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IGN Review of Need for Speed: Shift
EA's Need for Speed franchise has had its up and downs. Unfortunately, the past few years has been one of those "down" bits, with the last couple games doing nothing to advance the series in any way that you would call good. So, something had to be done, and EA decided to hand off the reins to Slightly Mad Studios, the folks behind the PC racing series GTR, to create Need for Speed Shift. So did the changing of the guard pay off?
Oh, yes it did, and in a huge way.
There are so many things done right in terms of design that this feels like the freshest take on the "simulation" racing genre in many, many years. I put the word "simulation" in quotes because while Need for Speed Shift is undoubtedly closer to that end of the racing spectrum than, say, Burnout, Slightly Mad made some very smart choices in deciding what would be realistic and what wouldn't. The result is that the team is essentially giving you a racing experience that is extremely close to the real thing in terms of presentation, while keeping the controls just arcadey enough to allow relative newcomers a much easier entryway into the game than the likes of Gran Turismo.
Click the image to watch our video review.
Let me step back a little bit before delving into the racing experience. NFS Shift returns to the track-based racing of old (and ProStreet) rather than the open-world stuff seen in most of the modern titles. You'll find mainstays like Laguna Seca, Willow Springs and Nurbergring as the backdrops to your tire burning, and each of these are brought to life excellently. They're not 100% accurate compared to their real-world counterparts however as Slightly Mad has tweaked the scenery to provide more compelling views in spots that were a little drab, but the course layouts are indeed intact, which is what's important. Given the course selection in the game (totalling somewhere around the 20 track mark), it's of little surprise that practically every meter of road in the game is fun to drive.
Unlike pretty much every modern day Need for Speed title, there's zero story involved, and I'm very happy about that. The closest thing you're going to get to some sort of tale is the voiceover that you'll hear at the start of the game, telling you that you've been given a chance to prove yourself in a BMW M3 around Brands Hatch before winning some cash and choosing your own ride. After that, the voice only returns to explain new events and the like, but never to tell you that the cops are on your tail or that your love interest can introduce you to some jackass in a garage. Nope, this pretty much as pure of a racing game as you can find, and I for one am very thankful for that.
That's not to say that the experience is drab. On the contrary, there's fantastic and somewhat atmospheric music in the menus, a generally slick interface all around and some stylistically edited videos to introduce new events. It's the sort of stuff that will keep your blood pumping between events without getting in the way.
Rather than remaining static, the view shifts and undulates slightly when the gas or brakes are applied. Sitting at the starting line and revving the engine can rock the vehicle back and forth, and slamming on the brakes to take a tight corner will throw your view forward towards the dashboard. It's a dynamic camera that moves to impart the inertia and g-forces that you'd feel while racing. Fortunately, it's not overdone to the point where it'll make you sick; it's subtle enough that you know that it's happening, but may forget about it after a while. But, go into the same view in most any other racer and you'll realize what you're missing.
Perhaps the coolest bits come when you crash as your view is tossed around, the colors fade out (and then back in as you recover) and your vision blurs. Again, it's not done to the point that it'll make you vomit all over your controller, but it does a very good job to let you know that you've just totaled a $200,000 automobile.
This exceptional cockpit view extends to the game's sense of speed. When you're doing 150mph, you know it. When you're doing 200+mph, you'll get scared. More than pretty much any other racing game I've ever played (and I've played a lot), NFS Shift makes you respect speed. When you get into the later races in the game and get behind the wheel of a Zonda R, Bugatti Veyron or Koenigseggisseggggnignigsegigisegggg CCX, you will actually consider taking your foot (or finger) off the gas in a slight bend because you can feel the car start to get loose. Slight undulations in the road that were previously unfelt will cause your car to lose traction for a split-second, which is enough to send it into the wall. It's a startling feeling, one that's rare in racing games and one of the biggest elements that separates real driving from its virtual counterpart. You still don't get the feeling of fearing for your life, but I'm pretty sure that's a good thing.
So the driving mechanics and sense of speed are fantastic, but let me now get into the sound because it is awesome. A lot of other racers have great engine samples, nice crashing effects and so forth, but very, very few actually get the mix of all of this correct. If you're driving around town in your day-to-day car and brake a little late into a turn or push your tachometer a little high before disengaging the clutch then you might get some nice tire squeals. Those squeals, however, are nothing like what you hear at a track, especially when you're inside of a supercar. Those squeals sound like the rubber is alive and being torn from the axel while also being burning alive. It's a raw sound that is not unlike what war in Hell would sound like were it taking place underneath your car, and pretty much no racing game on the market conveys this correctly.
Need for Speed Shift actually does, and it's music to the ears. Or, actually it's extremely grating, but that's the point. If you have your volume up to the appropriate level (past where the physical dial tries to you let you turn it) then you will get a deafening introduction to what these engines sound like when there are only inches of steel, cloth and/or leather between you and 600+ horsepower in the back seat. I'm sure there will be some people out there who buy this game and think that the sound isn't as good as their grandmother's racer, but they're dead wrong. This is how it should be done.
Oh, and as a nice "we want you to hear the cars" nod, the music is turned off by default in races. Thank you.
One area that I didn't like in terms of the driving mechanics, however, is with the drift events. Here, the physics simulation feels completely different, and punching the gas will cause your car to spin out even at the starting line. Vehicles are set up to be extremely slippery and it's your job to be careful and caress them through the corners. I found it to be extremely difficult to keep my car in check, often oversteering way, way too much even though I barely had my finger on the gas. I would have greatly preferred to have tackled this the other way around, where you need to work to get your car into a spin and over-rev in order to keep the tail out rather than having the game try to make you spin out and have you fight to keep the car in check. Fortunately, the career mode is set up in such a way that you can skip these without much of an issue.
The result of this is that regardless of where you place in an event, you'll have earned something. This is a very good thing in that it keeps you going even when you know that you're going to lose. One cool extension of this is that it applies to both online and offline racing. You rack up the same bank account and points total regardless of what you're doing, so you can help advance your career while playing online, which is obviously nice.
Obviously there's a cost difference, though as I played through the career mode, I never had an issue with cash. It would sometimes be close, but I always had enough money to buy the best car in a new class that I never had to deal with second-best and upgrade later. Granted, I didn't spend a whole lot of money on upgrades (which can get costly) because I was doing well enough with the stock models, but still, I didn't exactly spend much time at the dealership.
Fortunately, the game does mix things up quite a bit for you in that there are specialized events where you're given a specific car (or a choice of only a couple) to drive, so while you might not ever purchase a 350Z, you'll drive one a few times in events that feature it. I do like this element quite a bit, though again, I wish that I had to spend more time managing my stable of vehicles, slowly upgrading them over time and then finally purchasing a better car and reaping the benefits. In this respect, Gran Turismo this is not.
This sort of leads me to my own subjective view of the career mode in that it feels more "checklist-y" than I would like. I'm sure a lot of people will be fine with the set up, but for me I found that I never really went back to complete earlier races and always just kept going forward - I was simply working through all of the available events until I had completed them all with a decent number of stars. There aren't really events that require that you own specific cars (since car-specific events give you the appropriate ride), so you won't really go back down a class to compete in an event that you finally bought or earned a qualifying car for.
The last thing that I want to mention before wrapping this up is that while the online mode for the game doesn't offer a huge number of options, it's really fun. There's a basic Quick Race option (both ranked and unranked) which is pretty much exactly what you'd expect. But then you have a Driver Duel mode, which plays out sort of like a King of the Hill match. There are a handful of levels in the ladder that you're trying to climb, and you start at the bottom faced off against another racer at the same level. You'll both be in the same car (which is randomly chosen for you), and the car and track match the level that you're on. So on the first level, you'll be in pokey rides on easy tracks, while at the top you'll be in supercars on the most technical courses. The interesting thing here is that if you lose, you go all the way back down to the bottom. It's fun and fast-paced enough to keep you going for a good while.
©2009-09-10, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Oh, yes it did, and in a huge way.
There are so many things done right in terms of design that this feels like the freshest take on the "simulation" racing genre in many, many years. I put the word "simulation" in quotes because while Need for Speed Shift is undoubtedly closer to that end of the racing spectrum than, say, Burnout, Slightly Mad made some very smart choices in deciding what would be realistic and what wouldn't. The result is that the team is essentially giving you a racing experience that is extremely close to the real thing in terms of presentation, while keeping the controls just arcadey enough to allow relative newcomers a much easier entryway into the game than the likes of Gran Turismo.
Let me step back a little bit before delving into the racing experience. NFS Shift returns to the track-based racing of old (and ProStreet) rather than the open-world stuff seen in most of the modern titles. You'll find mainstays like Laguna Seca, Willow Springs and Nurbergring as the backdrops to your tire burning, and each of these are brought to life excellently. They're not 100% accurate compared to their real-world counterparts however as Slightly Mad has tweaked the scenery to provide more compelling views in spots that were a little drab, but the course layouts are indeed intact, which is what's important. Given the course selection in the game (totalling somewhere around the 20 track mark), it's of little surprise that practically every meter of road in the game is fun to drive.
Unlike pretty much every modern day Need for Speed title, there's zero story involved, and I'm very happy about that. The closest thing you're going to get to some sort of tale is the voiceover that you'll hear at the start of the game, telling you that you've been given a chance to prove yourself in a BMW M3 around Brands Hatch before winning some cash and choosing your own ride. After that, the voice only returns to explain new events and the like, but never to tell you that the cops are on your tail or that your love interest can introduce you to some jackass in a garage. Nope, this pretty much as pure of a racing game as you can find, and I for one am very thankful for that.
That's not to say that the experience is drab. On the contrary, there's fantastic and somewhat atmospheric music in the menus, a generally slick interface all around and some stylistically edited videos to introduce new events. It's the sort of stuff that will keep your blood pumping between events without getting in the way.
Rather than remaining static, the view shifts and undulates slightly when the gas or brakes are applied. Sitting at the starting line and revving the engine can rock the vehicle back and forth, and slamming on the brakes to take a tight corner will throw your view forward towards the dashboard. It's a dynamic camera that moves to impart the inertia and g-forces that you'd feel while racing. Fortunately, it's not overdone to the point where it'll make you sick; it's subtle enough that you know that it's happening, but may forget about it after a while. But, go into the same view in most any other racer and you'll realize what you're missing.
Perhaps the coolest bits come when you crash as your view is tossed around, the colors fade out (and then back in as you recover) and your vision blurs. Again, it's not done to the point that it'll make you vomit all over your controller, but it does a very good job to let you know that you've just totaled a $200,000 automobile.
This exceptional cockpit view extends to the game's sense of speed. When you're doing 150mph, you know it. When you're doing 200+mph, you'll get scared. More than pretty much any other racing game I've ever played (and I've played a lot), NFS Shift makes you respect speed. When you get into the later races in the game and get behind the wheel of a Zonda R, Bugatti Veyron or Koenigseggisseggggnignigsegigisegggg CCX, you will actually consider taking your foot (or finger) off the gas in a slight bend because you can feel the car start to get loose. Slight undulations in the road that were previously unfelt will cause your car to lose traction for a split-second, which is enough to send it into the wall. It's a startling feeling, one that's rare in racing games and one of the biggest elements that separates real driving from its virtual counterpart. You still don't get the feeling of fearing for your life, but I'm pretty sure that's a good thing.
So the driving mechanics and sense of speed are fantastic, but let me now get into the sound because it is awesome. A lot of other racers have great engine samples, nice crashing effects and so forth, but very, very few actually get the mix of all of this correct. If you're driving around town in your day-to-day car and brake a little late into a turn or push your tachometer a little high before disengaging the clutch then you might get some nice tire squeals. Those squeals, however, are nothing like what you hear at a track, especially when you're inside of a supercar. Those squeals sound like the rubber is alive and being torn from the axel while also being burning alive. It's a raw sound that is not unlike what war in Hell would sound like were it taking place underneath your car, and pretty much no racing game on the market conveys this correctly.
Need for Speed Shift actually does, and it's music to the ears. Or, actually it's extremely grating, but that's the point. If you have your volume up to the appropriate level (past where the physical dial tries to you let you turn it) then you will get a deafening introduction to what these engines sound like when there are only inches of steel, cloth and/or leather between you and 600+ horsepower in the back seat. I'm sure there will be some people out there who buy this game and think that the sound isn't as good as their grandmother's racer, but they're dead wrong. This is how it should be done.
Oh, and as a nice "we want you to hear the cars" nod, the music is turned off by default in races. Thank you.
One area that I didn't like in terms of the driving mechanics, however, is with the drift events. Here, the physics simulation feels completely different, and punching the gas will cause your car to spin out even at the starting line. Vehicles are set up to be extremely slippery and it's your job to be careful and caress them through the corners. I found it to be extremely difficult to keep my car in check, often oversteering way, way too much even though I barely had my finger on the gas. I would have greatly preferred to have tackled this the other way around, where you need to work to get your car into a spin and over-rev in order to keep the tail out rather than having the game try to make you spin out and have you fight to keep the car in check. Fortunately, the career mode is set up in such a way that you can skip these without much of an issue.
The result of this is that regardless of where you place in an event, you'll have earned something. This is a very good thing in that it keeps you going even when you know that you're going to lose. One cool extension of this is that it applies to both online and offline racing. You rack up the same bank account and points total regardless of what you're doing, so you can help advance your career while playing online, which is obviously nice.
Obviously there's a cost difference, though as I played through the career mode, I never had an issue with cash. It would sometimes be close, but I always had enough money to buy the best car in a new class that I never had to deal with second-best and upgrade later. Granted, I didn't spend a whole lot of money on upgrades (which can get costly) because I was doing well enough with the stock models, but still, I didn't exactly spend much time at the dealership.
Fortunately, the game does mix things up quite a bit for you in that there are specialized events where you're given a specific car (or a choice of only a couple) to drive, so while you might not ever purchase a 350Z, you'll drive one a few times in events that feature it. I do like this element quite a bit, though again, I wish that I had to spend more time managing my stable of vehicles, slowly upgrading them over time and then finally purchasing a better car and reaping the benefits. In this respect, Gran Turismo this is not.
This sort of leads me to my own subjective view of the career mode in that it feels more "checklist-y" than I would like. I'm sure a lot of people will be fine with the set up, but for me I found that I never really went back to complete earlier races and always just kept going forward - I was simply working through all of the available events until I had completed them all with a decent number of stars. There aren't really events that require that you own specific cars (since car-specific events give you the appropriate ride), so you won't really go back down a class to compete in an event that you finally bought or earned a qualifying car for.
The last thing that I want to mention before wrapping this up is that while the online mode for the game doesn't offer a huge number of options, it's really fun. There's a basic Quick Race option (both ranked and unranked) which is pretty much exactly what you'd expect. But then you have a Driver Duel mode, which plays out sort of like a King of the Hill match. There are a handful of levels in the ladder that you're trying to climb, and you start at the bottom faced off against another racer at the same level. You'll both be in the same car (which is randomly chosen for you), and the car and track match the level that you're on. So on the first level, you'll be in pokey rides on easy tracks, while at the top you'll be in supercars on the most technical courses. The interesting thing here is that if you lose, you go all the way back down to the bottom. It's fun and fast-paced enough to keep you going for a good while.
©2009-09-10, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved