After months and months of pre-release marketing, Ubisoft’s MMO racer The Crew seemed to disappear from the spotlight fairly quickly after its December launch last year. Rather than continue with the game’s frankly tedious story elements (no more Shiv? How can I possibly go on?), with first major expansion Wild Run, developer Ivory Tower has decided to double down on the open world fun that has kept its players around these last few months, adding new competitions, challenges and vehicles, and a number of entirely new racing disciplines in the process.
Of the expanded roster of vehicles, it’s monster trucks and motorbikes that provide the most drastically different experiences. The former are great fun to drive – a new stunt-driving game mode sees you flip them around a kind of makeshift skate park, trying to net as many point tokens as possible. It’s a more freeform, arcadey style of driving that’s a nice change from street racing. If you’re not too bothered about competitions, you could always set up your own race across the American wilderness, bouncing over sand dunes and smashing your way through traffic as you go. The new vehicles, including bikes and trucks, can be taken into most of the original game’s story missions, with a few caveats – it’s obviously not going to be particularly viable to take down a fleeing four-wheel drive monster with a Yamaha superbike.
Talking of bikes, they’re fun to use as well, but it’s obvious that they’ve been jammed into a game that’s designed more for four-wheel vehicles. Crash on a bike, and rather than seeing your poor rider and his vessel careen across the motorway, you sort of awkwardly fade to black and restart a few metres back. It’s symbolic of a general lack of physicality to the bikes. Leaning on corners feels stiff, and the handling is ever so slightly cumbersome. On the plus side they do add a nice bit of extra variety to the game, and there’s definitely fun to be had zipping in and out of traffic on the freeway or bounding across the wilderness on a dirtbike.
All these new toys should make traversing The Crew’s impressively detailed landscapes even more fun. Extended road trips with friends have always been the best way to experience the game, and in Wild Run a few new tools have been added to add a bit of structure to the open world exploration. FreeDrive Challenges are essentially custom races you can set up across the entire map; you’ve got up to ten checkpoints that you can place on the map, but there’s no maximum distance between any two points. Fancy racing your mates from one side of America to another? Simply scatter a few check points across the map, invite them to the party, and away you go. FreeDrive Stunt Challenges work in a similar way, but task you with fulfilling certain objectives like popping a wheelie for a specific distance, or narrowly avoiding a number of cars.
If you’re looking for something a bit more structured, there are several new racing disciplines to try out in a new competition called The Summit, which is a kind of end-game event area where you can enter various races and time trials and compete on global leaderboards. The aforementioned monster truck arenas offer a knockabout distraction, and drag and drift racing both make their debut. The former is really a test of your timing, as you try to get your gear changes exactly right while maintaining heading and speed. The latter – in which you earn points for swinging your car around corners like a Premiership footballer after thirty-six pints - is tough as nails to get the hang of, but a lot of fun once it clicks. It makes the most out of The Crew’s slightly loose, delayed handling model, and combined with new dynamic weather effects offers an entertainingly chaotic ride.
Those weather effects are part of an all-round visual upgrade the game’s going to receive alongside the expansion. Enhanced lighting effects and depth of field work add a layer of sheen that really brings out the best in what remains a pretty astonishing open world. Dynamic weather makes a big difference, too, especially when the sun goes down and you’re hurtling around corners on rain-slick city roads. Again, it’s a seemingly small addition that makes the world feel more alive.
Wild Run looks to capitalise on what made The Crew enjoyable, rather than stubbornly try to improve what didn’t work. It seems to rightly recognise that the game’s at its best when you’re roaring around the open world, endangering motorists’ lives and generally causing chaos, rather than when it tries to make you feel invested in the action by dragging you through a sub-Fast and Furious narrative, or forcing you to endlessly grind missions for new cars. The idea here is to give you the toys and tools to create your own fun, and simply let you loose. In other words, Wild Run aims to be exactly what the main game should have been upon release - from what I’ve seen so far, it stands a good chance of fulfilling that objective.
Top game moment: Doing double backflips with a monster truck like some kind of Autobot Tony Hawk.
