(100 hours on Uplay)
The Crew 2 is a lie. And it's good at lying to you with pretty screenshots, but it's such an unworthy game for your money. Where is why. They lie about everything.

1. They lie about the number of cars. They say it's much more than the Crew 1 - because you no longer grind to buy one, and pay small amount to get it's dirt or performance version, now all the versions are separate full priced cars. So what really happened is that they increased the grind 10x, and sell it to you as if they did any extra work.

2. They lie about the "dynamic weather system". The Crew 1 had various biomes where driving profiles were different: permanently snow covered mountain areas, most notably. They cut all of that out, now it's summer 40+ celsius everywhere, but if you quit to the now fullscreen menu, the game rarely loads in snow, everywhere across all the USA, even under 5 seconds it's white Christmas in freaking Miami. Gone is the variety, behold cheap gimmick feature.

3. They lie about updating the open world. Oh they updated it alright: cut out dozens of small towns, now you have 5 main cities and THAT'S ALL you get from the USA. No more small towns or unique locations, storages, power plants, nothing, all of it replaced with cornfields and forests. Literally EVERYTHING, I'm telling you, EVERYTHING cut out. Finding landmarks with that little extra info drop to get to know the USA's various locations? Gone. License plate unlocking challanges? Gone. They added the Summit after a year but even that is a shadow of it's former self.

4. They lie about even the promise of joy of exploration: remember how you could drive through from coast to coast in the first game and encounter a dozen little fun challanges? Yeah, those are cut, maybe 10% of them remains. Achievement challanges? Gone. Radar stations? Gone. Collectible special car parts? Gone. Crews, you know, the game's titular feature? Gone. But behold, lootboxes, and Diablo-like paragon system with endless skill points.

5. What was the coolest thing about the Crew 1? For me it was the long, endurance races. Those that could take up to 1.5-2 hours. Cut, gone. The longest is one race being maybe 40 minutes, the rest is 15 at best. And even these have drastically limited car options.

So what did Ubisoft replace all of the cut content with?

1. Now you can walk around on foot, in your home, so you can whack it out on your cars you're starting at when racing anyway. You can do this in various stores too.
2. You can customize your driver with all the "who on Earth would wear this?!" nonsense and very few tolerable clothes.
3. Planes and boats that'll wear down really fast, you'll propably never touch them again after 30 minutes.
4. PvP was cut for a year, they added it back, nobody plays it because it's all about "who grinded for more lootboxes?", no evening out the odds, it's literally the "new guy walks out of town, gets ganked by lv999 this game is my life MMO player" experience.
5. Tons and tons of nonsense microtransactions, it's all chinese MMO "who can buy the most obnoxious farting particle effect".

What they completely and entirely failed to improve from the first game:
1. Mirrors still don't function, blurry mess.
2. The devs have no idea how to make headlights. It's a semi-transparent white texture you push ahead of yourself, not emmitting real light, therefore you are completely blind at night. It took them 1 year of trying to fix this and instead decided to remove night driving by making it so light you can barely tell it's not noon.
3. Graphics somehow got uglier, cities lost a lot detail in both art and texture quality, they try to hide it with insane amount of blur, chromatic abberation and lens flare.
4. The story got practically removed.
5. The number of challanges (at least the types that weren't cut completely) are drastically fewer.
6. The number of races are drastically fewer. They literally had 12 street races on launch and that was EVERYTHING in the game. People on console got the "do everything" achievement in 2 days. I haven't done half of the Crew 1 to this day with hundreds of hours in it and I was done with the Crew 2 in 20 hours. Yeah they maybe about doubled the street race content (they pretty much dropped the other race types) but c'mon, it gives you what, +3 hours of racing?

And the worst part of it: model load in issues. You may not know, but here is how you drive: your eyes are on the horizon. Constantly processing information, which route is safe, no civil cars, no crashing into them. As the street changes on your horizon, so are your routing plan, choosing speed, which side of the street you drive on etc. Now the problem is, the Crew 2 loads in civil car models so abhorrently slowly, that they load in in the area BETWEEN the horizon and you, 99% of the time resulting in a situation where you already chose where and how to drive and you cannot alter it anymore and crash into civil cars at full speed. The faster your car is, the worse it gets, because the engine fails to load in civil cars fast enough. You think you are in for some nice sightseeing from the plane? The same happens: asphalt completely disappears, making cities look like as if they are build on dirt, trees become 2 sheets of paper crossing each other etc, the Statue of Liberty looks like a literal piece of ♥♥♥♥ if you try to take a photo of it from a nearby bridge, because your camera can zoom, but the models don't change back from their far away oversimplified version.

Here is what got better:
Photo mode has nice filters now.

Decide if it's worth your money, but I'd invest in Forza Horizon or The Crew 1.

EDIT: 5 years after release I decided to give it a chance again, on a whim. I'm pleasantly surprised: the game has QUADRUPLED it's content, the graphics (however slightly) improved. It's well worth picking up the core game on a deep sale. Open world content is richer with collectibles and just far more races to run into. There are TONS of overlapping bi-weekly events, unique races that decorate part of the world into chinatown for example, and every story content from the past is available for free, and FIVE YEARS of those is a LOT.

(100 hours on Uplay) The Crew 2 is a lie. And it's good at lying to you with pretty screenshots, but it's such an unworthy game for your money. Where is why. They lie about everything. 1. They lie about the number of cars. They say it's much more than the Crew 1 - because you no longer grind to buy one, and pay small amount to get it's dirt or performance version, now all the versions are separate full priced cars. So what really happened is that they increased the grind 10x, and sell it to you as if they did any extra work. 2. They lie about the "dynamic weather system". The Crew 1 had various biomes where driving profiles were different: permanently snow covered mountain areas, most notably. They cut all of that out, now it's summer 40+ celsius everywhere, but if you quit to the now fullscreen menu, the game rarely loads in snow, everywhere across all the USA, even under 5 seconds it's white Christmas in freaking Miami. Gone is the variety, behold cheap gimmick feature. 3. They lie about updating the open world. Oh they updated it alright: cut out dozens of small towns, now you have 5 main cities and THAT'S ALL you get from the USA. No more small towns or unique locations, storages, power plants, nothing, all of it replaced with cornfields and forests. Literally EVERYTHING, I'm telling you, EVERYTHING cut out. Finding landmarks with that little extra info drop to get to know the USA's various locations? Gone. License plate unlocking challanges? Gone. They added the Summit after a year but even that is a shadow of it's former self. 4. They lie about even the promise of joy of exploration: remember how you could drive through from coast to coast in the first game and encounter a dozen little fun challanges? Yeah, those are cut, maybe 10% of them remains. Achievement challanges? Gone. Radar stations? Gone. Collectible special car parts? Gone. Crews, you know, the game's titular feature? Gone. But behold, lootboxes, and Diablo-like paragon system with endless skill points. 5. What was the coolest thing about the Crew 1? For me it was the long, endurance races. Those that could take up to 1.5-2 hours. Cut, gone. The longest is one race being maybe 40 minutes, the rest is 15 at best. And even these have drastically limited car options. So what did Ubisoft replace all of the cut content with? 1. Now you can walk around on foot, in your home, so you can whack it out on your cars you're starting at when racing anyway. You can do this in various stores too. 2. You can customize your driver with all the "who on Earth would wear this?!" nonsense and very few tolerable clothes. 3. Planes and boats that'll wear down really fast, you'll propably never touch them again after 30 minutes. 4. PvP was cut for a year, they added it back, nobody plays it because it's all about "who grinded for more lootboxes?", no evening out the odds, it's literally the "new guy walks out of town, gets ganked by lv999 this game is my life MMO player" experience. 5. Tons and tons of nonsense microtransactions, it's all chinese MMO "who can buy the most obnoxious farting particle effect". What they completely and entirely failed to improve from the first game: 1. Mirrors still don't function, blurry mess. 2. The devs have no idea how to make headlights. It's a semi-transparent white texture you push ahead of yourself, not emmitting real light, therefore you are completely blind at night. It took them 1 year of trying to fix this and instead decided to remove night driving by making it so light you can barely tell it's not noon. 3. Graphics somehow got uglier, cities lost a lot detail in both art and texture quality, they try to hide it with insane amount of blur, chromatic abberation and lens flare. 4. The story got practically removed. 5. The number of challanges (at least the types that weren't cut completely) are drastically fewer. 6. The number of races are drastically fewer. They literally had 12 street races on launch and that was EVERYTHING in the game. People on console got the "do everything" achievement in 2 days. I haven't done half of the Crew 1 to this day with hundreds of hours in it and I was done with the Crew 2 in 20 hours. Yeah they maybe about doubled the street race content (they pretty much dropped the other race types) but c'mon, it gives you what, +3 hours of racing? And the worst part of it: model load in issues. You may not know, but here is how you drive: your eyes are on the horizon. Constantly processing information, which route is safe, no civil cars, no crashing into them. As the street changes on your horizon, so are your routing plan, choosing speed, which side of the street you drive on etc. Now the problem is, the Crew 2 loads in civil car models so abhorrently slowly, that they load in in the area BETWEEN the horizon and you, 99% of the time resulting in a situation where you already chose where and how to drive and you cannot alter it anymore and crash into civil cars at full speed. The faster your car is, the worse it gets, because the engine fails to load in civil cars fast enough. You think you are in for some nice sightseeing from the plane? The same happens: asphalt completely disappears, making cities look like as if they are build on dirt, trees become 2 sheets of paper crossing each other etc, the Statue of Liberty looks like a literal piece of shit if you try to take a photo of it from a nearby bridge, because your camera can zoom, but the models don't change back from their far away oversimplified version. Here is what got better: Photo mode has nice filters now. Decide if it's worth your money, but I'd invest in Forza Horizon or The Crew 1. EDIT: 5 years after release I decided to give it a chance again, on a whim. I'm pleasantly surprised: the game has QUADRUPLED it's content, the graphics (however slightly) improved. It's well worth picking up the core game on a deep sale. Open world content is richer with collectibles and just far more races to run into. There are TONS of overlapping bi-weekly events, unique races that decorate part of the world into chinatown for example, and every story content from the past is available for free, and FIVE YEARS of those is a LOT.