1782: The Crew: Project Gotham for a New Generation?

I wouldn’t say by any means that I’m a die-hard petrolhead, but I do enjoy a good driving game, with the emphasis on game. That is to say, I tend to find the more hardcore driving “simulations” such as Forza Motorsport and Gran Turismo to be hard going, slow paced and more difficult than is enjoyable; I’d much rather play something where the “correct” way to play is to fling your car sideways around a corner, not caring if you’re smashing street lights and fencing all over the shop, not worrying about fucking your car’s performance up after a few bumps and scrapes, not having to engage in anything even remotely resembling “sportsmanship” when racing against other cars, be they computer- or player-controlled.

One of the driving game series that I did find myself enjoying a whole lot over the years was Bizarre Creations’ Project Gotham Racing series, which actually began with the venerable (and awesome) Metropolis Street Racer on Sega’s ill-fated 128-bit console, the Dreamcast. Project Gotham as a whole occupied a curious middle-ground between serious sim and arcadey racer; on the one hand, you were racing real cars around realistic environments and it wasn’t really a “smash and bash” racer — in fact, Metropolis Street Racer even penalised you if you crashed too much, though this harshness was toned back a little in the later games, since they were already difficult enough — while on the other, you were flinging your car around with gay abandon, swinging its back end out whenever possible, darting between cone gates and playing chicken with upcoming walls as you tried to build up enough speed to actually leave the ground when racing down San Francisco’s hilly streets.

In other words, Project Gotham demanded some genuine driving skill, but also knew that people liked having fun in cars, too — the sort of fun that would quickly get you arrested were you to try it… well, anywhere, really. Project Gotham allowed a safe environment for you to hop into various high-spec sports cars (and a few low-end crap cars towards the beginning) and just have some fun. It was later taken to the next extreme by the rather wonderful commercial flop Blur, which combined Project Gotham’s semi-realistic racing (and real cars) with the stuff of pure fantasy — neon-coloured Mario Kart-inspired weapons that allowed you not only to race aggressively against your opponents, but to fire various explosive devices up their tailpipe, too. How sad that it wasn’t more of a success than it was.

But I digress. Today I’ve been playing The Crew from Ubisoft, a game that I’ve been cautiously curious about ever since I first heard about it a year or two back. Promising a (somewhat scaled-down) recreation of the entirety of the United States of America, a variety of different mission types and a strong focus on working together with actual, real-life other people, it sounded like a natural evolution of the direction racing games had been moving in for a while.

Need for Speed Underground 2 introduced us to the idea of a racing game set in an open world. And boy did it work well. It worked so well that pretty much every Need for Speed game since has had some variation on this formula, with you driving around a vast (and suspiciously geographically diverse) map to discover events, take them on and complete them — or just to drive around for the fun of it. These open worlds didn’t have the same level of detail about them as something like Grand Theft Auto, but they didn’t need to; you only saw them from behind your windshield, and you never left your vehicle, unlike in Rockstar’s classics. They did the job, though, and that was to provide you with an interesting environment in which you could get to know your car and the various roads, then challenge you with various events that would test your knowledge of both these things in a practical sense.

Later racing games played with this formula in different ways: Need for Speed Most Wanted had a strong emphasis on dramatic police chases, for example, while Need for Speed Hot Pursuit (the more recent version) actually allowed the choice of whether you were cops or street racers. Burnout Paradise, meanwhile, took that series’ typically exaggerated crashes and built a whole game mode out of them, where you’d have to crash and then bounce your car along the street for as long as possible, hitting as many things as possible along the way. (Oh, you could race a bit, too.)

The reason why I’m bringing up all these other games is that The Crew, so far, feels like an entertaining mishmash of all of them. It has Burnout’s crashcam, Project Gotham’s driving through gates and beating speed milestones, Need for Speed’s police chases. All of these different strands of DNA are very much apparent as you play, but for some reason it’s Project Gotham I keep thinking of as I play, even though they’re very different games; Project Gotham may have unfolded in realistic environments like The Crew does, but it took place entirely on enclosed courses rather than in open-world environments where it’s possible to find shortcuts and go off-piste.

I think it’s the variety of events which brings this to mind: most open-world racers in the last few years have included some sort of variation on the “race, destroy, time trial” formula, but The Crew adds a number of additional elements to the mix in the form of small, short skill challenges dotted around the various maps. Bringing to mind some of Project Gotham’s short but teeth-gnashingly difficult challenges, the skill tests task you with everything from remaining above 50mph for as long a distance as possible in a time limit to slaloming around posts. And, of course, just completing these tasks isn’t enough; there’s bronze, silver and gold levels of completion to take on, plus online leaderboards.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the game, though, is the “co-op” multiplayer, as this adds a strange and welcome twist to the usual online racing formula. Instead of everyone jockeying for first position as usually happens — or, more accurately, the person with the best car screaming off ahead, never to be seen again, as everyone else fights for second — these events just require that someone wins. Everyone else’s job then effectively becomes ensuring that the computer-controlled racers don’t have the opportunity to catch the person who is screaming off ahead, hopefully never to be seen again; it becomes a team effort, and when it works, it seems like a whole lot of fun. Unfortunately, I’ve only had the opportunity to try event in this manner so far, but hopefully as more people pick up the game there’ll be more chances to enjoy the game the way it was clearly designed to be played.

The Crew is often described as an “MMO”, though at present that’s not altogether accurate. The execution is somewhat like Test Drive Unlimited, in which you’ll be driving around minding your own business and occasionally see other people in the area. When you reach an event, you have the option to “quick invite” anyone in the vicinity to join you, or you can pre-form a crew of up to four people to tackle challenges in a more organised manner. There don’t seem to really be enough players online as yet — at least not on the PC version — to make this feature shine as it should, but I’m interested to see how — or indeed if — it grows in the coming weeks.

Even if it doesn’t, the single-player offering seems fairly solid, and it has so far made a good start at fulfilling my wish of a racing game with a semi-decent story, so I’m intrigued to see what happens next. I’m also pleased to see the protagonist is a bespectacled, bearded Gordon Freeman lookalike rather than the usual self-consciously cool douchebags that usually populate this sort of game.

First impressions are pretty good then; more will doubtless follow very soon.