We also know that many of you will be eager to turn to experts for their professional advice. You want to read how the pros feel after their carefully considered road tests of The Crew. While we totally understand (hey, we read reviews, too!), The Crew was built from the beginning to be a living playground full of driving fans, so it’s only possible to assess our game in its entirety with other real players in the world. And by other, we mean thousands and thousands and thousands of players – something that can’t be simulated with a handful of devs playing alongside the press.

For this very reason, The Crew will be available to media to begin their reviews when the game launches on December 2. There will be absolutely no embargo on any type of coverage once the game is available for sale. While we fully anticipate that you might see some reviews immediately at launch – largely built around the preview sessions we facilitated during the past months or the limited content of the closed and open betas – they won’t be based on optimal conditions or reflect the finished game. We sincerely hope everyone will take the time to customize their ride as they progress through all five regions, explore every corner of the map solo and with friends, dive into our competitive and cooperative mechanics, race to the end of the main campaign, choose a Faction and compete with your crew in Factions Wars, and so much more.

http://blog.ubi.com/the-crew-road-tested

A look at things to come? Personally I am in favor of reviewers getting the game at the same time stores get them and reviews only coming out a few days later, far too many reviews have been so biased lately.

The most recent has been the review from IGN for the MCC, they gave the game a 9/10 and it was a review in progress as they gave the developers a chance to fix the issues with the game via a patch.

In the same vein they gave Little Big Planet 3 a score of 6.7/10 because of issues that where supposedly sorted out with the Day 1 patch yet refused to review the game after the patch released.

This sort of biased look at games is not on and I hope more companies start to impose review embargo's on their games or just give reviewers the game on release day.

I only give a toss what Eurogamer and CVG say - one of them giving a good review is good enough for me on titles I'm on fence about. For the games I want or don't want I could care less if they got 0/10 or 10/10 (e.g The Crew I have zero interest).

I feel like Ubisoft is making a bigger deal out of this than it actually is.

journalists have been to quite a few press events for The Crew, and in fact a few months ago one of these press events let them play the last couple of story missions and then proceed into end game content.

At this point, journalists have played this game inside out (from my understanding).

But that said, its an interesting decision made by Ubisoft. I cant say I am for this per se since I will need to see what happens, but I aint against it either.

Final review 3 months later after patch 8.4a

The only reason I think they do this is because they already know their game has a lot of problems and want to get as much sales before reviews affect it :/
Ac unity and sonic boom did the same thing

Aside from the review embargo on Unity. I still had so much fun. Played over 40hrs of Unity. Latest patch fixed a lot. Give it a try guys!!! But broken games are no excuse still on release. Sadly we're seeing too much of that lately. But I'm trying to focus on the good rather than the bad lately.