The Crew is free this month from Ubisoft, just two years on from its release. Back then it received mixed reviews. But free is free, and the size of the game’s open world – a huge recreation of the United States – is intriguing enough to entice Adam and Brendan to revisit the racer with a challenge in mind. Who can get from East coast to the West coast the fastest? Ready, set, go.
RPS Feature Amphetamine addiction is ugly
None can know the minds of EA. We were sent review code for Need For Speed [official site] yesterday, plenty ahead of its release… and told that the review embargo for this online-enhanced game would be 8am the next day. The game’s not out until the 17th. A very strange situation indeed, to be given less than 24 hours to review a large, involved driving game, over a week before the servers would be populated. Keeps us on our toes, I suppose. But obviously we’ve not rushed anything. Below are some extensive impressions of this year’s reboot of the franchise based on my first 12 hours with the game. We’ll update this into a full review for you once the game is out, and we can actually play all its aspects.
RPS Feature Burnout Paradise?
Ubisoft’s The Crew is now out, via Steam in the US and UPlay and something called “shops” in other parts of the world. Ubisoft, after the PR disaster of trying to impose post-release embargoes on Assassin’s Creed: Unity reviews, have taken the rather bold step of informing customers not to trust early reviews. This is because they’ve withheld review code from journalists until just before launch, and then insisted that no fair opinion of it can be gained until it’s been played for dozens of hours, the end-game reached, on populated servers. Indeed, no fair review could be written in a day – especially one where, surprise, there are server issues – but impressions can certainly be had of those opening few hours. I’ve written mine below.
I’ve been looking for a decent, freeware 16-bit-esque racer in the style of Outrun for quite some time now and kept bumping into unfinished prototypes, bad ideas, boring implementations and short one-level offerings.
Thankfully and due to the wonders of the internets, I found a terrific one in the most unlikely of places: the Adventure Game Studio forums. A place where people are bound to talk about their mouse driven point-and-click adventures and not racing games of the Red Hot Overdrive variety.
I have drawn a graph to explain how excited I am about Criterion’s Need For Speed: Most Wanted. You can see it below. Up here I’ll instead comment on just how weird it is to be talking positively about Need For Speed. So recently it was the wideboy gaming release, a new copy out every Christmas for people who wear their caps sideways and speak exclusively without consonants. And now look at it – it’s a sequel to what is unquestionably (I’m in charge here) the most fun driving game of all time, Burnout: Paradise.
Italian devs Playstos Entertainment have announced a rather novel looking racer. Real World Racing is a top-down racing game that focuses on realism, rather than arcade antics. Also, it’s using photographs instead of graphics. Photo-realistic graphics!
Gas Guzzlers: Combat Carnage is sort of a 3D Death Rally, or at least that’s what it looks like and that’s reason enough for me to be quite eager to see if that’s what it plays like. Customisable cars with guns on top drive around and pretend to race each other while actually only really caring about exploding one another. It’s out in just four days today if the press release that just landed is to be believed more than the official website. Apparently it’s a “fast-paced addictive combat racing game”. A shame then that the trailer below spends two or three minutes adjusting its mirrors before actually igniting into anything that could be described as “fast-paced”.
