I played this game a bit through Uplay years ago.

Ubisoft just shuts down the game and doesn't leave at least a single-player mode for people to still enjoy it.

GG

En 2016 conseguí este juego por Xbox Gold, y lo recuerdo demasiado porque era de los juegos que más me gustaba de todos los que desbloqueé con la suscripción, y aunque si lo jugué mucho rato y llegué casi a la mitad de la historia, por alguna razón lo dejé de jugar y ya nunca lo continué (conociéndome de seguro me quedé atorado en un nivel).

Y todos estos años he tenido el juego en la mente por esa espinita que tenía de nunca habérmelo pasado, de hecho nunca lo desinstalé, pero igual no tenía prisa de volverlo a jugar, nada mas sabía que algún día lo haría y pues ahí estaba en mi consola sin que lo volviera a tocar.

Ahora en 2024, 10 años después del lanzamiento del juego y 8 años después de que lo jugué, ví que iban a cerrar el juego y que ya no se iba a poder jugar a partir del 31 de marzo, así que pooooor fin me quité esa espinita y me lo pasé. Tantos años teniéndolo en la mente pero ya ahora si completé la campaña, y no será el mejor juego de carreras, pero por el recuerdo que yo le tengo para mi es de mis favoritos. Gracias por las memorias The Crew, y hasta nunca. (Gracias menos a las misiones de romper 80 cajas, me cagan las odio muéranse alv alv)

more like the mid

I was planning to play this way later but the whole server shutdown turning every copy of this game into a coaster in 3 months forced me to play my hand and see what this game is all about.

Considering the fact that I've mostly been playing racing games from 5th/6th gen, getting whacked over the head with all the modern gaming tropes in this game was certainly jarring at first. There's a HUGE open world of fucked up america to drive around, and I really do mean HUGE. It takes about 45 minutes just to drive from one end of the map to the other, and while the copious amounts of space definitely allowed me to get into the zen headspace that long scenic car rides do, it also is just too overwhelmingly massive for me to really know what to do with. I'm the kind of guy that likes to slow down and appreciate the craftsmanship that goes into game worlds, and there's just not enough time in this universe for me to really be able to see all the sights that this game has, much less before the imminent server shutdown. So my options with world interaction slowly became a choice between slowly meandering through large empty spaces unrelated to anything else in the game, or just bumrushing straight from waypoint to waypoint to progress as much as possible. Neither of them really felt very satisfying, as both had this sense of "am I really playing this right?" lingering in the back of my head. Maybe I just need to get more comfortable with large-scale open world games, I don't really play that much in the genre.

The plot was a whole lot of whatever. Absolute junk food western shlock, yanno? Join car gang, rise the ranks in the car gang, it's edgy and gritty and written like a cheesy action movie and I can't tell how seriously it really wanted me to take it, but I eventually tuned most of the plot out and focused more on the road trips. The main character looks like what would happen if Gordon Freeman and Alex YIIK had a child, truly terrifying.

The actual racing is also solid enough. The cars control with a decent amount of weight to em, but also slide around a lot and sometimes the physics can freak out in comical ways so it's all decent enough fun. The events where you gotta take down other drivers kinda suck though, its like trying to ram a bar of soap into a drunk driver.

The game also has this huge focus on online multiplayer, with the always-on structure and how players are supposed to populate the game world in real time alongside the game being entirely playable in up to 4 player co-op meant that the biggest focus of the crew is in your literal crew of fellow players. Ironically though, in my entire playthrough of this game throughout this entire month of January I didn't bump into a SINGLE other player, despite what the large populated map every time I signed in would suggest. I left my game in "searching for crew members" mode the entire time, and not a single other soul answered the call. Surely, due to the fact the game is 10 years old and I am playing on Xbox (which is a platform that I do not really associate with active playerbases), there's not much surprise in the game being a ghost town. But that also begs the question of why this game needed to be always online in the first place when you absolutely can play the entire game solo and enjoy all the game has to offer that way. The closest thing I got to human interaction was spending like 5 minutes chasing a player location waypoint only for their car to vanish like a ghost once I actually got up close to them.

Overall, it surely is a Ubisoft title. Doesn't really do anything atrocious, but also doesn't do anything amazing. I will say that the licensed OST so far has been one of the most irritating setlists I have heard though, and the game constantly rerouting my GPS waypoint to fucking Ohio or whatever to try and get me to buy the delisted DLC was very annoying. But at least I got the chance to squeeze a playthrough in before the end of times. Maybe someone might make a fan server or offline mod or some shit to keep this game preserved and accessible down the line, but I won't hold my breath. Shame too, because while the game was certainly kinda existantcore to me, I definitely think enough effort was put into it that it's lowkey a waste to just get rid of it. Please look forward to my review of the Crew 2 in 2028 when the servers for that are about to bite the dust.

While I recognize that The Crew is just another disposable helping of Ubisoft open-world slop full of map-revealing radar towers and distracting activity icons that get in your way at least as often as they represent opportunities for rewards, I can't help but feel a great affection for it. The ridiculous deep-cover gang infiltration (it's incredible how many things can be accomplished through the medium of illegal street racing) story and world flavor, however thin and clichéd, are so much more fun than the bland sports festival theming that seems to be the trend today. Race design is hit and miss, but the hits are memorable, like the time I bested a high-performance supercar with my dirt-tuned Nissan Fairlady by efficiently drifting through a series of off-road shortcuts that ran alongside and often cut across the street, a twisting duel of contrasts that felt much more interesting than a typical race between similar vehicles sharing the same circuit.

But, more than anything else, I just enjoyed tracing my way across the massive map, winding through the mountainous northeast on a rainy night to Laurent Juillet's ambient music or stomping through a southern swamp to Baby or Black Milk. I know it doesn't seem very impressive, but I think I might just be happy if a game gives me a map, a car, and a soundtrack. My love for paths and routes and mazes is something that I think about all the time in the context of videogames but rarely talk about because I don't entirely know how to explain it and doubt most people would understand, but the point here is that I take great pleasure in simply following The Crew's interstates and highways. Those relaxing cross-country trips that lasted twenty or thirty minutes before I reached New York or Los Angeles for the first time, flying down the overpass as the buildings gradually enveloped me, decelerating into the smooth cruise of an exit loop, fluidly weaving through traffic as I cleanly transitioned into a tunnel or a grid of city blocks, coolly emboldened by the Arctic Monkeys or American Princes song on the radio—those are the experiences that I'll remember most from this game.

Is that really anything remarkable for the genre? Am I overvaluing The Crew because I simply haven't played many of its influences, competitors, and successors? I honestly don't know. I look forward to finding out.

I meant to spend more time with it before it got shut down, but thankfully members of the community seem pretty confident that they can get some kind of server emulation up and running to preserve the game. I hope it won't take long. I still have to finish avenging my brother's murder by driving real good.

I know I'm literally 10 years late on this one but I had to try it when I saw it was shutting down. I did not care for the story one bit; my goal was to get some American car considering the location and visit all the main attractions and landmarks (little did I know that the 31 of March was not included in the days you can still play the same). Got in my red Mustang and started exploring, 1170 real life kilometers later I was done with everything besides the west coast. Imagine my face today when I hopped on to finish and see the servers are done. Fuck you Ubisoft for not allowing an offline mode. Guess now I'll have to look on YouTube for the west coast. Anyway, the vibes at the end of it were great, relaxing cruising to see iconic stuff in the US. I even got used to the driving mechanics.

Screenshots: https://www.imagebam.com/view/GAAYMV

West Coast landmarks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ny0EdIp8BTw

With The Crew's servers going down in less than two weeks, I felt compelled to play through the campaign before it goes away forever. My expectations were fairly low coming in, and The Crew was actually even more boring than I thought I'd find it. I did find the massive map to be impressive and driving through it could sometimes be zen-like, but the campaign events are repetitive and the plot is threadbare. The entire game feels pointless and boring as a result, with little reason to play event after event. The multiplayer aspects also appear to be shoehorned, though I didn't experience it directly.

closing shift
6,5/10 - Length
7,0/10 - Enjoyment
6,0/10 - Perfomance/Bugs
6,5/10 - Story/Experience
6,5/10 - Gameplay

Score = 6,5/10