My personal opinion about The Crew 2

[crosstiger]

This text contains personal opinion and criticism. If you can’t handle this, don’t read it. I know this game is still in beta but a beta is still a representation of what the game will look like. Especially one month before release.

 

TL:DR at the end.

Story
What is it about?

You get the chance to take part in a race. Why exactly you are getting the chance is unclear to me. After you completed the race you’ve been told that you got potential and you should race more to earn follower and money and becoming fame.

Positive:

Negative:
The story is not only bad it is extremely cringe worthy. It is for what every reason extremely important to gain as many followers as possible. There are no real reasons why you should take part in these races and hopefully win them. No consequences, nothing. It’s only important to gain more and more follower and become more and more fame. Because more follower apparently equals being a better person. Also there is no explanation why you should found your own crew. In the first game you had a reason why you should get some friends and form a crew. But in this game the crew only exist for what? Earning more followers? Is this the new identification for a race driver, having the most follower? From a gameplay point of view followers are more like xp that you collect / earn for doing events and not much more.
Anyway you drive to earn followers and money and that’s it.

Rating: 2/10 (Story is just bad.)
 
Technical
Performance

The technical aspect of the game hasn’t changed that much, so it seems at least. Visually the game doesn’t look too amazing and the performance is acceptable if you are playing on a high end pc. Playing on an older or lower end pc will result in a bad experience. On my system (Ryzen 1700, 16 GB RAM, GTX 1080) the game runs on a 2k resolution with the maximum graphical setting at stable 60 fps and there are no real performance drops. On my brother’s system (I7 5930K, 16 GB RAM, GTX 980 SLI) it’s only possible to achieve stable 60 fps by playing on 1080p at medium to high settings. Even the developers suggest a single GTX 970. SLI can’t be used as we are used to from the first game. So you are limited to a single gpu.

On a notebook the story looks very different and not in a good way. On my notebook (I7 6700HQ, 8 GB RAM, GTX 1060) it is not possible to get stable 60 fps or even stable 50 fps on 1080p at the lowest graphic settings. It’s not a fault of the system since the cpu is utilized at around 60 – 70% while the gpu hovers at 50 – 60%. The available resources are just not being used. Ubisoft themselves recommend a GTX 660 and an I5 2400 for 1080p at 30 fps. My notebook, in comparison, has the same performance as a combination of desktop I7 2600 and a GTX 780 TI. Enough performance to drive 1080p at 60 fps with the lowest settings even in 2018. A recommendation for 1080p at 60 fps with low settings doesn’t exist. A quick benchmark shows that the performance is extremely poor in cities and small villages. On the highway it is possible to get 60 fps but only if you don’t drive through the woods or if there are no npcs around.

It is only possible to lock the game to 30 or 60 fps. You can’t unlock the framerate or turn the lock up to 120 or 140. Even for a beta this is unacceptable.

Rating: 6/10 (Not playable on lower end hardware, max 60 fps lock.)

Steering
For input you can choose between keyboard, gamepad and steering wheel. During the alpha only a small amount of gamepads were supported and steering wheels couldn’t be used all together. This has changed now. Now you can use the most common gamepads like the xBox, Sony’s DS controller and even the steam pad. Also some steering wheels are now supported. However there is no official information about using a generic usb controller like the Logitech Cordless Rumblepad. This doesn’t mean that the pad won’t work. It is functional and since the beta you can also change the button mapping but an official recommendation for direct I/O devices would be great. I even tried an 8BitDo gamepad which shows as a xBox 360 controller and it worked without any issues.
But what’s really annoying is that you can’t change the button mapping of the A and B buttons to navigate the menu. The option is there but it’s greyed out. Those keys were swapped on my end so I had to press the A button if I want to go back a menu. Same goes for the Y and X buttons but you can swap them.
Also sometimes there is no button display on the ingame ui. For example if you want to join a crew the ui element doesn’t tell you which button to press. I assume this is just a minor bug.

Rating: 7/10 (Small official recommendation and some bugs, but useable)

Connection
The connection to the servers was like expected. There were some connection errors and you got kicked out of the game without any warning. Even during the alpha the servers were more stable. But once the servers were running they were running well. There is very little noticeable delay during races and free roam. If you crash into someone they won’t get kicked by a meteor. You can still react to an impact and it feels good.
Something that is annoying is that you have to wait quite some time to join an event or a crew. This can get really annoying. Sometimes the crew invitation could take up to two minutes.

Rating: 7/10 (Some connection issues but much less than in the previous title.)

Playing with friends
Playing with friends is as easy as it can be. Once you are in a crew everybody can suggest a race and everyone who wants to join can join. You are not forced to join a race.
But the game doesn’t really incentivise you to join a crew or invite players around you into your crew. If you don’t already have some friends in your crew it’s hard to find new ones. This misses the point of having a crew in the first place. Crews are also limited to 4 players. An option to increase the player count to 8 would be nice since some of us have more than three friends to play with.

Rating: 6/10 (The system is functional but not really used to a great extent.)

Gameplay
Game modes

With The Crew 2 it is now possible to race not only on the street but also on water and in the air. This is something you either like or don’t. I for myself don’t like plane or boat races. They are boring to watch and to race. For street racing you can choose between cars or bikes. The different vehicles are customized for the different races you take part in. You can change your car into a street car, a SUV, a race car, a drift car, a drag car, a rally car and so on. Some cars can even be used in nearly any type of event. There is a nice variation of events not only because of the changing weather and time. You not only drive on the road but also across fields and through forests.

Since you can use bikes alongside cars you enter a situation where quite often bikes are superior over cars. Bikes are faster through corners and while accelerating. The balance between performance, price and type of car is not that great. Not only because bikes are better than cars it’s also because some cars are not like their real world counterparts. For example an Audi TT can be obtained for free at the start of the game and is one of the best cars you can own. With proper tuning it is as good as a tuned Audi R8 which makes the R8 more or less useless from a price to performance standpoint.

You also don’t tune your car via money but rather via tuning cards. For every event you finish you get tuning cards that can be used on any vehicle you own. This makes for some lack of variation since it’s only important to get the best cards you can get. There is no personal touch to tuning a car, performance wise. The person who wins the most races gets the most cards and has the best car at the end. Since I am not interested in boat or place races I don’t know how they are affected by this system but since they used the exact same system I think it will play out the same way.

Rating: 7/10 (Good variation but on a surface level and very linear)

Available cars
At first glance it seems that you have a lot of cars at your disposal. But the seconds and third look tells a different story: the story of recycling cars. For example you can use the Nissan Skyline or the Ford Mustang for basically every event. On the other hand a Mazda MX-5 can only be used for street racing. The amount of cars available quickly becomes quite simple. Most cars available are newcomer (construction year 2016 and younger) or classic cars (construction year 1980 and older). Between this timespan there are not a lot of cars available. The company Toyota is not even in the game. Sorry to all of you tofu delivery guys.

Rating: 6/10 (Not a small selection of cars but not a great one either, more brands and time periods required)

Controls of the cars
The car handling is what you expect from an arcade racing game. The steering is accurate and you feel like you’re in control of the car. There is a big different of how you steer a racing car vs. a drift car or a rally car. The system works well for as long as you drive the cars as they were intended. As soon as you try to change your driving the cars won’t react as you expect. For example if you try to drift with a street car you get frustrated very quickly because it becomes uncontrollable and loses momentum very fast. If you activate the driving assist (ESP, ABS, Anti-Slip and Drift-Assist) they will keep your car in place and drifting becomes nearly impossible. However if you disable the assist your rear-end says hello just way too often. Sometimes the driving assists even feel like they are doing nothing at all. If you disable the ABS nothing really chances. You are still in full control of the car even if you slam the brakes.
And every single car can use the driving assist. Doesn’t matter when the car was manufactured.
I only tested the controls of boats and planes very briefly. Planes fly like expected and are not affected by wind. Flying extremely low or doing some fancy tricks is no big deal. Boats on the other hand are very much affected by waves and get nocked all over the place. I saw some waves raise even some meters high.

Rating: 7/10 (The controls of cars are pretty good, planes are boring and boats are annoying.)
 

Rating

Story: 2/10
Performance: 6/10
Controls (Input) 7/10
Connection: 7/10
Playing with friends: 6/10
Game modes: 7/10
Available cars: 6/10
Controls of the cars: 7/10

Rating: 6/10

TL:DR
Not a bad but also not a good game. Bad story. Bad performance if you don’t have a high end system and a lacklustre assortment of cars. The new planes and boats are boring as well. I would by the game only if my friends would join me. I would never play this game alone and that is not only because the game is always online. I would skip boat and plane races all together and never pay attention to the story. If you have at least two mates to play with and race against each other I would give this game a go but If you don’t stay away from it. You won’t miss anything special.

[Swealteek]

How can you review a beta ? the game is not even out yet. yes yes it wil not be chance much but still. the gave you a the underlying cake. their are still layers that you havent tried.

 

AND FUCK YOU UBSOFT FOR AVX SUPPORT ! 0/10 

[crosstiger]

4 minutes ago, Swealteek said:

How can you review a beta ? the game is not even out yet. yes yes it wil not be chance much but still. the gave you a the underlying cake. their are still layers that you havent tried.

 

AND FUCK YOU UBSOFT FOR AVX SUPPORT ! 0/10 

As you might have red I'm not going super in depth. The core component of the game will likely not change in the last 30 days of development. And the way the story is presented is also most likely finished. In my eyes it's valid to review a beta.

[Swealteek]

2 minutes ago, crosstiger said:

As you might have red I'm not going super in depth. The core component of the game will likely not change in the last 30 days of development. And the way the story is presented is also most likely finished. In my eyes it's valid to review a beta.

Yes and no, i think i did type it well. I meant do you really think the show the entire game right before reals. Like story all the cars and all upgrades ? pure game play (how cars drive graphs yes ) but their it ends.

 

Also a weekend of playing is not anting (in my opinion) for a review

[crosstiger]

1 hour ago, Swealteek said:

... Like story all the cars and all upgrades ? pure game play (how cars drive graphs yes ) but their it ends.

 

Also a weekend of playing is not anting (in my opinion) for a review

And that's where I think you are wrong. The cars and customization available is comparable to what was available in the first game. I'm confident that they will add more in the future but surely not double the amount. If I recall correct there are 52 street cars and bikes available. Not including the different versions for different event types.

 

And why should "one weekend" be to little? I played the beta for three days straight (guess around 10 - 12 hours) and took part in the alpha.