Planes are fun to fly around in until you’re forced to maneuver through tight, slalom style events, and even boats tend to feel a little too loose when turning. Drifting with standard cars doesn’t feel consistently reliable even with upgrades, but using a car specifically designed for drifting events is almost comically over-tuned and touchy. Outside of a few small events, like the Monster Truck arena, The Crew 2 tends to play things a little safe, and you’ll rarely see moments that stand out when racing or just driving cross-country. Next, while the controls in The Crew 2 are OK, it never feels like it steers hard enough into the arcade racer motif that it goes for. Seriously, the story element is so remarkably stripped down that it feels like an afterthought here. That’s about it, despite a number of small cutscenes stitched in as you complete events in the 4 major disciplines the game has to offer. Your sole goal is to increase your follower count for some sort of unnamed social media, which in turn doubles as your experience meter in-game.
You play an unnamed racer that’s attempting to get famous by performing well in races, stunts, and other events.
However, there are a number of other elements that tend to pull the spotlight away from the good stuff.įirst off, the “story” is a pretty limp caricature of every racing movie that tried hard to ride The Fast and the Furious’ coattails in the early 2000’s, but with zero teeth, stakes, or characters to speak of. There isn’t one particular element about The Crew 2 that makes it into a bad game, the controls are passable, the ability to zoom in and out on the map in a Google Maps style fashion is pretty slick, and having nearly the entire United States to drive or fly through is pretty cool. I’d say The Crew 2 has more content at launch than The Crew originally did when it came out in 2014, but having content doesn’t mean much if the base experience isn’t all that enjoyable.
They do well enough when improving upon a base idea that I thought surely The Crew 2 would turn out a bit better than its predecessor.
Look back at the jump from Assassin’s Creed to Assassin’s Creed 2, or the more current improvement from Watch Dogs to Watch Dogs 2. Ubisoft generally has a pretty good track record when it comes to sequels.