Technical difficulties, bad design decisions and a completely insane racing AI spoil what could have been great racer.
Once the game was installed, I'd finished my test lap for the difficulty settings and started my first race I was immediately struck with a number of impressions.
Firstly, the graphics are just not as good as I was expecting. They are by no means bad but from what I'd seen in the media I was expecting something a little more Grid and a little less Race Pro, if you know what I mean. My PC can handle Grid at high settings with very little slow down, 60 fps all the way, pretty much. But even after comprehensive tweaking and testing Shift has moments of real slow-down when there are many cars on screen and this can have nasty effect on your ability to drive. On Replays when the game appears to improve the graphical quality the game was often dipping down to 25-30 fps. As we all know it's not the fps that really matters its the smoothness and it would have been nice if this had been ironed out, a frame cap at 30 would have been ideal. So, not a game spoiler but not brilliant.
My second realisation was the fact that this is not actually a simulation at all. True, there are sim elements, real-world physics is definitely in play in some way and the cars are generally quite difficult to manage effectively especially at speed, as you would expect, but there are quite a few problems when you play without assists or with minimal assists as I normally feel obliged to do.
Finding the right rev band for a good launch is encouraged yet there is no benefit from this and I have learned that getting off the start line quickly is just a matter of flooring it.
It is far quicker to corner by skidding around a bend than it is to stick to the racing line, there seems to be very little chance of your tail flicking out and causing a problem, it will come out, skid and then tamely come back in again. In fact, in this game, more often than not it is your front end causing the problems. Most of the cars I tried had real problems turning into corners even at relatively low speeds. Talking of the racing line, the indicator that shows the best route around a corner is a very dangerous thing and should probably be switched off. It may or may not be in the right place but what it definitely isn't is the right colour most of the time. Green is supposed to represent safety. Time and again (too many times for a normally quite rational person) I went around 'green' bends and ended up pointing the wrong way in a gravel trap. The line is a lie. You have been warned.
There are other problems too and one by one the aren't that important but together they begin to add up to a pretty bad simulation experience. And then we meet the AI driven cars and any pretense of simulation is completely forgotten. You may be forced to drive by the laws of physics (almost) but this limitation does not apply to your rivals on the track who not only can drive much faster than you around corners that would have you spinning they rarely suffer the same punishments that you do for going off-track. A car that you tangled with and sent flying the previous corner will often come straight back at you and attempt to do the same to you. The AI drivers are a pretty mean spirited bunch and appear to delight in barging you out of the way for daring to be on the same piece of tarmac as them. It's not just the ones behind you that you have to worry about either, the ones in front will sometimes slow down (presumably sacrificing any chance of winning the race) put themselves on your line and then brake so that you go into the back of them. As well as irritating the hell out of you this really highlights how bad the AI actually is. If you can't build an AI system that can win by following the rules then go for the easier option and build one that wins by cheating. This is an option taken by many racing game developers recently and this game is by the far the worst example of this I've seen.
Yes, encouraging acts of violence in motor racing seems to be the way to go in games. The developers have made sure that you get in on the act as well by telling you that aggressive driving is something to do with trading paint and making contact with other drivers and they reward you for it. There are even races where you wont get full points for winning. No winning is far too mundane for them; you have to win and spin someone off whilst doing it. Of course you can try to ignore all this rubbish, in much the same way that you can ignore the rewind cheat in Grid and Dirt 2, but this just makes the game more difficult and frustrating.
So from a gameplay perspective this is not looking good and technically it's just as bad. I've had a bad save that decided I hadn't started my career when I was actually Tier 2, cars that wont start, missing sounds, controller set-ups being forgotten and other strange occurrences. The one that had me most perplexed was something I noticed when looking through my awards or Badges. I had a Silver Difficulty Master Badge which said that I had beaten the AI on the highest difficulty 11 out of 18 times. I had never set the AI to difficult and had been playing on medium. However, this does explain why some races were more difficult than others. So when you are having problems winning a race it may not actually be you that's at fault. This and some of the other problems would benefit from a patch but will one be forthcoming from EA? I have my doubts.
I will leave you with one final thought. Does the idea of driving a Bugatti Veyron around the Nordschleife appeal to you? To a lot of racing game enthusiasts this would be very appealing indeed. So, I thought I'd give it a go. As I carefully negotiated some tricky bends I noticed that my opposition was sailing off into the hills at speeds normally only associated with space craft. This was slightly perturbing given the distinctly curvy nature of the course but I soon lost interest in this strangeness as I was rammed at high speed by not one but three different cars in quick succession. The last hit left me in a ditch with an on-screen message warning me that I may be disqualified if I didn't stay on the track. Ah.. racing bliss.
It was at that point that I decided to write this. Oh, and start saving my pennies for Forza 3 of course.