If you are a Gran Turismo or Forza fan and are looking for a quick fix, this semi-'sim' will hold you over for a while.
I was going to the store yesterday to buy a new television because my ceiling leaked on my old 720P 32" Akai and put it out of its misery.(Air conditioning unit water cache overflow due to clogged drainage pipes.) So I bought a 42" Vizio 1080P for $700 from Walmart and a copy of Need For Speed : Shift for my Xbox 360. When I got home I immediately hooked up my new T.V and fired up my xbox 360 and inserted my new game. I also have Logitech X-530 surround sound, so playing just about any game is fun in my room.
I started the game's career mode and was pleasantly surprised to find out I could enable/disable all of the assists that I could in Forza Motorsport 2. I prefer to race with a Manual transmission and the only assist I will enable is traction control in any simulation I play. In this game the traction control can be set to "low" or "high." I chose the low settings so I could get the tail out more in the corners.
Depending on how you place in the game's first race, you will get a small fortune to spend on a slow or "tier 1" car. I placed 3rd and bought the Nissan Skyline 2000GT-R.
How did it handle? Fun, quite simply. It didn't handle like a stock vehicle, it already felt as if it had racing suspension and brakes. The car had almost no body roll... and the suspension was springy with no feeling of stabilizers or dampers. No damping is fun!
After about two hours I had unlocked tier two and acquired a 2010 Chevrolet Camaro SS. When I bought it I already had enough money to buy all of the upgrades and get 670HP. Sadly enough, the Camaro had 340 more HP than my Nissan when I was done with it but it did not feel any faster or exciting. In fact, it had almost identical handling characteristics. "Crap, maybe I should have waited for Forza 3."
I have driven about 15 different vehicles so far in NFS:Shift. And so far I can only describe the physics in the game to be based on shifter karts with front and rear suspension with no dampers.
Upon finding that I couldn't take a corner on a certain track because there was a speed bump that would make it bounce uncontrollably until my car pumels the wall and straightens back out, I decided to tune the suspension. In the suspension tuning section, there are two options... Front spring rate, rear spring rate.... and they were both set all the way soft by default! You can't even adjust the damping, probably because there is no dampers.
Finding that this game is basically like driving the same car chassis with a different body shell for every vehicle, I decided to go online and drive into oncoming traffic. Bad part is, you can't. The game won't let you drive backwards for more than 5 seconds before turning you around or removing you from the race.
There is a fun demolition derby like track though that is in the shape of the number 8 with no bridge in the middle. It was pretty fun.
If you want think you might like this game, you probably will. If you like a deep career mode and in depth tuning, you will probably not like this game. The handling in this game is almost just like the other NFS games. I will continue waiting for Forza 3.