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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.
The Crew, the new open world racing game from Ivory Tower and Ubisoft has been getting a lot of attention recently. Unfortunately, some of that has been rather negative because the game is locked at 30 FPS on PS4, XBox One and…PC. While some people might say that 30 FPS vs 60 FPS isn’t that big of a deal, others will disagree. Particularly in racing games, lower framerates introduce input lag, leading to that floaty disconnected feeling you might have experienced before in other games. Fortunately, the engine isn’t hard locked at 30FPS. Follow these simple steps and enjoy your new 60 FPS version of The Crew (PLEASE NOTE: The Crew is in Beta and this fix may not work for everyone. If you experience instability, simply reverse the steps to restore your previous framerate.)
The people at Comcept have released a new gameplay video for their crowdfunded game Mighty No. 9, which shows off some of what we’re to expect from it.
Although recently another crowdfunder has gone up for the game to receive english voiceacting as well as the Japanese original, fans of the Megaman franchise will probably be interested in the game. Like those games the hero Beck can defeat and absorb powers of his enemies, and the video demonstrates a few of the transformations. It also gives us a look at Call, the other playable hero who wears pink armour and is equipped with a jetpack.
Microsoft are making some major jobs cuts in the European teams reportedly, with some claiming up to 75 percent of the jobs in the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) team are being gotten rid of, with the other positions having to be re-applied for by staff. The UK Xbox team has also lost around 10 percent of the jobs. However, Microsoft have said that all jobs lost were in marketing and PR not development.
“We eliminated a number of EMEA roles in the UK to gain efficiencies… We believe that the UK has exceptional games industry talent and we’ll continue to focus on game creation through Microsoft Studios like Rare, Lionhead Studios, Lift London and Soho Productions.”
They continued onto to say that Europe is still a market they are interested in and that the job losses haven’t hindered the plans to launch the Xbox One in 13 mainland European markets this September.
The news follows the announcement on Thursday of Microsoft’s plans to lay off seven percent of their staff in the next year, an estimated 18,000 jobs. The news also came later of the intention to close down Xbox Entertainment Studios which was responsible for original TV programming that was shown on the Xbox platforms.
Most gamers love special edition hardware and gadgets, they sell well to collectors and fans of the brands alike and it looks like Microsoft are again looking to cash in on this market by releasing a new special edition headset and controller. The controller and headset are the special edition armed forces and they sport a camouflage pattern. The headset unit is going to be around £50 and the controller will be £35 and it also looks like they will only be available in north America as there is no way to pre-order if you live in Europe presently.
