There is one thing above all else that has defined the first year or so of next-gen gaming on PS4 and Xbox One.

It isn’t amazing advances in gameplay. These have been few and far between, and we’re still shooting people and driving cars in much the same way we have done for years now.

It also isn’t jaw-dropping graphics, though there have been some notable instances.

The thing that has been most prominent so far is social, the idea that people want to work with other humans, play against other humans, share everything they do and create with other humans.

Within this the biggest move has been towards mutual experiences where everyone either plays at the same time in the same place or at least gets to interact with others’ games, blurring the lines between single and multiplayer.

Activision’s Destiny has been the highest profile all-play-together game of the year, but Ubsioft has been trailblazing throughout 2014 with a clutch of titles in which other players are omnipresent or just a click away.

Its latest game pushing the social model is The Crew, an open-world racing game.

Is the final big game of the year a champion driver or a nuisance on the road?

Your Local Guardian:

What's it all about?

The Crew is an MMO – massively multiplayer online – so there are lots of people occupying the same game world at the same time. It’s also an RPG – role-playing game – so there is a lot of levelling up, improvement and customisation which can be done to your character, which in this case is really your car despite the game having a story with a protagonist attached to it.

The game takes place on a large, connected map of the USA featuring networks of country roads and many cities to explore. It’s scaled down and simplified from the real thing, obviously, but it’s still very big and each region is instantly recognisable.

Progress is made by completing story missions comprising numerous driving tasks, and there is also a vast assortment of other mini challenges to spend time on.

The structure is very similar to an Assassin’s Creed or Grand Theft Auto open-world game. In terms of driving games, it’s easy to spot inspiration from Test Drive Unlimited, Need For Speed and Midnight Club.

Your Local Guardian:

What’s good about it?

The Crew’s huge, fully traversable setting is far and away its standout feature. Condensed it may be, but it’s still vast and varied in line with the real-world America.

Washington, New York, Detroit, Chicago, Miami, New Orleans, Dallas, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco – these and more of the major US cities are included, along with many other towns, all linked by road. Each area and major settlement within it has been crafted to feature believable weather conditions, architecture, vegetation, wildlife and so on.

Travelling coast to coast or top to bottom is a massive undertaking even within the confines of this slimmer artificial replica of America. The game world feels authentically large-scale and it’s great fun setting out on long drives through it.

Although there’s a game to be played, it’s still possible to plot the epic American road trip of your dreams and just get lost in the driving experience. In fact, if you want to drive from each of the cities to every other on the map you could take a staggering 2,145 separate road trips.

The Crew’s game world is incredibly immersive – it’s quite some technical feat too, working seamlessly with very few loading times. It may not be the most alive a setting has ever been in terms of hustle and bustle, but the character of America has been captured beautifully.

Your Local Guardian:

The other big impressive thing about this game is the amount of different things you can do once you hit the road, or go off-road.

Main missions follow similar paths to other open-world games but instead of tailing someone on foot and then killing them to complete an objective, you’re doing everything from behind the wheel of your car. So there are lots of races, takedowns, escapes and getting to destinations within tight timeframes. There are also tons of quick little minigames such as slaloming, jumping and driving as fast as you can.

Like with Ubisoft stable-mate Assassin’s Creed, the map is dotted with dozens of points that have something to see or do when you get there. Also, as with Assassin’s Creed, some of the best fun is to be just wandering around picking up tasks along the way.

Completing anything in the game earns car parts and money so you can tinker with the appearance and performance of your vehicle, both inside and out, making it unique to you.

Your Local Guardian:

What’s not to like?

With such a large and expansive map, I guess it’s inevitable something was going to give. The element that’s been sacrificed by developer Ivory Tower is the visual quality.

When the game loads up there’s a mouth-watering sequence showing spectacular action from gorgeous looking cars in near-photo-realistic landscapes. It’s a real wow moment, which the actual game doesn’t get remotely close to matching.

There isn’t anything amazing about the graphics, which have quite a low-res last-gen look to them. Weak textures, terrible draw distances and a general lack of detail are all noticeable when driving around.

There are some stunning sights to behold on the epic trip around America but overall the game is a bit unattractive.

This extends to the car models too, which are quite underwhelming – the word jagged comes to mind more than sleek. Engine noises are a touch feeble, too.

Once you start customising and upgrading your first car – and in a strange way becoming attached to it – you may find there isn’t much desire to purchase any of the other 40-odd vehicles in the game. This is just as well as it takes a lot of time and patience to be able to afford the more luxurious motors – unless you make use of the hideous micro-transactions.

Your Local Guardian:

The Crew is very much an arcade racer, with barely a whiff of simulation to it. The sense of speed it creates is reasonable and the handling is passable (aside from a few cornering issues I’ve had), but it’s never as edge-of-the-seat exciting as some of the Need For Speed or Dirt games of the past in which racing has been properly exhilarating.

Sometimes wayward physics slightly blight the driving experience, as does the unpredictability of when the police will give you their attention. Damaging fences seems to irk them more than smashing into other cars. When the police are on your tail you’ll certainly know about it as they are ridiculously aggressive and drive suspiciously superpowered cars.

A sense of cheating extends to other AI in the game.

During races it feels like cars are kept artificially close together, whatever the player’s driving performance, to ramp up tension.

In some events it’s like there are imaginary lines that have to be passed before objectives can be completed. It doesn’t matter what you do in the first 90 seconds or two minutes, you’ll only be able to catch the target car when the game decides you can. There is an early chase mission which I’ve repeated a few times, alone and in co-op, and the takedown has happened at the same point each time.

Everything feels pre-determined and pre-scripted rather than live and improvised.

Also, if you’re not at the right in-game experience level for a particular mission it’s most likely things will conspire against you to ensure you don’t win, stopping you from progressing faster than the game thinks you should and forcing you to grind your way around the map to level up sufficiently.

Your Local Guardian:

With the focus on each player’s car being the main character, it’s not surprising the plot to The Crew is so rubbish.

Yet again, a game starts with the murder of a main character’s family member. Huge yawn.

In this case, the main human character is a bearded, bespectacled hipster type called Alex Taylor, who very early on gets framed for the murder of his brother. Years later he comes out of prison after striking a deal with the FBI to infiltrate a notorious car/crime gang linked to the killing and get those who were really responsible.

So starts a standard revenge plot full of clichés and stereotypical characters completely devoid of charisma. I’ve seen it compared to a rejected Fast and the Furious script, and that’s fair.

Finally, for a game built and sold on its social model, The Crew can at times be very unsociable.

I don’t have friends who have PS4s and who have The Crew, so I’ve been at a disadvantage and forced to rely on the kindness of strangers to be able to enjoy the game’s co-op parts. Unfortunately, most of my requests to others to join my four-man crew for doing multiplayer missions have been rejected and I’ve only been invited into someone else’s crew on a couple of occasions.

When able to play with others it’s been good fun but otherwise I’ve felt slightly isolated and excluded from the party. It’s the same problem I felt held Destiny back – a somewhat cliquey game requiring several conditions to be met before players can get the best out of it. You either need several friends to have the game and be online at the same time or you need to find a group of strangers in the game who are at the right skill level and have the same approach to playing as you do.

Should I buy it?

If you’re expecting this to raise the bar for driving games by being packed with cars that make you salivate, state-of-the-art graphics, perfect physics, non-stop social connection and gripping action against computer opponents, you’re going to be let down.

In some respects The Crew over-promises and under-delivers.

However, it does do some things well and if you’re into driving games it’s worth checking out for the massive game world alone.

If the things that are wrong can be improved in updates or future instalments it could really hit top gear.

7 out of 10

Out now on PS4, Xbox One, Xbox 360 and PC – PS4 version reviewed.