Given absolute freedom to race anywhere you choose, The Crew 2 is one of the most exciting racing concepts on PS4 and Xbox One consoles. For those who missed the original, it hands you a miniaturised version of the USA, from New York to San Francisco, remixed and remodeled for you to freely explore. Four years on, the canvas is now even bigger for this sequel - and to help with that heightened scale, developer Ivory Tower adds boats and planes to an existing warehouse of supercars, giving you more ways to get from state to state. The sense of scale is often staggering - a supersized version of Forza Horizon, if you will - and the idea is realised surprisingly well on all consoles.
Of course, you can bypass all of the game's open-world roaming, and just jump straight to set racing events on a 2D map. It's far more practical, but ultimately it's hard not to experiment with The Crew 2's engine in a more free-form manner, just to see how far it goes. Certainly in my experience escalates to a point I didn't expect going in.
First, there's the breadth of the terrain. Taken at a macro level, the breadth of landmass is a marvel - it's just as much experimenting with this side of the game as the actual racing. The engine gives you all the tools you need to migrate quickly: take a vehicle anywhere in the world, freeze the action, and then zoom out and out until you see a full top-down view. It's like an in-game Google Earth - even letting you walk around to admire your collection of boats, planes and cars. The orbital camera mechanic has similarities to Driver San Francisco - itself an unusual last-gen racer, which let you detach from your vehicle. It's curious to note this was developed by Ubisoft Reflections, who also had a hand on the original The Crew, and you have to wonder if some ideas were carried over between the two projects.