Today, at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), Ubisoft announced The Crew: Wild Run, a massive expansion for the action-driving MMO The Crew.

The Crew: Wild Run will take players to “The Summit”, a huge gathering of drivers and racing enthusiasts facing off in a series of extreme events in iconic US locations. Players will put their skills to the test competing to determine who will become king of the road.

Players can choose dragsters, designed to reach incredible top speeds, drift cars that demonstrate impressive control, unstoppable monster trucks that can perform dangerous backflips and insane jumps, or a wide range of agile motorcycles from prestigious brands geared to take on the fastest cars on and off-road.

No challenge is ever the same at “The Summit”. The largest challenge in a driving game to date, where players will showcase their talents across a widest range of skillsets and terrains.

From qualifiers to finales, players can earn exclusive rewards and rare bonuses based on their performance. To accentuate every driving nuance, a major graphical update will be applied, creating stunning environments, enhanced by new lighting effects and redesigned areas adapted for all vehicle types.

The Crew: Wild Run will be available for download from November 17th, 2015 on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 computer entertainment system and Windows PC.

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Ubisoft has announced that The Crew Raid Car Pack and Raid Live Update are now available. The Raid Car Pack, the last of four themed car packs, includes three new cars, official liveries and a set of exclusive cosmetic parts, and accompanies the fourth free live content update for the action-driving MMO.

The add-on Car Pack will have you experiencing the thrill of high speeds on any terrain with the brand new cars from the Raid Car Pack including the stunning 2012 Cadillac Escaladepalace on wheels, innovative off-road 2011 Volkswagen Touareg NF and high-speed McLaren F1 supercar.

Plus there are four new faction missions are now available for all players, free of charge, with the Raid Live Update. Smash crates in Treasure Hunt, go back to America’s prehistoric past in Jurassic Raid, saddle up for a roller-coaster of a dirt race in the Black Hills and race against the clock in the harsh conditions of Let It Snow.

The Raid Live Update also comes with new tuning specs for six of your favorite cars to enrich your car collection. Make them shine with your brand new chrome colors and lacquered interiors.

The 2014 Game Critics Awards Best Racing Game of E3, The Crew takes gamers on a wild ride throughout a massive open world recreation of the United States filled with exciting challenges and populated by other real players.

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With the open road ahead of them players can push the pedal to the metal and embark on a road trip from the east coast of the United States to the west in an epic journey that’ll likely take an hour or more to complete.

The world of The Crew is a vast and rather impressive achievement. To pack the entire United States into a game console (albeit scaled down somewhat) and without any loading times is rather special.

Whilst a sunset drive around the rim of The Grand Canyon is breathtaking, much of the landscape and cities do have a rather generic look to them.

Compare this to the amazing environments in Grand Theft Auto V or Forza Horizons 2 and you can see that The Crew suffers from quantity over quality, somewhat. But still, this is a game with a lot of road.

Reviewing The Crew straight off playing Grand Theft Auto V on PS4 and Forza Horizons 2 on the Xbox One, shows up The Crew’s polished, but frankly, last-gen visuals.

We have the resolution, but not the textures or the refined car models of its current-gen peers. Visually, The Crew suffers from its cross generational development. The result is a game that still looks very nice, but not great.

Instead of a bunch of random races or some nebulous reason to drive at insane speeds, The Crew has what I’d say was a reasonable plot, considering it is a racing game.

Seemingly cribbed from a discarded treatment for some unmade Fast and the Furious movie, players take on the role of ex-con, Alex Taylor (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Gordon Freeman, the unfortunate protagonist from the Half Life games), framed for the murder of his brother.

An expert racer, Alex is recruited by the FBI to take down the leader of the 510 gang and his corrupt FBI associate. In order to infiltrate the 510 Alex must, of course, win races and undertake missions that involve driving really, really fast.

It may be a story packed to the gills with clichés, but fair play to the developers for at least trying to inject the game with a bit of character. Talking of character, the game features the vocal talent of Troy Baker, who we last heard in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, as the lead- Alex Taylor.

The game takes a while to get going, spoon-feeding players with a fair few missions before leaving them to it. But, with those introductory missions out of the way, there’s nothing to stop players from just driving across, up and down the United States.

Even so, whilst this is fun, the game wants to you work your way from Detroit to St. Louis and onwards from there, unlocking missions and activities as you go.

Missions consist of check-point based circuit races, point-to-point races/time trials, escaping pursuers and ramming targets.

The adequate, but paper-thin narrative giving them context and the incredibly varied landscapes making sure that no mission feels the same as the next. Some missions will also whisk you off for one-off races in new locations giving players a nice change of scenery and a taste of what’s to come.

There are a number of fast-travel options available to cross the USA.

For a fee, players can travel via train or plane to other destinations. Whilst this will enable you to explore the country’s major locations quickly, the best way to get about is to drive there. Not only does that enable players to partake in XP-providing activities on route, but also, you can fast travel to any point that you’ve already driven along.

The game borrows many traits from role-playing games, the most obvious being the XP/level progression system.

Missions and activities are all level dependant and you gain XP by passing missions and successfully completing challenges.

This enables the game to control the player experience and the way they navigate the map. Sure, you can drive straight out to LA, but when you get there none of the activities will be available to you and all your available story missions will be way out east.

Even when sequentially going through the story missions, quite a few times I found myself at too low a level to proceed and forced to grind through the increasingly repetitive challenge activities to level myself up.

Whilst there are hundreds of challenge activities dotted across the map, there are only a few different types, albeit of varying difficulty. None of them offer an outstanding bit of gameplay, instead they are something to do whilst on your journey from A to B.

You’ll find yourself performing jumps, engaging in slalom runs, driving through targets or trying to get the fastest speed in a set time.

The way the map gets populated will be brutally familiar to anyone that’s played the likes of Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry or Watchdogs.

That’s right folks, in what I can only put down to an exasperating lack of originality, Ubisoft have wheeled out their overused ‘unlock the radio tower’ etc. gaming mechanic for The Crew. Locating “data stations” unlocks the area’s activities on the map.

A slow hand clap there, Ubisoft.

It was only with the introduction of the off-road Dirt vehicle class that things start to pick up. As dull, flat city circuits gave way to rough dirt tracks and hilly cross-county affairs, The Crew started to shine.

Each car can be tuned in several different ways from the stock version creating Street, Dirt, Performance, Raid and Circuit versions. Again, these variants unlock as players progress through the story missions.

The whole car tuning/parts, leveling and XP business was a bit overwhelming at first. Rather than worry about it I just went with it.

After each mission and activity I was awarded XP raising both my level and that of my cars, I was also gifted a part to either upgrade my current car or send to my HQ. To begin with, most of the time, I just upgraded my car as I earned each part.

After a while I started getting parts of a lower level to those I had installed and others that required my level to be higher before I installed them.

Using the RPG analogy again, car parts are like armour and/or weapon items. Some may raise attributes like, say, acceleration, but may reduce speed or grip.

Similarly, the perk points that come with each level can be spent, like in RPGs, on attributes that grant more XP for wins and cheaper parts and car prices.

A few hours into the game faction missions open up. These offer some additional challenges and races to boost your faction’s standing, ranging from 10 minute to 1 hour plus long activities.

The Crew features an environment where player’s actions have consequences. You can cut corners taking out fences or clipping cars, but damage enough property and you’ll draw the attention of the law.

Careless actions are likely to result in a multiple-vehicle police chase that may just have a pursuit helicopter thrown in for good measure. Fast turns and skilful driving will be needed to break the line of sight and lose the cops.

As a racer, The Crew is more of an arcade affair than a “racing simulator”, and that’s fine. The vehicle handling is very good, and easy to master. The races, on roads packed with traffic, can be unforgiving.

The game did seem to employ a fair bit of “rubber-banding” enabling me to catch up to the pack if I got caught in a bit of high speed carnage.

Personally I found the city circuits somewhat uninspiring compared to the off-road and dirt tracks. Don’t get me wrong, though, I found all the races to be heart-in-mouth stuff.

The Crew is online only, and yet I found myself rather alone. The game is supposed to group a number of players together like a lobby, similar to GTA Online or Need for Speed: Rivals.

Most of the time I was on my own, suggesting that even a couple of weeks after release, the game (locally anyway) hasn’t really taken off.

On the odd occasion that I did find myself sharing the game with others, I may as well have been on my own, race invites were unanswered and drivers often a considerable distance away. For a social game, I found The Crew to be a bit unsociable.

I had some connection problems. Several times I got disconnected from the server and had the game boot me back to the menu screen. Teething problems maybe, but still if you are going to have an essential online element to your game, it needs to be rock solid.

A few times I also had trouble starting races with the game stuck looping the loading animation.

A bit of a slow burner, The Crew requires a bit of dedication to get into. Quite a few times during the review I almost put it down to go play something a bit more fulfilling. But every time my interest waned, something about the game, be it a new location or race type, drew me back in.

You could never say that the game was short on content. The Crew is another gluttonous Ubisoft feast that if anything is likely to leave you with heartburn.

Clearly the work of genius, I just wish that the publisher could embrace the concept of creating games that were smaller in scope but better formed.

The Crew joins Far Cry, Watchdogs and even my beloved Assassin’s Creed in being a bloated quasi-masterpiece whereby players are thrown into a vast and overwhelming game consisting of mediocre filler peppered with excellence.

A bit more focus and less over-indulgence would have made The Crew into a far better game than we’ve got.

Whilst technically impressive, there are far better, albeit smaller scale racers out there. Still it is a good game and one that is sure to provide hours of arcade racing fun.

The post The Crew – Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

I say busy because, whilst the French publisher has be hitting the headlines pretty continuously regarding the latest Assassin’s Creed: Unity bug report, they’ve released an outstanding about of other games without a hitch. In the last couple of weeks Ubisoft have also launched Just Dance 2014, Assassin’s Creed: Rogue, Far Cry 4, Shape Up and Rabbids Invasion: The Interactive TV Show.

That’s a pretty impressive line-up that caters for a huge demographic.

To round off the season’s game releases, The Crew gives racing fans the chance to burn rubber across the entire USA. Well, a scaled version of the USA, anyway. It’s still a big game that’ll take well over an hour for even the fastest drivers to race from the east coast to the west.

Earlier this year at the EB Expo I got the chance to play The Crew during an extended preview with Ahmed Boukhefila, chief operating officer at the game’s developer, Ivory Studios.

The first thing Ahmed showed me was the map. The map of the whole of the United States, and I thought that Forza Horizons 2 was big! For the demonstration the entire map was unlocked, something that only happens in-game once you have visited a location. I started in Detroit. Not a place I’ve ever been to, so I couldn’t see just how true to life it was, but graphically it looked good.

It also felt quite familiar.

As soon as Ahmed told me about the game’s connection with the Test Drive Unlimited games the peeny dropped. The Crew has been developed by many of the same folks that made Atari’s two open-world online Test Drive Unlimited games, the first set on the Hawaiian island of Oahu and the second on the Mediterranean island of Ibiza.

Test Drive Unlimited was the first game I played that seamlessly melded online and offline play.

Now, with new-gen games like Destiny and even Need for Speed: Rivals starting to blur the line between online and offline experiences, what Eden Software did eight years ago with Test Drive Unlimited was a bit ahead of its time.

Unlike the Test Drive Unlimited games, The Crew doesn’t rely so much on procedurally assets.

Whilst it most definitely has some procedurally generated assets and, to be honest, you’ve got to expect it a game of this size), a lot of the environment has been manually adjusted by the game’s designers and artists. The result is a more organic and believable world, a far cry from the somewhat generic, cookie-cutter scenery in the Test Drive Unlimited games.

Ahmed asked me where I wanted to go. Rather than race around unfamiliar territory, I thought I’d take a look at Las Vegas.

Instead of dropping me straight onto the strip my car was placed on the winding road down from Mount Charleston to the west of the city. Not only could I enjoy the beautiful panorama overlooking Sin City, I could also hoon around some pretty mean corners as I made my way down the mountainside.

The actual city of Las Vegas, like all the major US cities in the game is based on the real thing, giving players all the landmarks and features that they expect to see.

Driving along The Strip I could see the game’s interpretation of The Luxor and the MGM Grand. Heading east I took the road to Boulder City and on to the Hoover Dam.

Back to the map, it was on to Los Angeles for a quick spin through Santa Monica before checking out some of the tuning options.

A lot of work has clearly gone into making tuning cars in The Crew as comprehensive as possible, but still easy to understand.

Unlike some racing games where all those tweaks can end up with a car that’s impossible to drive, The Crew gives players immediate visual feedback as modifications are applied.

Not only can you see the car’s stats change, but you can also see the parts being added to the striped down chassis. The tuning graphics are really nicely done, with the car engine running so that you can see all the moving parts and the effect of the mods in real-time.

There are six tuning specs in the game, adapting cars for use on different terrains and race classes. Full stock is the basic showroom car state. Street offers a road car with a bit more grunt. Dirt upgrades the car for some rally action.

The Raid spec turns the car into an all-terrain beast. Performance make the car into a finely-tuned tricked out street-racer. Finally the Circuit spec makes the car into a lightweight aerodynamic track racer that’s not at all road legal.

Ahmed explained that they addressed the game’s tuning system in a similar way that they would a character’s stats in a role-playing game. The cars are the game’s characters, with the modifications being the character’s various abilities and the tuning specs the character class. It’s an interesting way of looking at a racing game.

I tuned my car to the Raid spec and got it dropped into the desert. The Crew takes the idea of an open-world racer and runs with it. In a similar way to Forza Horizons 2, there are no boundaries in The Crew. And with a Raid car that means nowhere is out of bounds.

Hooning across sand dunes was exhilarating as I tried to jump the car as high as possible. Then I came across one of the challenge markers that are randomly dotted throughout the game, triggering an escape challenge.

This involved driving as fast as possible away from an ever increasing red circle on the map. As fast as I could I drove over the dunes, through fences and across roads, dodging trees as I went. Eventually the red circle caught up with me and I could breathe again.

The main thing I took away from my preview of the game was just how much there is to do in the game. Players familiar with the Far Cry and Assassin’s Creed games will know that Ubisoft don’t mess about when it comes to side-activities, and that’s exactly what we have in The Crew.

Whilst racing is the game’s mainstay, if you need a break or only have a short time to play, you’ll always find a skill challenge or other activity on your travels.

The Crew looks likely to change the way we view racing games in the future. With a ridiculously huge map and the promise of and engaging story, I’m looking forward to burning some runner across the USA.

Look out for a review of The Crew on shanethegamer.com soon.

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