Haha, that’s the dude that tore Bethasda a new one for HDR and SDR in Starfield!
Yeah, the whole channel is just that.
This is the first time I’ve actually been happy to be old. Can I see the difference between the two? Yep, the screenshots are pretty obvious. But once the cars are in motion? Nope, not a bit. Granted, in person might change my mind but what I don’t know can’t hurt me or something.
Didn’t expect that, let’s see if this can tear me away from Forza Horizon 5.
The problem I had with The Crew 2 is that AI is too rubber bandy and the driving is too arcady, compared with Horizon 4 or 5. Horizon is already arcady but The Crew 2 is one step too far. It is a lot of fun driving around a miniature USA in the Crew 2 but the racing bit is meh.
I wonder if you can pre-load the trial? I’ll check later tonight.
I am downloading it now
Ok played it for an hour, finished a playlist. It is trying very hard to fit into the mission structure of Forza Horizon, which is a shame because the whole point of the Crew is it is NOT Horizon. Overall it is ok, and fake Hawaii is still so much bigger than the Horizon maps.
The racing is as I remembered in the Crew 1 and 2: arcady. It doesn’t really matter what car you are driving, what mattered are the parts, and you grind them by playing events. It is really a shame because half of the fun of Horizon is tuning your car within a certain class (trade speed for cornering or vice versa), and picking the right car for the right race. The playlist I played uses pre-tuned cars so no need to tinker.
The graphics department is a bit lacking however. There is no DLSS or even FSR. It looks ok but the framerate could be better, in a racing game locked 60 fps is a must, but the auto setting the game set for my rig doesn’t hit that target.
It wants to be Horizon so bad. But it doesn’t look anywhere near as good. Something is really off with the lighting. Not sure yet if they’re doing the CaRPG stuff better than FH, but I can’t really see myself playing this over FM.
The CaRPG stuff is pretty much the same from The Crew 1, which is meh. The problem with the Crew from the beginning is all the cars drive the same, there is no personality to the car. Different cars are just different skins. Whereas in Horizon there is, similar to the real thing, which is a legacy from Forza Motorsport I guess. A Shelby and Lotus will both be at the same A class but one is a heavy muscle car but the other is light and agile. Horizon takes that into account but not the Crew.
I look at my Ubisoft library and I realised I bought The Crew 2 Gold Edition with all the DLCs for a song back in 2021. Yeah nah not going to bother with this new game until I’ve finished the Crew 2, giving it another shot to see if it can hold my attention while I wait for the review for the new Forza game to drop.
I really liked the CaRPG in the first game, it was just that the UI made it bafflingly hard to figure out which event to do to upgrade a particular part.
IIRC if you want to upgrade street car parts, you do street race, and so on. It is the same here. But once you’ve done a few street races, the parts are piling up and some are just crap and the UI makes it difficult to weed out what is crap and what is good. The newest and best parts show up dead last in the list, and when you have to scroll through 5-10 crap parts to get to that, you are just fighting the UI.
Maybe I just never got a car high enough level for it to kick in, but that doesn’t sound like The Crew 1. As you complete events, you get better parts, but they’re all in the form of +5 brakes, etc and they’re all just automagically applied. The Crew 2 does do what you’re describing, which is part of why I didn’t like it as much.
I just assume what was in The Crew 2 was also in The Crew 1. It’s been a while since I played The Crew 1, maybe it was as you described, but then why would they make it worse in The Crew 2???
If I recall correctly from Tom’s original scathing review, The Crew 2 launched with an even worse system. They retrofit in the current one at some point, but I don’t think they got the UI as good as it needs to be.
Really, The Crew 2 is worse than TC1 is almost every way I care about. I’ll try Motorfest, but it sounds like they’ve continued the trend of making each game worse than the one before.
Disappointed that the trial has a five hour limit. But at the same time, realistically, I doubt I can actually find five hours of free time through this weekend to play it.
I can’t believe they still, after three games, didn’t figure out how to do working mirrors.
It is such a stupid immersion breaker. JFC just implement RT reflections or something if you cannot do it the oldschool way.
The cockpit is otherwise really cool - the steering wheel animations in particular, I hope Forza will finally have them like this in future games.
Graphics looks nice and it ran flawlessly. It is pretty fun.
The incessant inane jabber during races is fucking terrible. The game requires muting all voices and disabling subtitles, I found it extremely annoying otherwise. Should have named it Crew: Cringefest.
Yeah, I really hate the whole festival motif in car games. Unfortunately it seems like Ubisoft is all in on that with Riders Republic et al.
Yikes, you weren’t kidding about the amount of talking. At one point during the first American Muscle Car race, the playlist host said something like “listen to that engine!” I can’t hear it because you keep talking over it, “dude”!
I think the engine noises in general aren’t great. I’m driving the starter Mustang and, from the external view, it sounds nothing like an actual Mustang. Where’s the bass of the exhaust? It’s a little better in the cockpit view, but so far I liked the sounds of my TC1 Mustang better.
To not be totally negative, I do think the theme is a little less cringy than The Crew 2. I still liked TC1 better, but TC:M isn’t bad.
I played for about an hour this morning. I couldn’t take the long drawn out start so I skipped all the cutscenes. I really like the mode of play focussed on showing you the island so far. The Hawaii local guy talking to you sounds nice, and I love how laid back it is and I even did something I never do in driving games: switched to 3rd person so I could enjoy the scenery more.
You’re right, the cars don’t feel all that different from each other, which is weird since the game otherwise reminds me so much of Horizon games.
The racing is all about using nitrous it seems?
I played through the American Muscle Car playlist last night, and I don’t think I agree that the cars all feel similar. Leaving aside the various specs (dirt spec handles really differently than street spec), there was a noticable difference between the Mustang GT, Shelby GT 500, and '69 Mustang Boss. The Boss, in particular, felt like a much more primitive machine. I was playing with all the driving assists except ABS turned off, so maybe that matters?
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not very good at these games, though, so maybe this is just a case of me not knowing what I didn’t know.