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Need for Speed: Shift tries to take the series past as a more arcade style racer and mix it with a bit of sim.  The result is a game that does a lot of things fairly well, but doesn’t stand out as being truly great at anything.

Shift’s single player revolves primily around career mode.  During career mode you’ll be playing a variety of different events including regular races, head-to-head races, time attacks, and drift events.  The career mode is short compared to other games such as Forza 3.  Additionally, while there is tuning and upgrading of cars these customization options are not nearly as thorough in their implementation as Forza 3 either.  AI is a bit of mixed bag, and during some of the events there is clearly some rubber-banding implemented to make up for the AI’s unevenness.

Shift’s multiplayer isn’t much better.  Because the game’s experience system awards both precise and aggressive driving, the online experience can be frustrating as you’ll often find half the people trying to run the race cleanly and half trying to spin or tap everyone off the track.  It may have been bad luck, but during multiplayer I also experienced frequent disconnects when races lasted any length of time.

Shift’s graphics are overall very good, but don’t have quite the detail Forza 3 does.  Controls seem to be too sensitive by default and even after customization the cars often feel very unstable in situations where they shouldn’t.  The damage model is also underdeveloped. In fact overall, it looks and feels like a game that took the stock NFS formula and tried to add successful bits from other games to make it better.

Overall, Shift is a good game.  It just compromises too much in an attempt to satisfy both the sim and arcade crowds.

Scores

Graphics

Cars look fairly good.  Damage model isn’t as complete as comparable games.  Some textures on the track seem to be suffering from being a bit too low of resolution.

Sound

All sounds in the game usually high production values one would expect from EA.

Gameplay

The experience overall doesn’t feel very deep.  Career mode is too short.  Experience system works well for single player, but causes problems for multiplayer.

Controls

With either the gamepad or wheel, controls feel equally awkward.  Turning down the sensitivity helps with the gamepad, but I was never able to tweak things adequately for my Microsoft wheel.

Originality

Shift doesn’t really offer anything new.  It mostly takes from other games and doesn’t implement these things particularly well.

Overall Single Player

Somewhat short campaign and rubber-banding AI limit the game to a merely average single player experience.

Overall Multiplayer

Star experience system tends to encourage extreme behavior.  I also experienced some connection issues while playing.

Reviewer’s Opinion

NFS: Shift is a decent attempt at a hybrid arcade-sim racer, but at the end of the day it does nothing very well and there are better options out there depending on what type of racer you like.

Screenshots