A huge leap forward for a series that had seriously lost its way. An in depth review of Need for Speed : Shift.
These recommendations show you just some of the expansive custimisation options in Shift, such as AI Difficulty, Car Transmission and Damge Model. But dont fret - you can change any of these settings at any point in the games wide career mode, making it truly a customizable game for any type of racer. The goal of the game is not to beat some gangsta-bro in a street race, rather to make it to the NFS Tournament. To get there, you have to race through numerous tiers of races. The race modes are very varied, with the basics being Circuit Races, Time Trials and Drift Races. However the Drift Races feel out of place in a serious racing sim, but they are strangly addictive.
By far the best races are Head to Head Races and also the Manifcaturer Races. Head to Head Races are races in which you race against a single appoinent in 3 rounds. Manifacturer Races are races in which a car manifacturer pits a group of one model of car against eachother. These are great because they really test your skills as a driver, even on the easy difficulty. To unlock each Tier, you have to collect a certain amount of Gold Stars and Profile Points. Profile Points are earned by choosing a racing path - Precision or Aggresion. What makes this system so good is that you dont choose in a simple menu screen, you decide by your actions in each race. Throughout the campaign, you earn alot of money. This isnt really a good thing as you can just buy the best car in each tier, so you dont really need to collect any cars - unless you have a collector mentality, like me.
And while the career is quite packed in content, it feels a bit shallow. You will, for the most part, troll threw the rather basic menu list of races checking if you have finished this event series, gotten these stars, etc and it feels a bit to repetitive by other similiar racing standards (ala Forza 2) and it feels like SMS could have put some more effort into the presentation (ala DiRT2).. EA has been heavily hyping the new Cockpit View, which is really dynamic. The inside is well detailed and strongly defined, and when you crash the screen jitters and goes black and white momentarily. Its really a nice touch, and if you get bored of the cockpit view theres always the third person view, which looks great. As does the rest of the game - it all looks fantastic. Cars are very good looking and tracks look very nice.
The AI is mercilessly great, as they crash into you if the race heats up , however they do only tend to follow the racing line which makes it easy to overtake the car and gain the upperhand. Every now and then, however, there is a fairly noticable bug in the graphics. But its not really that bad. However, the Visual Dmage Model is really half-arsed in areas. An increase in tracks and vehicles would have been better appreciated, but the selection you have provided is decent to get by with. Need for Speed Shift is a great racing game, and whether you're a hardcore racer or just a newbie, you will definately find something here to satisfy your racing needs.