There is, however, a charming sort of daftness to this condensed ode to the US. Combined with low-detailed NPC cars (complete with entirely black, opaque glass), some forgettable effects (splashing water is especially dire), no weather, and the fact that the models of the 40-or-so cars are in a league below those of contemporaries like Forza Horizon 2 or Driveclub, The Crew struggles to shake the look of a game several years older than it actually is. Cities are smattered with recognisable landmarks but don’t really seem built to stand up to stationary scrutiny. It’s a world that looks fine whipping by you at speed, but it favours sheer size over the kind of granular detail we now expect in modern open world racers.
The Crew admirably does all this in a single game world you can drive across in one lengthy session. Plenty of racing games curate a bunch of different backdrops into their track selections, from urban street races in major American metropolitan centres to icy blasts across snow-swept mountains, flat-out sprints across the baking desert, or muddy expeditions through giant Sequoia forests. Cities are shrunken caricatures, but the truly vast sweeping tracts of land between them means traversing it really does capture the spirit of a cross-country, city-to-city road trip better than any driving game before it. What The Crew gets right is its stylised and scaled-down version of the entire continental USA.
Sound generally lacks oomph, the economy is stingy, the multiplayer community is only loosely connected, and the missions are too often undermined by some incredibly frustrating AI that brazenly cheats in a misguided attempt to ratchet up the tension. Its size, however, has taken a toll on The Crew’s visuals and effects, and its problems don’t stop there. The Crew is an immense and unique online-only racing game that, above all else, boasts an ambitious open world of such preposterous proportions it ought to rank amongst some of the year’s most remarkable technical accomplishments.