Hands-on with Ubisoft’s The Crew: Calling All Units

Ubisoft showed off the new downloadable content (DLC) for its open world driving game, The Crew. In this case, your job is to try to get away from the cops or to try to catch the bad guys.

If you’re the cops, you have to pull close behind the bad guys and stay there for seven seconds. If you do that, you complete the arrest. You can call in a helicopter to help you, but you have to watch out for flash bangs dropped by the criminals. If you fall too far behind, you can hit a reset button that puts you reasonably close to your target so you can keep trying.

Your job as the bad guy is to pick up a stash and deliver it without getting caught. A blue line tells you the path where you have to go, but you can choose any way you want to get there. You can also use a nitro boost to pull away from the cops who are closing in. There’s a lot of opportunities for multiplayer chases, as multiple players can play on both sides.

Here are a few hands-on gameplay sessions where I managed to completely fail at the task at hand. The game is coming this fall on the PC and the consoles. The date isn’t set yet.

The Crew debuted as an open world racing game in 2014. Ubisoft expanded it with The Crew Wild Run in 2015.

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.