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The driving model, which was perfectly fine for quiet exploration, fell apart when applied to the campaign’s missions. There’s so little in its structure to encourage the sort of aimless wandering that I loved that first night. The warm feeling you get when you “discover” a quaint little town, but with none of the awkwardness of being an outsider.īut by the end of my time with it, I realized that I hated The Crew. The kind of virtual tourism I could feel good about. It had given me something no other game had: A sort of Postcard America. But still, that first night I thought I was going to love The Crew. They were cramped, desperate to show off landmarks. The big cities I passed through didn’t feel as good as the spaces in between. Whether they intended to or not, Ubisoft captured the way small towns, strange signs, and old highways feel in my memory. Or that little park with the statue of… um, you know, that guy? These towns are filled with low resolution assets and weird architectural arrangements, but somehow that makes them more familiar.
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Or the little café, with that patio that you remember so well, but that you can’t actually remember stopping at. It so easily captures the grimy little motel off the side of the highway that you crashed at that night. I passed through so many little places, the sort we all have in the periphery of our lives. On my first night with The Crew, once I was done with the tutorial missions, I decided to travel from Detroit to New York, and then down home to Jersey-or at least to the approximation available in this strange pastiche America. Unfortunately, The Crew is not a good game for driving. People like those other things too, of course, but underlying those joys is a more fundamental one: People like to move, to travel, to drive. Not just to race or to bash through crates or to launch from jumps, but to drive. It feels like, at some point during The Crew’s development, its designers lost sight of the fact that people like to drive.