn’t go ahead and check your brain at the door before jumping into The Crew.  Stellar storytelling is clearly NOT a top priority here, and I found it was better to just tune out the nattering of your NPC friend Zoe whenever she popped up in the corner of the screen.

Once you drive yourself through the Death Star sized plot hole that is the story, things thankfully start to get better. Immediately you are given the cash to buy one of four starter cars before hitting the open road. Then..Zoe shows up again. This will become a common theme, but it seemed that every time I was settling in and enjoying The Crew,  Zoe would pop up to nag me about something. Once you get your first few races out of the way, you are allowed to pretty much do whatever you want. This is where the game really starts to get interesting for me.

The entirety of the United States makes up the map in The Crew. Obviously, its not a 1:1 recreation and I find the selection of cities such as Detroit, New York, etc to be a bit wearing on the eyes. Things get better when you venture west , but I still saw far to much of grey city streets with grey buildings and grey skies. Eschewing the missions Zoe constantly tried to foist off on me, I decided to take a drive from Detroit to New York. The game let me do that without throwing any invisible walls in my way, much to my (pleasant) surprise. Even more pleasantly, as I cruised the highways at ludicrous speeds, slamming into tour buses full of unsuspecting victims and incurring no discernible penalty aside from the few seconds it required me to accelerate back to top speed, I came across challenges. One had me launching my car off of a ramp towards a landing zone. The further I jumped, the more points. Another had me slaloming in and out of gates littered along the highway. They provided nice diversions and gave me hope that driving in the game would be overall entertaining.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t appear to be the case. While I am aware that the game is in Beta, I found no such distractions when I chose to venture westward from Detroit to Salt Lake City. Instead, I was greeted by a bland expanse of open road, populated by overly chatty players whom I could not seem to turn off in my voice comms…and not single challenge to be seen.

Fortunately, the game is decent looking. Some people will argue that it looks great. And it probably does on console. Unfortunately, much like the recent Watch_ Dogs,  the game is merely competent on PC. Textures are of mixed quality, the frame rate is locked to 30 FPS and the damage modeling on the cars is so awful I actually stopped and searched the options menu for a way to turn it off. Mud and snow effects stick to the bottom of your screen, and while they are a nice touch at first, they quickly become distracting. The in car view is nicely detailed, but utterly impractical for long term driving.  It is noteworthy that I was unable to find any of the offroad races, and I will update this article once I do.

You might be thinking to yourself that I seem to have very mixed impressions of The Crew so far. Truthfully, I do. Once I did a little judicious tweaking and unlocked the games 30 FPS artificial cap, it went a long way towards solving the niggling control issues I had. That being said, the lack of things to do and the somewhat lifeless feel of the open world have me concerned going forwards. Is the game fun to play? You bet it is. The customization, sense of speed (even at 30 FPS) and overall presentation (aside from Zoe. SHUT UP ZOE!) are slick, polished and well implemented. I look forward to what Ivory Tower will do with their new IP. Unfortunately, unless something drastic changes, I won’t be seeing to much of it as I can’t justify paying full retail price for The Crew if the final game doesn’t improve by leaps and bounds over this beta.

Check out my video impressions below: