Motley: Prepare To Accrue The Crew This Fall

I'm sure Ubisoft's enticingly open racer The Crew will provide oodles of entertainment if I can just make it past the title screen without face-planting into my steering wheel due to paralytic title-born boredom coma. The Crew sounds like the most generic thing in the world, and in some ways it looks the part too. The promise of having the entirety of the (truncated) United States open for traversal, however, is simply too tempting to resist. I am conflicted but hopeful. It'll be out this fall, and there's a new trailer below.

So far, Ubisoft is only saying "fall 2014" for release, refusing to narrow it down any further. Oh well.

The Crew really is set to be positively massive, though. Apparently driving from one side of the map to the other will take around 90 minutes. So yes, it falls short of US' purple mountain majesties and amber waves of grain concrete, but it's quite a span by videogame standards.

Once upon a time, Rich wrote about The Crew's utter dependence upon, er, crews, noting that sloppy controlling single-player couldn't hold a candle to the thrill of downing an armored 4x4 with some friends (or strangers). I'm not sure if I agree entirely, given that my ideal mode of playing this game would be just cruising around the countryside and admiring quintessential US landmarks like the world's biggest rocking chair.

Also, the one time I played the crew (E3 of last year, I believe), I loudly declared that I was going to drive off a highway cliff and straight into the middle of Las Vegas. A Ubi PR rep was like, "Um, OK, but I don't really think you can do--" and then he stopped like a ferret with its tongue trapped in a lawnmower because I goddamn did it. My car exploded the first time, but the second time I cartwheeled down that cliff like a ballerina gymnast samurai who was also a car. There's the plot of your next Transformers movie, Michael Bay. You can just go ahead and take that, free of fucking charge.

Ahem. So anyway, The Crew has my attention, even if I am worried that it'll be a tad generic and have crappy car handling. Those things matter significantly less, however, when you're planning to spend 90 percent of your time on an immaterial life-death tightrope swaying gently over every major city in America just before plunging to your certain, immaculately planned doom.