The Crew (2014) - Every PC Rally Game
6The Crew by Ivory Tower/Ubisoft Reflections/Ubisoft, 2014.
The Crew series of games are spiritual successors to Test Drive Unlimited and Test Drive Unlimited 2, using many of the same developers. Both games focus on (a condensed version of) the USA as a map. This original version mostly focused on fake offroad variants of road going cars, but it also included a couple of genuine rally raid/Dakar cars, in the MINI Countryman ALL4 Racing X-Raid and the Volkswagen Race Touareg 3.
Unlike the 2018 sequel, there are no specific rallycross events, but there are (courtesy of the Calling All Units upgrade) some off road events, including offroad cop chases (shown at the end of this video!). There are limited car liveries available, with no community skin options.
Graphics are decent enough, but the game drops a few framers here-and-there (which you can see in this video!), and it has a tendency to suddenly decide it's night-time, mid-day time, which suddenly sends everything pitch dark!
Sound is okay, but a bit quiet. There are a lot of animals everywhere (which the sequel included too). Cars have not only endless (rechargeable over time) nitro boost, but also they mend themselves slowly over time too! So it's just a bit arcade!
The game's focus is on being in a crew to do various (mostly) illegal racing and mission-based events (e.g takedowns), whilst you're secretly working undercover, etc, etc. To me, I prefer the more racing focused sequel!
This is part of the Every PC Rally Game playlist, which you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYDobL0b26ugFuXASCIC9qmFb9_k4_fqU