As part of my preparation for returning for reviewing Gator Rush for The Crew 2, I returned to the game a few days prior and played a lot more of it. I really got into the groove and put aside my irks about certain bugs and really enjoyed the additional 20+ hours I put into the game.

Driving around in an online crew not surprisingly made the experience that much better. The Crew 2 has some nice ideas, and some decent racing. I can safely say I am encouraged by the way the base game is building based on the free Gator Rush expansion (all future main expansion content for the base game will be free).

Being able to traverse from water to land seamlessly during a race is great.

Firstly, Gator Rush is mainly about a new discipline; small hovercraft. I have to say on paper it doesn’t sound like much, but racing around on these unique machines is extremely fun. Even cruising around is amazing because you can go from water to land and it is seamless. You have about half a dozen hover craft you can buy, and playing the base game will win you one of these as well. I can’t recall hover crafts being used in a racing game before, so kudos to Ivory Tower and Ubisoft for doing this.

Next, Gator Rush also fixes a lot of bugs that plagued the game at launch. Finally I can configure my two houses with a wide assortment of vehicles and it saves. This really adds to the immersion and the experience for me, so I am overjoyed to see this fixed. The AI has also been given a good tweak, particularly for the hyper car races, which results in far less rubber banding. It is still present, but not quite as noticeable and less exploitable.

At time of launch these vehicles were also available, allowing you to start with a Hovercraft straight away.

There is also a new tier of parts which are Legendary. This provides even more of a boost to your favourite vehicles, and combined with other similarly themed parts allows you to get extra bonuses for completing a set. For grinders, this is heaven. I’m not much of a grinder, but the rewards seem to pop up fairly frequently even if you are just racing. There is also an additional difficulty level. This bumps the difficulties levels to choose from up to three. This makes sense in line with the new legendary parts you can receive.

Overall I’m impressed with Gator Rush, The Crew 2’s first free DLC. It helps cement the game’s promise and I hope to see the game really come into a fuller experience when the second DLC is released in December. With this upcoming expansion we’ll finally be able to play PvP in the game.