The best thing to be said about 'The Crew' is that it is an ambitious endeavour.

Ivory Tower and Ubisoft have taken on a massive effort in trying to create a MMORPG as a car racing game, and in putting in a miniaturised version of the United States which is fully driveable.

This is a good game hidden beneath a veneer of mediocrity. There's several things which are very enjoyable - the 'long' road trips from city to city which take about 15 minutes to half an hour, speeding along highways.

The challenges you can carry out quickly and easily which upgrade your car to keep it competitive (seriously, these are the best bits of the game. They trigger without a loading screen simply by driving through a gate, and they are varied enough that they don't feel like a grind until the very late levels).

When you can, find others online to join with and do missions.

But there's problems too. The game has a main storyline, and races only unlock in drips and drabs. A far better way would be to unlock new cities at certain levels, and have say, 10 or 20 races available across each, with opponents scaled to your car level. That's a driving game - and avoids one of the major turnoffs of playing co-op with friends - if they haven't unlocked the mission you want to do, they can't do it.

Instead The Crew forces you to follow its incredibly rubbish storyline, which is even more absurd when you write it down.

You play the younger brother of the leader of an illegal street-racing gang. One of his members is stealing money, and when confronted, fatally shoots your brother and tosses the gun into the street. The police arrive along with an FBI agent, who wipes the gun clean and you get framed for murder.

Five years pass, and the guy who killed your brother has managed to both take over the gang and turn it into a US-wide gun, car and drug smuggling operation. An FBI agent comes to you to try and expose the guy who set you up and take down the gang (because apparently they think a guy who was known within the gang and would have been splashed all over the news during the trial is a good pick for a covert operation?)

That all sounds pretty ordinary for now - but then you throw in a secret child and lover and a host of other ludicrous plot twists and it descends into a swirling mess which is impossible to engage with, and instead borders on comedy.

While it's an arcade racer and those always need to get a bit of leeway when discussing driving physics, there are a couple of bugbears I have with the handling in The Crew. Firstly, there's no real feel of connection with either the car or the road, and in a game where you'll spend a lot of time in the same car because of its stinginess with money and the fact you have to grind to level up new cars to make them viable, that's a problem. And when people are able to make spoofs like this - there's probably something wrong with your physics model.

Then there is the problem with the laziness employed in the game in the interest of making it competitive. The Crew's devs have employed much of the lazy corner-cutting which has been almost unanimously shunned by the industry in recent years. AI cars have "catchup" employed - when you are too far behind they'll slow down, when you are too far ahead they'll speed up - as a manufactured way of trying to keep races competitive. Police cars are faster than you, stronger than you and able to deploy in your immediate vicinity to make pursuits and chase missions an incredibly frustrating experience.

A lack of variety in the cars (though since this is meant to be an MMORPG no doubt it'll be tripled and each will be available for individual purpose) and the other issues have me wondering if this was a genuine attempt to make a good one, or an attempt to sabotage the idea so nobody else tries to make one.

2 stars.