Feel the water on your face as you race your way through the waves, or feel the air flow through your hair as your car whips around a corner, figuratively speaking of course. The Crew 2 picks up where the first one left off in terms of gameplay, graphics, and open world story missions. Your character selection process begins with picking your perfect avatar for the story ahead. The Crew 2 is very much different from the first game, and that’s definitely for the best.
Developed by Ivory Tower and Published by Ubisoft, comes an open world racing game that will leave your head spinning. For starters the map is split into 4 different sections, The West, The Midwest, The South, and finally The East Coast. Each area is full of missions and races that can be unlocked by completing the trials of each motorsport family. You will explore areas of the United States in stunning detail, areas like the Golden Gate Bridge, New York City, and even the swamps of Florida. You will be able to compete in races on both asphalt and off-road, you will be able to race through the waves of dams and other areas of water, and you will be able to take to the sky to shock and awe your fans.
There are four families that you will be dealing with in this game that will allow you to rank up your character. The first group is Street Racing, you will race inside of cities to raise your follower count and to earn money for newer street racing cars. The Pro Racing team is set up to allow you to race in a boat, a plane, and yes pro circuit cars. Freestyle mode is a mode where you are going to be able to drive around the countryside in all sorts of off road vehicles, driving through the woods as well as up and down mountainsides, doing whatever tricks you can to earn points. Finally we come to our last family, the Off-road family is where you will go across many different types of tracks whether they are dirt and asphalt or muddy tracks. All of these different play modes allow you to open more and more missions to earn more followers and increase your overall popularity and rankings to unlock better vehicles and races.
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You earn points for doing tricks and dangerous stunts in your vehicles, the more dangerous and fun the stunt, the more followers you will get. It is all a popularity contest with these missions everyone. Once you unlock a specified number of followers you will unlock the next tier, and the next tier. A whole library of vehicles will open up to you as if from nowhere. You start with the basic low-level muscle or tuner cars or vehicles, and then you move into the heavier duty, higher performance vehicles like Pro Circuit level cars.
The Crew 2 has relit the fire in me for the racing genre in many ways. The open world playability where you can just drive around and hit speed traps or fly a plane just to do tricks, it’s like a playground. I love the choices of cars, and yes there are a lot of them. The vehicles are all customizable and you can upgrade everything from the tires to the engines. Each upgrade will allow you to better handle your vehicles in the air, on the ground, or at sea. The speed of the game great and you hardly feel like there is any time spent in it. You forget all about it because you are having so much fun.
If I could change anything in the game what would it be? Because this is only Closed Beta I haven’t seen all of the games details yet, so the thing I would do is unlock a few more free types of vehicles. The more options you have the more chance for competitiveness you will have right from the beginning. Other than these few things, as far as a Closed Beta is concerned I had fun, I just wish you could progress past rookie to be able to see the new options as your progress.
Overall Crew 2 is very well set up for things to do and keep you busy, coming in with lots of missions unlocked after each trial, as well as the ability to expand your vehicle library with the money you make in game from races and gear up each one. You will be able to lose yourself in this game and not even care that you spend hours racing across the states. The Crew 2 comes out on June 29, 2018 for the price of 59.99 USD for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. Expect our review around then, too!
