With the Xbox One soon to head off into the sunset thanks to the arrival of the Series X/S it’s worth stepping back to revisit some of the games that made an impact here during this generation. Not all of them are exclusive but each of them resulted in many hours spent glued to controllers and that’s all that really matters. 🙂

Ubisoft’s take on the open world racer arrived at at the worst time. Though The Crew offered a large map (based on the whole United States) and a crime based story to justify the trouble you’re up to it was going to be a hard sell pulling me away from Forza Horizon 2 which was all about fun and was far prettier too. However it impressed Grocs (the resident racing fiend here) a lot and he stuck by the game over the following years. I played a lot more of the game thanks to his recommendations and thanks to the multiplayer having a similar appeal to that of Test Drive Unlimited where you can point your car in a direction and go.

Grocs’ time on the game also lead to easily one of our most popular posts to help players earn credits within both the original game and the Wild Run expansion which is DLC worth mentioning here as it helped give the game a much needed graphical boost in a post Forza Horizon world. I was really impressed with the magic the developers performed here and that Ubisoft was willing to support the game to the level it did but that was also something they would do often during this generation. On the flip side it was also a product of the times when every Ubisoft game needed players to find a “tower” to unlock side missions on the map and that cookie cutter approach wasn’t doing the game any favours.

Time has certainly not been kind to The Crew and with so many other racers available since it might be harder to recommend it now but back then it was something new and it generated a lot of discussion here in relation to our expectations from games in the genre.