The Crew covers every MMO mainstay you can think of (but with cars)

Ding!

Ubisoft's The Crew is a racing game that has as much in common with World of Warcraft as it does with Need for Speed. Put another way, it combines the thrill of fast-paced driving with the exploration and rewarding progression inherent to an MMO. Pretty much every genre trope you can think of shows up in The Crew, tweaked to perfectly fit this modern-day arcade racer.

Open-world? The Crew's massive sprawl of real estate offers the best-of America's most iconic territories, each one the size of Grand Theft Auto 5's Los Santos. Quests? Roadways are littered with challenge markers; drive through one, and they start instantly. Quest rewards? Depending on how well (or horribly) you do during a challenge, your corresponding medal determines the stats (yes, stats, including health) of your car part prize. Parties? That's basically your Crew, a group of four players who can warp into each other's missions in an instant. Factions? Instead of Horde or Alliance, The Crew lets you align with one of five different factions, each presiding over its own region. PvP? Yep--though The Crew is built for co-op, you can challenge your fellow drivers to races just as easily as you can team up with them. And like most MMOs, The Crew is intended to be played as an online-only affair.

As with the best MMOs, quest--sorry, mission--variety is excellent in The Crew. One moment, you're evading a parade of squad cars in hot pursuit; the next, you and three friends are ramming into a fleeing bad guy's truck with reckless abandon. It's a neat spin on the typical racing formula, and I'm hoping that eventually, people start taking The Crew's faction wars as seriously as MMO reputation grinding and PvP.

Check out the following screenshots for additional info!

One moment, you're racing down the Las Vegas Strip; the next, you're driving over dunes in the desert

Fleeing a swarm of police cars is even more intense with three friends at your side

Not every mission is over-the-top; some are simply traditional races on an established track

If even one player in your Crew succeeds at a co-op mission, you all do--but you're still competing amongst yourselves for the best times

Because this is an open-world racer, you'll have to deal with NPC traffic (though I didn't see any pedestrians to run over)

Expect a huge variety of terrains, from downtown grids and industrial areas to rural farmland and rocky canyons

Thanks to the deep car customization, you can have the same model tuned for different specs, like city or offroad racing