The Crew 2 Special Edition

I've spent enough time with open-world racers to know that "land, air, and sea" is a marketing bullet point that usually means three shallow mini-games stitched together. The Crew 2 is more honest than that, but not without its own contradictions. The headline mechanic, called Fast Fav, lets you hot-swap between a car, a boat, and a plane on the fly while free-roaming, and in those unscripted moments cruising down a canyon highway before veering into the Pacific, it genuinely feels like nothing else on the market. The problem is that the campaign mostly ignores this trick, leaning instead on conventional race structures across the four disciplines: Street Racing (drag, drift, hypercar), Off-road (rally raid, motocross, rallycross), Freestyle (aerobatics, monster truck, jetsprint), and Pro Racing (touring car, powerboat, air race, Alpha GP). That is a staggering menu. Whether any individual item on it is satisfying is another question. The car handling sits in a confident arcade sweet spot, responsive and forgiving, with nitro boosts and generous drift assists keeping things exciting at any skill level. If you have never touched a racing sim, you will feel at home here quickly. Boats and planes are spongier, lacking the tactile feedback that cars nail, but they are competent enough not to ruin the novelty. The world itself, a condensed but enormous approximation of the continental US, is the game's strongest argument for itself. Driving from desert highways in Nevada through rain-soaked Appalachian forests into the Manhattan grid without a single load screen is legitimately impressive, and the density of discipline-specific events scattered across the map means there is always something within reach. For multiplayer, online co-op lets you drop into most events alongside friends, and the Live Battle mode supports up to eight players in competitive sessions, with weekly Live Summits adding a community-competition layer on top. A word of warning for solo players, though: the offline Hybrid mode was a late addition, arriving in late 2025, so some features like LIVE Summits, custom liveries, and certain achievements remain online-only. Progress from online saves does carry over to offline. It is a workable arrangement now, but it matters that these systems were not designed with offline in mind from the start. The upgrade system is similarly low-friction: equip the part with the bigger number and move on. That suits casual players fine but leaves gear-heads with little to theorize over between sessions. The Special Edition bundles in the Digital Special Pack, which includes two bonus vehicles: a Dodge Challenger SRT Demon Interception Unit and a Porsche 911 Speedster. Neither changes the base experience meaningfully, but they are a reasonable sweetener. What you are ultimately getting is an arcade racer with extraordinary surface area and uneven depth. If your crew is four people who want to mess around in a shared open world, swap into planes over Monument Valley, and occasionally throw down in an online race night, this delivers that consistently. If you want a racing game to obsess over mechanically, the campaign's rubber-banding AI and repetitive event structures will wear out their welcome before the map does.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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