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Need For Speed: Shift
Need For Speed: Shift is the 13th instalment in the popular racing franchise but after last years poor reception of NFS: Undercover this version makes some drastic changes. Gone is any semblance of a storyline or cut-scenes, gone are the police chases, roadblocks and open world, and gone are all gimmicks like slow-motion “speed-breakers”. What’s left has more in common with games like Gran Turismo or Project Gotham Racing than previous NFS titles and considering how dire Pro Street (the last NFS title to tread this path) turned out I wasn’t exactly looking forward to this instalment.
The good news is that the game didn’t turn out to be the disaster I expected but on the other hand it’s not one of my favourite games in the series either. Firstly the game is meant to be played from a cockpit perspective and while a lot of attention and detail ahs been lavished on this perspective I usually play my racing games from a chase-cam perspective so all this effort was largely lost on me. All the fully functional dials and displays look really nice and the cool crash effects are best experiences from this perspective but I found it way too disorienting and sticking with an outside view gave me a much better view of my surroundings. All the races are circuit based so there’s only so much they could do with the backgrounds. The crowds look pretty nice, taking photos and waving flags but the circuits don’t come close to the open world racing in my opinion. Speaking of the tracks, you’ll be racing on the likes of Brands Hatch and Laguna Seca but because most of the tracks have already featured in other games you do get a feeling of déjà vu. At least there are some nice cars to drive and vehicles range from Audi S3’s and Ford Focus St’s to McLaren F1’s and Lamborghinis. The wide selection of cars will please all racing fans. Less pleasing are the technical issues that plague this game. The car handling can feel like you are racing with a bar of soap and it took some serious tweaking on my part before I could live with it. The load times are also quite ridiculous and if you have an ATI graphics card be sure to download the latest patch as without it the game verges on unplayable. It’s quite worrying that it took a patch to add LAN play and mouse support to this game, usually an indication that the game was rushed out the door to make deadline. The gameplay is a bit of a mixed bag. The game seems to want to be a serious racing simulation so if you wish you can fiddle with tires, brakes, alignment, springs, dampers and other stuff but on the other hand you could just turn on steering assists, turn off damage and treat it as an Arcade racer. The latter is by far the most entertaining option but serious petrolheads will relish the extra options. The simulation elements were spoiled a bit for me by the dodgy physics that crop up from time to time and overly aggressive AI drivers make the latter races a chore. There is a variety of events to take part in like racing, drifting, time attack, car battles, endurance races, manufacturer competitions and various class or country restricted competitions. The game is split up into five tiers with stars earned during races unlocking new events and tiers. The funny thing is you can unlock the final event by tier two already if you race well enough! Don’t expect any kind of ending however. Shift has some interesting ideas like rewarding you for your driving style (either precision or aggressive) but in the end it had too many annoyances for me to recommend it wholeheartedly. This is definitely a try before you buy kind of game.
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System Requirements
TAGS: Need For Speed: Shift,
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