Certain races can only be completed using certain classes of cars, meaning that you’ll end up with at least four different cars. The car and race selection also follow in this vaguely open, skill-based direction. It goes a long way toward making the game feel like your racing experience even if it isn’t that freeing or responsive. You can drive as messily or cautiously as you want, and the game will reward you. What feels great about this point/reward system is that it doesn’t punish you for one kind of driving or the other, as long as you don’t count losing. If you get 1st place and earn enough achievement points (earned by following the perfect route for a long time, taking another car out, or other minor achievements), you’ll always have enough money to by cool new cars and upgrade them. In all honesty, there isn’t a difference between how well you do in either area. Following the recommended path (which traces the ideal route through each course), avoiding crashes, and accelerating perfectly into and out of turns all earn your precision points. Sliding off the road, bumping other cars, and avoiding the recommended path all earn you aggressive points. You get points in each category depending on how you won each race. That’s right, every time you slide into or out of a turn, you receive a separate grade for each turn.Īll of this record-keeping helps the game determine whether you played the course aggressively or precisely. It records similar information when you round any turn. For instance, when accelerating to pass a car, it records your speed, any contact made with the opposing car, how closely you follow the recommended path, and the smoothness of your acceleration and deceleration. Whenever you do anything in Shift, the game pointedly, carefully records your progress and grades you on your prowess. What’s welcome is the game’s meta-game system, which revolves around cash rewards and an extremely detailed, moment-to-moment judge system. Otherwise there’s a lot of overturning and correction. It’s hard to ease into and out of turns unless you turn the sensitivity way up and drive very carefully. The controls are pretty good, although they’re a bit twitchy for my taste. Mostly, you’ll be carefully drifting around corners, precisely decelerating into and accelerating out of turns. As a racing game, it’s less focused on vehicular damage than Burnout, less sim-like than the GT titles, and quite similar to the PGR games. In-game, you come up against the good and the bad of Shift fairly quickly. It’s a feature you can (gleefully) ignore, but it reminds you that for all of EA’s focus on being a nice company with interesting new IPs, they’re still the same cutthroat villains they were years ago. Of course, it isn’t that hard to earn the money needed to buy relatively nice cars. It’s almost beside the point these days, but EA’s offer to “let” paying customers ($60 in already, mind you) “unlock” better cars for a little fee is both ludicrous and mildly insulting. If you don’t have the money to buy a fast Audi, for instance, you can always go to the EA store and pay real money for the car. This is where you encounter one of the more amusing but annoying bits of Shift: the EA microtransactions that you’ve all been waiting for. After your first race, you have to buy your first crappy car. Shift introduces you to its campaign mode rather convincingly. This is a super-serious mock-up of professional racing, a fiddly fine tuning car sim, an arcade racer complete with bonuses and demerits based on drift, aggression, and precision, and much more (or less, depending on how you look at it). The answer is: uncertainly, which is the same way that the game goes about defining itself. Where is Need for Speed: Shift to fit in among these heavy and established hitters? Dirt, Burnout, Project Gotham Racing, and the more sim-like Gran Turismo games are all carefully ensconced in their separate niches. Today’s racing scene is both more crowded and more accomplished than it was years ago. So things have carried on in this fashion, NFS flirting ungracefully with street racing, returning (maladroitly) to Hot Pursuit II, and finally arriving in the present day. Porsche Unleashed was a fun racer, but the hemmed in tracks and mostly arcade-centric racing were humdrum when compared to new racing titles. Since the arrival of Hot Pursuit on the scene, Need for Speed has struggled to reattain its brilliance. It’s also the first title (that I ever played) that introduced the aggressive AI driver, in the form of a police car, designed to take you down at all costs. The Need for Speed series has been the home to great games, good games, and absolutely awful games.
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