Vacation Simulator

The Crew is a shitty racing game. But it lets you enjoy one hell of a road trip when you're too cheap to go places in real life.

Claire and I are broke as fuck. Now, when most of you guys think 'broke', you imagine having to use regular four-ply toilet paper instead of the gold-plated stuff you normally use. But I'm talking seriously poor here. We don't just re-use our teabags for extra tea. We use the string to sew the holes in the potato bags we stole from Farm Foods to wear them like clothes. We don't even eat all the potatoes! We set them on fire, so they can serve as a source of warmth and light. So imagine how happy we were when Ubisoft gave The Crew away for free, because it sucks so hard, people have long stopped buying it.

When I first tried to get into The Crew, I tried to pretend it's a racing game, which is wrong. The game has you play a young Gordon Freeman, who witnesses the murder of Mr. Clean. Then Colonel Sanders shows up and blames you. Now you have to take revenge on the KFC mascot and his gang by beating random people in street races. It all makes perfect sense and is highly entertaining, well-written and in every way as gripping as a Wednesday episode of Coronation Street.

The driving physics in the game are total ass and your car only stops handling like a brick after you spend several hours raising your vehicle's level. There's also some overpriced new DLC, which apes the police chases from Need for Speed and GTA, without adding any of the stuff that makes them fun. The main feature of said DLC is to remind you that you should totally go buy it every thirty or so seconds.

It ain't fucking free if it costs 25 Bucks to unlock it!

There's also a shitty ingame GPS, which constantly forgets where the fuck you're supposed to go, cutting off in the middle of nowhere. So basically, you get to drive around with zero directions while some lady keeps nagging non-stop. The only way to make the driving experience any more realistic would be if they patched in some children, who complain, get hungry, throw up in the car and need a piss stop every five minutes.

There's one genuinely impressive feature about the Crew - its absolutely massive world. You get to visit miniaturized versions of New York, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, drive through the snow in the Rocky Mountains and enjoy some virtual scorching heat in Death Valley and the Grand Canyon. There's a whole ton of amazing landmarks here, a great deal of visual variety and while the entire game looks a bit dated and fugly, just driving from one coast to another and seeing all the sights can be really exciting.

So that's what we did. Claire and I fired up our favourite MP3 playlist (because the ingame radio is complete garbage), got in our cars, skipped the whole shitty story and most of the racing against the retarded rubberbanding AI and just went from the east coast to the west coast and back. And there's an amazing amount of love and detail in that game world. People with RVs and lawn chairs camping in the middle of nowhere, little lakes and cafes near dense forests you would normally just race through at 180mph and tons of wildlife. Eagles, vultures, bears, deer, fighter jets and stealth bombers happily frolicking about!

Suddenly Vegas

We had lots of random challenges popping up along the way. Sometimes you have to maintain your speed and stay on the road, then you have to zig-zag around targets or smash right through them. Doing so will unlock new car parts and upgrades, so it's perfectly cool to just drive around all day, upgrading your vehicle in the process.

This game doesn't look as great or handle as well as Forza or GTA. The story is a total joke. Most of the generic traffic vehicles look so bland and devoid of any detail, they would have looked crap a decade ago. We've also encountered a whole bunch of bugs and problems. Traffic spawning inside buildings or simply disappearing into thin air, infinite load screens, as well as 38 billion mission popups for races we cannot even access without the DLC. Granted, you can filter those out, but you shouldn't have to. The Crew is genuinely bad. There's one notorious, game-breaking bug, which has been around for two years with no apparent fix. The official forum thread about it is 41 pages long.

Having a dozen menus pop up while I'm
driving at top speed is brilliant game design, you guys!

I've played Forza, Shift, Dirt, Outrun 2006 Coast2Coast and just about every other racing sim and arcade racer that came out since the first Screamer. The racing felt better in pretty much all of them. Driving in The Crew doesn't feel any more solid than it would on Autobahn Racer or Eurotruck Simulator. But, also much like Eurotruck Simulator, it can feel incredibly satisfying when you just pick a random far away location, play some good music and enjoy the dated, but highly varied and still rather beautiful landscapes. And it gets really good when you have somebody to enjoy the ride with. And if you grab the game for free or get it for peanuts at one of the many Russian key stores, there really isn't much to lose. But fuck 'em for trying to force that DLC on to people as aggressively as they do.