The Crew Sends Racers Across America

Making a racing game is theoretically very simple: Make a few racetracks, add a few cars, balance the gameplay systems and you're good to go. The best racing games, however, are usually more ambitious, as is the case with "The Crew" from Ubisoft. This game challenges players to customize the perfect driving machine, then race across the United States on a road trip for the ages.
Tom's Guide had a chance to play "The Crew" for ourselves at E3 2014, and experienced a good chunk of what makes the game so unique. The developers made meticulous recreations of dozens of U.S. cities, and created a campaign that ensures that dedicated racers will see them all as they build the digital car of their dreams.
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Ubisoft has described "The Crew" only somewhat jokingly as a "CaRPG," or a role-playing game where your avatar happens to be a car. Just as RPG characters have classes and equipment, the cars in "The Crew" all have different specifications and parts.
To begin, players select one of five car specs. Street cars have tight handling for urban corners, Dirt cars excel on backwoods gravel roads, Performance cars have unmatched top speeds, Raid cars can go off-road with little ill effect, and Circuit cars are essentially race cars experiencing the world outside the racetrack.
Each spec has significant advantages and drawbacks, which players can enhance or mitigate with their choice of equipment. On top of choosing a spec, players can also customize 20 individual parts of their cars: nine parts that affect performance, and 11 parts that affect aesthetics. These variables range from paint color to rim style to engine function. These parts are seldom strictly better or worse than one another, forcing players to instead decide between incomparable traits: a faster top speed or better handling, for example.
During our time with "The Crew," we played through two missions. Our first was a novel chase in which we and two teammates had to chase an enemy car across a desert and ram it into submission. Our second was a more traditional race across the Louisiana bayou, complete with shallow streams and dense woods. We found the handling on the cars to be excellent. Getting to customize our cars beforehand made us feel that much more invested in how they handled, and ponder how we could improve them in-between missions.
With cities as central as New York and as remote as Sedona, Arizona, "The Crew" looks like it may well deliver on its promise to be the ultimate American road trip in video-game form. Racing-game fans should keep an eye on this one, but so should anyone who's ever wanted to travel cross-country. After all, the game will be cheaper than paying for all that gas.
"The Crew" will launch on November 11 for Xbox One, PS4 and PC, and retail for $59.99.