Game Review: The Crew - Calling All Units

The Crew video game franchise's second major update, Calling All Units, is now out as part of an 'Ultimate' version of the game that includes the base game, the first major expansion, Wild Run, as well as this brand-new expansion.

When we first took The Crew out for a spin two years ago, it was certainly a new experience — a driving game with quite massive scope and ambition, but at the time a little rough around the edges.

The idea was to take elements seen in massive multiplayer role-play games such as World of Warcraft, and bring them to a game on wheels.

In the ensuing years The Crew has been refined. Wild Run added motorcycles, monster trucks and drag racers as well as fleshing out the stable of cars available in the game and introducing the multiplayer event driven system known as The Summit.

Now, Calling All Units brings fan-requested cop-chases to the game, making it feel very much like a massive open-world Need For Speed game.

There are new story hooks as ludicrous as the original story-line of taking to the road to find the crooked cop that framed you for your brother’s murder. This time around players can take the role of elite but still learning cop Clara Washington, trying to take down illegal racers from coast to coast.

Integrating stories into car racing games is difficult at the best of times, but throw in an open drive-anywhere type environment and holding a plot together is nearly impossible. But it doesn’t matter, because the core game-play in The Crew is retained and enhanced by these ideas stolen from Need For Speed.

New cops and robbers activities pepper the landscape as well.  As a cop, they usually involve the pursuit and take-down of some racer trying to get a “crate” from one location to another.

Taking the role of a racer, you will need to grab a crate, of varying difficulties, and evade the cops to deliver it to a designated point on the map. Once you do the cops will instantly end the chase.

It is not a bad hook, and certainly one that has proven to be fun in other games. The Crew, however, has the advantage of being online all the time, meaning you can jump into other player’s pursuits, either as a cop chaser or as part of the gang trying to deliver the crate.

A nice close EMP blast or Flash-Bomb will disorientate enemies nearby and a Speed Hack will certainly cause those on the opposing side a good deal of temporary annoyance as they get slowed.

Successful delivery of the crate rewards the racers with perhaps a new car or bike. Certainly success on either side is a big boost to experience points and therefore the potential of rising a level or two. Thankfully with Calling All Units, the level cap in The Crew is now 60.

This is still a very forgiving arcade racer as far as physics go.  Damage is not modelled and a mistake resulting in a high-speed head-on with a tree will likely only cause a minor disruption to the race at hand.

In the intervening two years, The Crew has come into its own and there is now plenty to do across the expanse of the US mainland. There's a slickness to the multiplayer aspect that was not present at the beginning.

If you haven’t played The Crew for some time, or perhaps are considering getting all the game's latest goodies in the Ultimate Edition, the latest instalment is well worth a look.