Review – Need for Speed: SHIFT (PS3, X360)

My fondest memories of the Need for Speed series involve illegal street races, an exaggerated, arcade-like control system and attempts to evade police in increasingly insane chases.  Need for Speed: SHIFT, like ProStreet before it, does away with all of that, focusing instead on much more organized (and legal) races on closed-circuit courses.  There’s nothing wrong with all of that, as it all works out pretty well.  The game packs in over 60 vehicles from 26 different manufacturers, organizing them into tiers, with stuff like Honda Civics at the bottom and Pagani Zondas at the top.  These vehicles visit 19 different locations and race on 37 track layouts, from fictional street circuits in Tokyo to the epic Nordschleife.

Graphically, the game tries very hard to present itself in a realistic sense, with detailed tracks, gorgeous cars modeled inside and out, and an absolutely awesome sense of speed.  The presentation stumbles now and again, with the damage modeling looking oddly blocky at times.  Vehicles tend to look less realistic the more banged up they get.  The insides of the vehicles are quite impressive, showing off working gauges, meters, mirrors and the hands and arms of the driver.  A cool depth-of-field effect gets used when the vehicle goes at a good clip and the interior blurring out as the driver focuses on the track.  Unfortunately, the view’s so far back in this mode that under half the screen shows the actual track.  As much as I liked the interior camera, I played using the hood camera.

On the subject of cameras, the game frequently has trouble with its exterior views, especially during replays.  The camera will clip through the ground, pieces of scenery, or even the cars themselves.  The physics engine will act up oddly now and again, with vehicles flipping up into the air – seemingly weighing nothing.  Upon the conclusion of a race, when the AI takes over the player car, it sometimes immediately slams into a wall.  These are all minor points, but they contributed to a detachment from any sense of realism the game was trying to present.

The sound of all these cars zooming around manages to be pretty impressive, with different effects for each one.  The roar of supercar engines contributes to the sense of speed, and everything being just barely under the player’s control.  The driver makes some odd little grunts when cars bump about that I found a little distracting and silly.  SHIFT has to have a whopping ten tracks of music, a bizarre mix of tunes that get heard mostly in 15 second clips at the end of races while advancing through the reward screens.  Drift events play music all the time, further alienating this mode.

The actual racing engine under SHIFT’s hood is good.  It wants to be something along the lines of a Gran Turismo / Forza game, with real-life courses, real vehicles and racing that requires knowledge of racing lines and proper braking instead of crazy powerslides and drifts.  There is even a colour-coded racing line: green for speed up, yellow for coast, red for brake.  But it also tries to be approachable, offering different racing models to appeal to different gamers.  On the Casual profile, the game auto-brakes and helps with turning.  So much so that I could do full laps on top-tier cars while keeping the gas all the way down.

I appreciate what Slightly Mad Studios is trying to do with choices like this, but it really does feel like the game isn’t sure what it is supposed to be.  It’s immensely satisfying to take the Corkscrew on Laguna Seca at speed and have the little Corner Mastered message pop.  But that’s all diminished when I can get it during the first lap on the track – ever – because of the amount of help the game gives.  On the Experienced or Pro models, the game feels really good and offers a fairly consistent challenge, at least as far as car versus track.  I’ve read comments about the controls feeling sluggish, but I either didn’t notice, or got used to the feel of the game too quickly.

The core of the SHIFT experience is the idea of Driver Level.  Start at level 1 and progressing to level 50 over the course of the game, the player unlocks more garage spots, vinyl bits, rims and paint job types.  Every now and again an Invitational Event will open up, offering cash for races a little outside of the current tier, and biased towards the player’s racing style.  It all sounds pretty impressive, but it essentially boils down to much the same to Metropolis Street Racer’s / Project Gotham Racing’s Kudos system.  Do certain things during a race to get points and collect enough points to level up.  Precision points are awarded for clean overtakes, following the racing line, and taking turns perfectly.  Aggression points are awarded for dirty overtakes, tapping opponents, making them spin out, and drafting.  Rewarding players for playing like jerks is always a recipe for disaster.

There are online support and Quick Races, but the bulk of the game is found in Career mode.  It all starts with an empty garage, an inexperienced driver, and a test lap.  Depending on how well that goes, the game suggests an assortment of difficulty options, gives a bit of cash and sends the player on his way.  Over the course of the next 15 hours or so, the player progresses through five tiers of races against more and more demanding opponents, unlocking features and bonus bits as his experience level rises.  By no means a bad system at all, for the most part.

Slightly Mad has packed a lot of races into Career mode – easily over a couple hundred.  Apart from achievement / trophy hunting, there’s really no reason to do all these races, although there are a good variety of events to be had.  I was plugging through the game, going for completion points, and had managed to unlock the final tier of the game (effectively tier five) halfway through the races on tier two.  I could have been picking and choosing the races I enjoyed most and made the same progress.  Given that there’s way too many unpleasant races, this is the best course of action.

Everything about the Drift events, which involve sliding wildly around a few turns and getting points, seem shoehorned into a game that doesn’t want any part of it.  Competing in these events is just a matter of scoring the most points after three heats on a short section of track. In addition, only eleven vehicles are Drift compatible.  Every single one of these events involved chain-restarting until I managed a good run.  I never really felt in control, and although I started to develop an ability for controlling slides after a few dozen attempts, it was never fun.

This theme of ‘never fun’ crops up again and again towards the end of Career mode.  The AI ramps up and Rivals start coming into play, with the first 20 seconds of every race degrading into an absolute mess that would make David Cronenberg proud.  There’s still good racing to be had, but it’s all way too aggressive, spoiling the illusion of working up the ranks of more and more experienced drivers.  I’ve seen more civilized behaviour on the Krachenwagen.  All this ridiculousness came to a head in two events:  an Endurance race that took place around a figure eight track, and a Duel Driver race-off where my opponent was using a vehicle type that was banned in the current event.

As I put more and more time into the game, I started noticing these little odd omissions.  There’s no real Time Trial mode that lets one car do infinite laps to practice a course.  There’s no support for Ghost replays, or proper support for best lap times in a certain car tier.  The leaderboards that the game offers off of the Career mode events only ever show Friends.  During a race, all the split times are hidden in the upper-left, with no individual splits showing up after laps or track sections.  These are mostly all basic racing game functions that didn’t seem to make the cut.  Was attention being focused elsewhere?  Was it all an attempt to make the game more approachable to the casual, old-school NFS fan?

Collisions in the game make the whole screen go all black-and-white and blurry, which is a cool effect, except that it can really shift the emphasis off racing.  If I get a good bump on me during the first turn of the race, I’m off the track and odds are it’s going to take a few moments to be able to see again, get back on the track, and get up to speed.  This more or less sums up my experience with online play.  The performance of it was fine, but I felt I wasn’t playing the game right.  Furthermore, I couldn’t find any way to filter my opponents based on their driving settings, which can make recovering from a ‘take out’ much more straightforward.

Which is a shame, because one of the online modes is pretty cool.  Driver Duel matches up players in one-on-one matches, similar to the Rival events in Career.  The game chooses a random car, a random track, and sets up three races, with alternating players having an advantage, then an even, rolling start.  The first player to two race wins (five seconds ahead or cross the line first) takes the whole event.  But the cool part is the Naruto: Rise of a Ninja style tier system that this mode uses.  As the player goes into this event over and over, they will rise through standings and face opponents of a similar ranking.  It’s a dynamic sort of tournament mode that seems like a good fit with most of what Slightly Mad is trying to do.  I hope we continue to see it in future games.

I know I’m being really hard on the game, but I did have fun with it, despite the 20-30 second load times for races and other assorted quibbles.  I feel the whole series is at a transition point right now, with EA and Slightly Mad trying to bridge the gap.  The realistic controls and closed-circuit tracks will frustrate traditional fans of the series, who just want a good arcade-style race.  The more casual elements of the game will frustrate people looking for a more realistic experience, leaving no one truly happy with what we have here.

Need for Speed: SHIFT is a summer blockbuster.  Lots of bang, flash and wow that really does manage to impress, but it all comes across as shallow and engineered to move, and will probably be forgotten in a few months’ time.  I’d recommend it to racing game fans who’re not averse to a little mingling of arcade and simulation style racing.  Big kudos to Simply Mad for something so close to awesome for their first high-definition console title, and let’s hope they find the perfect niche for the undoubted sequel.