The Crew 2 Hovercraft Free Weekend

Cars are rubbish, what with their tires and grip and unfortunate habit of sinking in water – hovercraft are clearly better, and ready to ride today in Ubisoft’s sandbox drive ’em up The Crew 2. In the Gator Rush free expansion – out now – Ubisoft have added three kinds of hovercraft and a new set of events to drive them in, wherever land meets water. Ubi also hope to get a few more people in the drivers seat over this weekend with a 45%-off sale right now, and a free weekend starting tomorrow morning, available for preloading now.

It’s no surprise that Ubisoft are running this event now, as Microsoft juggernaut Forza Horizon 4 launches on PC in just a few days. Both are open-world racing games with similarly playful tones and a variety of vehicles. Still, while Forza lets you race against a gigantic scenery-crushing hovercraft in some events (see this clip from IGN), The Crew 2 lets players get behind the wheel of one, albeit less capable of driving through trees. The Gator Rush update also adds a new Ace difficulty mode to the game, which rewards legendary loot and upgrades, if the AI doesn’t crush you.

The Crew 2 had a rough launch. Our man John had to review it as a purely single-player game as there weren’t enough people on the servers pre-launch to test what’s arguably the heart of it all. Even then it had technical issues at launch and issues connecting to people for a while after that. I haven’t had a chance to take it for a spin yet, but are there any motorheads among us able to weigh in on the state of the game at present? I’d be honestly surprised if the initial problems hadn’t been ironed out by this point, but it seemed that everything that could go wrong at launch, did.

The Crew 2 is 45% off on the Ubisoft Store, down from its usual £50/60/$60. I noticed you can use Club Units (I got enough by playing Assassin’s Creed Origins) to shave it down another 20%. The free weekend starts 7am UTC on September 27th (tomorrow), and runs until 8pm UTC on Sunday, September 30th. You can preload it here if your internet isn’t as brilliant as a hovercraft.