The weekend saw The Crew 2 have an open beta. It seemed like the full game was playable, and I spent some time with it on Xbox One X. Let me share some of my early impressions of the game.
Firstly, I am super impressed by the level of polish of the game. Loading times are super short, the engine was running at a very stable frame rate, and on Xbox One X, I’m pretty sure the resolution was 4k, or very close to it. The textures and graphics was just astounding. For a game with such a big map, I was very surprised at both the performance and the quality of the engine.
Onto gameplay. I didn’t like the first game. The Crew was an ambitious game that fell flat due to poor handling mechanics and dull gameplay. Both of those issues seems to be addressed in The Crew 2. The handling mechanics of all vehicles are much nicer and the cars are much easier and more fun to handle. It is still an arcade racer, but it’s a much better and more enjoyable racer.
Then there is the challenges and the “story”. It’s very cheesy and feels a bit tacted on. The cutscenes are a bit cringy. But they are all skippable, and that helps a lot. The challenges and races themselves are rather enjoyable. They is a huge variety of types of races, and the AI is actually a challenge. What I like is that, in stead of making the AI unfairly faster at higher difficulty, the vehicle performance is much higher. It gives the challenges a degree of replayability. I like that, and is an interesting mechanic.
The extra vehicles (planes, boats, bikes and race cars) are just simply awesome! There is a hot swap mechanic where you can immediately swap between a boat, plane or car, and you can set the vehicles that it swaps to. This is so much fun. Swapping between the different vehicles opens up so many different gameplay possibilities, and makes a trek across the enormous map much more fun. The vehicle choices themselves are really good.
Overall I really enjoyed my time with The Crew 2. I am seriously considering grabbing the game when it launches this Friday. It is a definite improvement from the first game.
Had the throttle jammed open, no ability to change gears, or even get back to the menu to change/check the controller settings. Got stuck against a building, unable to reverse. Spent a full minute “wriggling” the car left and right to get past the corner, and then still managed to catch up the other 3 racers in the Prologue before the transition to the boats - ridiculous rubberbanding was an issue in the first game too. Got to the end of the Prologue and the game froze up on me at the start of the cutscene. Had to C-A-D and shut it down with Task Manager.