Need for Speed: Shift review
When EA first announced Need for Speed: Shift, we were promised a brand new racing simulation. Sadly, EA hasn’t quite lived up to that promise, and it has certainly caused a big debate in the world of gaming. One group of people that believes Shift is potentially a good game, let down heavily by poor handling. The other group believes that Shift is a good game with controls that slightly need tweaking before you can experience the game to its full potential. And I sit in the latter camp.
The start of the game sees you sitting in a BMW with the aim of beating a set time, and depending on your performance, you’ll be offered settings the game believes are best for you. But it’s also not a great first outing in Shift, with the controls feeling very twitchy, and the cars not handling or gripping how you would expect for a sim.
The fact is that Shift is not a sim. It’s not an arcade game either. It’s stuck in the middle between Forza 2 and Race Pro. And that’s only after you have fine tuned your controller sensitivity settings, and produced something that is actually playable. But once you do achieve handling perfection, and this is before any actual tuning of the cars, you’ll find Need for Speed: Shift to be one of the most fun racers available.
Shift reminds me of TOCA 2 on the original Xbox. Lots of real world tracks, handling that wasn’t of the arcade variety but not quite a sim either, lots of cars to tune and race, and most importantly, lots of fun to be had. Online play, when Xbox Live was still in its early years, was also one hell of a blast. Without fail I would be on most nights, racing with the same guys over and over for hours. I’m still good friends with a lot of those guys, and racing on Shift is just like those TOCA old days. And we’re certainly having just as much fun as we did back then.
And that could be bad news for Forza 3. Don’t get me wrong, Forza 3 will be a hit game, and will be very good. But it’s a more serious racer compared to Shift. I don’t know how EA did it, and I don’t think they meant to, but Shift is a game that can be enjoyed for hours on end – once the pesky controls have been sorted out. And that’s the main problem that Shift has.
Thanks to hours of tinkering by people and placing their configurations on forums, they have achieved something that EA, the developers of Shift and their testers couldn’t before release. You have to wonder how well their testers actually tested before the game went gold, when a simple setting such as Oversteer/Understeer could be mixed up. Allow me to explain.
If you found your car was suffering from Understeer, in the tuning settings found in Shift you would expect to move the slider more towards the Oversteer setting, which in normal circumstances would counteract the Understeer you were suffering from. Not so in Shift. Some bright spark over in EA labelled this part of the tuning incorrectly, and so to solve an Understeering problem you need to move the slider to the Understeer option. A basic and simple mistake which should never appear in the final version of a game.
However, just about the rest of what I have to say is nothing but good. Graphically the game looks lovely and has to be classed as one of the best looking racers available on consoles at the moment. The tracks and surrounding scenery are quite frankly second to none, and the in car cockpit view certainly beats the view offered by Race Pro. The one and only issue I would have with the cockpit view, is you can’t see the smoke produced by your tyres as you scream around a corner, or the dust thrown up when going off road. Not really a problem, and it shows I’m clutching at straws to find a way to criticise this game.
The sounds produced by the car engines are also nothing short of impressive either. As you tune and upgrade your car with more performance and power, the sound produced by your car will change, with new noises coming from increased turbo power, or a new exhaust outlet for example.
Shift has lots for you to do. Whether it’s buying new cars and upgrading them to works performance, or simply progressing through the different events available in each tier, building up points and money, as well as trying to beat the times set by the people on your friends list. This is a great feature introduced by EA as it makes you want to keep on playing, constantly trying to beat your friends, as well as grab back the events you once owned.
It does this by having a red or green light above certain events. A green lights states you currently own that event, done so by having the majority of the fastest laps out of your friends. A red light above the event states your friend currently owns it. And it’s just like holding a red rag to a bull, as you’ll be drawn into the event, determined to beat the times set by your friends.
Need for Speed: Shift is a truly fantastic game. It’s let down by odd bugs and the online experience is slightly hampered by the countdown timer in the lobby. It’s something that is supposed to keep racing going, but does quickly became annoying as you don’t always want to go straight into a race. The inability to tune your car in a lobby, as well as the fact a lobby becomes locked with 20 seconds left on the timer are also minor negatives against a game that is full of positives. Yes Forza 3 is out soon, but if you enjoy racing, you’ll enjoy Need for Speed Shift. Possibly more.
