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.