You gain followers either by competing in events, or by dicking about in the world, apparently incessantly filmed by invisible cameras and beamed to your ever-growing pool of adoring admirers. Shut up dad, you're embarrassing me!ДЇollowers becomes the games' de facto XP, used to gain levels (of fame) and thus unlocking further tiers of races and race types. So instead you get the 40-something duuuuude narrator just awkwardly bleating about how important it is for us kids to 'get more followers' on 'your social media'. But being unlicensed from all the big names in the field (and yet oh so licensed in every other), isn't able to actually say 'Instagram' or 'Snapchat' or any of the words it so desperately wants to. Its instantaneous and all-pervading obsession with 'social media' reeks of a gruesome desperation to sound - what the game would probably call - 'with it'. It also has this excruciating sensation from the very start of a game being made by confused dads trying to sound like teens. Cities are minimalist, textures pop in very late, and it's hard to ever stop feeling like you're driving around inside a 3D model of a city on some mayor's table as he declares plans to build a casino. It's often extremely pretty, but in a peculiarly sterile way. Good lord, it's a muddle.ДЇirst impressions don't do much. It's a multiplayer racing game that defaults to having you race AIs for all the progression. It's a game that actively encourages you to play solo, emphasising all the hundreds of solo events and solo challenges and solo races across all its plethora of vehicles, and never whispers a mention of how one would ever actually form a crew - and yet is an always-on, network dependent game that logs you out if you leave it idle for more than a few minutes. It's a multi-disciplinary collection of races, with cars, planes and boats of multifarious forms, yet tries to create a Need For Speed-style storyline that is wholly incoherent as it's spread micro-thin across their surface.

It's a rendition of vast stretches of the United States that just isn't very interesting to drive around, and then lets you teleport to anywhere from the very start. I've no idea what The Crew 2 wants to be. I've reached the conclusion that, oh boy, the multiplayer aspects had better be exciting. Meanwhile, I've been playing it this week to experience its vast amount of solo content, which is undeniably the focus of the game's core progression. The Crew 2 is out proper tomorrow, at which point its servers will probably collapse for a bit, then eventually get stable as players fill up the vast amount of empty space in this miniaturised rendition of the United States.

The crew 2 reviews