The hum of the engine drowns out everything else as you bolt through the clouds like a streak of lightning. The Crew 2 open beta continues where the closed beta left off. After a quick character wipe, you get the opportunity to once again pick a starting player and pave your way through the racing world, in cars, boats, planes, and even off-road buggies. After picking your player you once again get to choose your starting vehicle and get started down the road to victory. This is our impression for The Crew 2 Open Beta.
Developed by Ivory Tower and Published by Ubisoft, comes an open world racing game that will let you leave our world and join a new world of racing excitement. The game world is split into 4 different regions, the South, the West, the Midwest, and finally the East Coast. Each area contains missions and races that can be unlocked as you complete trials for each motorsport group. You get the opportunity to explore areas of the United States in amazingly real detail. Explore New York City, a dam in Nevada, and other locations of interest as you find your way through the world. You will compete in races on and off-road, you will race through around trying to gain prestige for yourself and the group you are with. Like Twitter, you will be looking to get as many followers as possible helping your raise your prestige and levels.
There are four families that you will be racing for, they each unlock a set amount of missions that you can complete which allow you to rank up your character. The group one is the Street Racing group, you will race through city streets as you make an attempt to win and raise your follower count allowing you to earn money to purchase newer vehicles. The Pro Racing team allows you to race in boats, planes, and even pro circuit race cars. Freestyle mode allows you to do just that, you can drive around the map using all sorts of vehicles, or do some things in boats, or even take to the skies as you fly in your plane. Get as many points as you can to gain those followers. Our last family, the Off-road family allows you to race in the wilderness in races that are not restricted to normal race tracks. All of these modes allow you to do more and more missions to earn more followers and increase your popularity ratings and your rankings to unlock better vehicles and races.
How does one progress in this game? You earn points for doing tricks and stunts in your vehicles, the more dangerous and fun the stunt, the more followers you will gain. It is a big popularity contest that you need to win to move on. Once you get a specified number of followers you unlock the next ranked tier. A whole slew of new vehicles will open up to you as you progress through the game. You start with the basic muscle or tuner cars, or boats and planes. As you raise your rank, higher level vehicles will be opened up to you including, but not limited to, Pro Circuit level cars.
The Crew 2 continues to make me feel more joy as I play through this genre. I haven’t felt this good about a game since some of the newer Need for Speed games were released. The open world, the off-road races, the ability to fly a plane in races, these things make me want to not put the game down. The choices of cars are almost endless, and with more vehicles come more customizations for them. Each upgrade allows you to increase your vehicles statistics and make them run better. Be careful not to have too much fun though, you will forget where you are, and lose track of time very easily.
Overall The Crew 2 has been set up for some big improvements to the series and the developer has done a lot to make it fun for everyone. There are lots of missions to unlock, as well as the ability to expand your vehicle library with the money you make in game from races. You will lose yourself in this game. The Crew 2 comes out for purchase on June 29, 2018, for the price of 59.99 USD for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.