Developer: Ivory Tower
Publisher: Ubisoft
Platforms: PC, Xbox One, Xbox 360, PS4
Tested on: PC
The Crew: Wild Run DLC – Review
Since The Crew’s release last year, it has had numerous updates to make the experience of players better. Now, they’re trying to make it even better with a brand new DLC which adds a lot of things the community has been asking for. Race with new cars, take part in more events than ever, do some freedrive challenges and events, and all of this with updated graphics and dynamic weather.
Story
The Wild Run DLC doesn’t really feature any story at all, so we’ll just repeat the story of the main game shortly to get you situated.
America is ruled by illegal street-racing, everyone wants to join the 510 crew and their ranks, and they go to great ends doing so. The 510’s smuggle everything that can fit in a car: guns, people, drugs and more. Your brother was part of the 510’s, he worked his way to the top, but one evening he takes you out on a run and gets killed. The man who killed him is now the new leader of the 510’s, and you’ll do everything to join the crew and climb its ranks so you can get back at him. You also get some help from the FBI, because one of their agents is corrupt and lets the 510’s do everything they want in return for big money…
The story itself is pretty cliché, but it’s entertaining nonetheless. It takes you around America in order to ascend in the ranks and allows you to explore a whole lot more when you’re not doing story missions.
Graphics
A lot has changed graphics wise, if we can believe what the developers say. The game has undergone a complete graphic overhaul which allows you to immerse yourself even deeper into the United States. Sadly, I wasn’t able to play the base game so a comparison isn’t really easy to do, but what can be told is that the game looks pretty damn good. Depth of field and lighting is amazing, and the new added dynamic weather is awesome as well. It’s simply a blast driving in first person and seeing the rain on your windows. Furthermore, vehicle model detail and paint have been improved to please more fans than ever before.
However, better graphics do come at a prize. The game is FPS locked at either 30 or 60 FPS, but it’s pretty hard to reach that 60 FPS mark either way for your everyday gamer. The game has gotten pretty demanding to run, and will require a fairly good setup in order to play it on the highest settings with stable FPS.
Sound
The music and sound effects in The Crew are simply a delight. Cars sound great, accelerating sounds awesome, drifting is great, everything about it is cool. The music over the radio is nice as well, it has great songs to accompany racing and the story missions have nice soundtracks to them as well. Voice acting has also been done very good. The only thing that could have been better is the amount of radio tracks, as you’ll hear most of them repeat quite often.
Gameplay
When we look at The Crew, we see an MMO racing game bigger than ever before. It features a huge map and a lot of territory to explore, taking countless of hours to see everything there is. The controls are pretty standard as well, there’s the typical accelerate, break/reverse, nitrous and all of that sweet stuff, nothing really special to notice here.
As said before, The Crew has an okay story, but there’s so much more to do besides that. You can explore the country looking for car wrecks, landmarks, data stations and so much more. With the addition of the Wild Run DLC, you can now also take part in freedrive challenges and stunts. They pretty much speak for themselves: in challenges you can create custom routes and allow your friends to play them and in stunts you can complete increasingly difficult stunts and bring them to a good end.
Wild Run also features some new tuning specs and a new type of transport: motorcycles! The tuning specs are dragsters, drift cars and monster trucks. Of course, they all have their specific races which you can participate in. In dragster races, you have to warm up the tires, slam the gas and shift at the right time in order to get those perfect timings. When playing a drift race, you’ll have to be the Drift King and take out everyone with spinning tires, and in monster trucks you’ll have to maneuver in an arena which gives more points the more difficult stunts you do.
Motorcycles themselves have also been added, but sadly they’re not that satisfying at all to drive. They’re pretty sluggish and crashing them is almost impossible to do. The main reason for this is that the physics in The Crew really aren’t that good. Trying to flip your car is one of the hardest things to do, let alone crash it. That’s one thing they should have focused on with this DLC, improve physics! Stunting with monster trucks is cool and all, but if the core physics of your game aren’t up to par (in a car game) then it’s no good at all.
As said, the game has also received new driving conditions which are simply a blast. But the biggest addition of them all has to be “The Summit”. The Summit is a gathering of thousands of drivers around the world which takes place in iconic locations around America. It’s the car Mecca and features a lot of cool stuff. The Summit is a month long event, where players have to qualify every week in various races around the country. The higher they score, the better rewards they’ll get when they finally take part in The Summit at the end of the month. This mode can give you very good and unique rewards, but it does require you to put quite a bit of hours into the game as you’ll have to have a really good car and skills in order to put down good scores.
Conclusion
The Crew: Wild Run adds a whole other dimension to The Crew. It has great new graphics, awesome new tuning modes and motorcycles. There’s also a monthly event with qualifiers every week, allowing you to take your competitive spirit to a whole new level. However, the motorcycles aren’t all that fun to drive, and the game is still flawed at its most basic feature: physics. Decide wisely!
The Crew: Wild Run DLC - Review,
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