After a long chain of not so good games, NFS franchise is back with a new game Need for Speed: Shift which promises to do a lot of things that a thousand other games have already perfected.
Shift goes back to the ProStreet style organized and totally legal (damn!) racing. Like ProStreet, it’s not clear whether it is a simulation or an arcade game.
There are two game modes, Quick Race and Career. Quick race, lets you race on quite a few tracks with a car of your choice. In career mode, you start off with a tier 1 car and have to play through races to earn stars and upgrade your tier. After the race, you earn up to 3 stars for position, 2 for precision and aggression and 1 for bonus acts which can be anything from performing clean sections to reaching a particular speed. The star rating system adds a level of replay value to the races. Talking about replaying races, there will be moments when you need to replay 10 lap races all over again just because you hit that @#$%*^ wall just near the end of the race. The opponents are not very polite either as they don’t hesitate to slam you into walls or grind you off the track. The drift mode is a tad difficult for average gamers.
Car modification is not very different from previous games. Applying performance upgrades like new engine and transmission not only makes your car quicker, but also changes the engine sound which is a nice touch. Menu music (by the way, it’s a sin to call it music) starts getting on your nerves as soon as you hear it. Apart from that, morphing vinyls is so time consuming that you will be better off without vinyls altogether.
Graphics are not eye popping but they aren’t too bad either. It’s nice to see the environments blur when you are driving your car at 150 miles per hour. You can almost smell the asphalt in the heat of an intense race.
As I said, this game is neither a simulation, nor arcade so it won’t satisfy fans of any of these but casual gamers might like this game provided they can handle the steep learning curve.
Rating: 7.5/10
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