The Crew creative director Julian Gerighty has called the game a role-playing game with large-scale multiplayer elements. Players can also build cars with a tie-in app for iOS and Android. There are no in-game loading screens or pauses. The multiplayer mode lets a maximum of eight players to compete in races and other gametypes. Missions can be played alone, with friends, or with online co-op matchmaking. Players' scores are automatically saved so friends can try and beat their scores, in similar fashion to how Autolog works in games of the Need for Speed franchise.

They are triggered when a player drives through them and involve completing challenges such as weaving through gates and staying as close to a racing line as possible for a period of time. Players can also participate in mini-games called skills challenges that are peppered across the world. The Single-player campaign is up to 20 hours long, and entails infiltrating criminal groups with protagonist Alex Taylor ( Troy Baker). It takes approximately 45 minutes in real time to drive from coast to coast in-game. Over thirty smaller cities and towns line the countryside, such as Nashville, Norfolk and others. Louis, Washington, D.C., New Orleans, Dallas, Salt Lake City, Santa Fe, San Francisco, and Seattle, are also featured in the game. Six main cities (one in each region, two in the Midwest) are featured in the game: Detroit and Chicago in the Midwest, New York City on the East Coast, Miami in The South, Las Vegas in the Mountain States, and Los Angeles on the West Coast. Each region has its own unique geographical features. The map is split into five regions: The Midwest, East Coast, The South, Mountain States, and West Coast. The Crew is a racing game set in a persistent open world environment for free-roaming across a scaled-down recreation of the contiguous United States. A sequel, The Crew 2, was released worldwide on June 29, 2018. The second expansion, entitled The Crew: Calling All Units, was announced at Gamescom 2016 and released on November 29, 2016. The first expansion, titled The Crew: Wild Run, was released on November 17, 2015. The game shipped two million copies by January 1, 2015. Critics praised the game's world design but criticized the always-online aspect, which created technical glitches and other issues, the difficult-to-understand user interface, and the presence of microtransactions. The Crew received a mixed reception upon release. It features a persistent open world environment for free-roaming across a scaled-down recreation of the United States and includes both role-playing and large-scale multiplayer elements. The Crew is an online-only racing video game developed by Ivory Tower and Ubisoft Reflections and published by Ubisoft for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, with an Xbox 360 port developed by Asobo Studio.

The crew ultimate edition trailer