Need for Speed Shift (PS3) Review
Posted by Armando Rodriguez on 10.22.2009
Need for Speed Shift is the game ProStreet should have been: a fun simulation racer that offers tons of replay value and a deep career mode.
Game Title: Need for Speed Shift
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Developer: Slightly Mad Studios
Genre: Racing
Players: 1-8 (Online)
Rated E for Everyone
Need for Speed Shift attempts to take the NFS franchise in a new direction by incorporating simulation-style gameplay and circuit tracks instead of the tuned street cars and illegal street racing of the previous entries. In a way it is a return to their roots, as the first NFS titles featured circuit tracks and supercars. Even the cockpit view is back, showing the steering wheel and the dashboard. It brings back fond memories. Is NFS Shift a perfect game? The answer is no. There are still quite a few issues that need to be addressed. However, this is the best NFS title in years and a step in the right direction. This is the game that ProStreet should have been.
Gameplay:
If you have played any of the NFS titles, then you are in for a shock. Gone are the days of powersliding through corners at top speed. Gone are the days of customizing your cars with shiny lights and insanely-shaped spoilers. Need for Speed Shift introduces a lot of simulation elements, which means that effective breaking and following the best racing line are requirements for success. It still retains a bit of the arcade feel, since it is easier to pick up and play than Gran Turismo or Forza, but if you jump directly into it from the last NFS title or from Burnout, expect a heavy learning curve.
As a matter of fact, my first hour or two with the game where spent getting myself familiar with the game’s mechanics. The controls are a bit too sensitive and likely you will need to fine tune the many available sliders for such things as brake and gas sensitivity, steering and speed steering sensitivity and even turning assists for braking and cornering on or off. The good thing is that there are so many options and variables that you can tune the experience to what you are looking for. If you want the best simulation-like experience, turn off the racing line, assists and play with the default controls. If you want a better pick up and play experience, keep the racing line and assists and tune the other sliders until you find a comfortable setup. I, for once, stayed somewhere in the middle. I turned off all the assists, kept the original controls for the most part (adjustments where needed for the drift portion of the game) and kept the racing line. You will learn quickly that just because you can see the line, it doesn’t mean you will stay in the line. Once again, I have to take points off for not allowing us to customize the buttons. You can only choose from three different setups and none of them where the classic Most Wanted setup that I felt in love with. Granted, the three setups are functional and chances are you will find one that you like (I really liked one of them after a bit) but it would be nice if they gave us the option to customize the controls and determine what we want each button to do. Another thing that I would recommend for the eventual sequel is the ability to save different setups for different race types. I found myself performing my share of adjustments on the sliders for the Drift portion of the game and then I had to fix it back whenever I was set to go on a race.
Once you start your career (and trust me, it is the game mode that will eat up most of your time) you are thrown into a race. This race is a test, to determine how well you can drive in the game and at the end of it the game will recommend a difficulty and control setup for you, with things such as assists turned on or off. This is only a recommendation and you can manually adjust everything later. Then you are taken to yet another race, with the objective of earning money to buy your first car. The game is divided by tiers, with 4 tiers total. Tier 1 features lowly tuners like the Honda Civic Si, Honda S2000, Nissan 350Z and so forth, while Tier 4 is composed of supercars like the Lamborghini Reventon, McLaren and Bugatti Veryon. One thing I loved about the game is how different the cars feel from each other. American cars like the Dodge Viper and Chevrolet Corvette are notably difficult to handle, while cars like the Nissan Skyline and Lotus Elise are a breeze to control, even at top speeds. Just wait until you reach the supercars and drive the likes of the Pagani Zonda….you will be holding on for dear life!
The Career progression is measured by stars. The more stars you get, the easier time you will have unlocking events and tiers. The good thing is that you can earn stars for scoring points and also for performing optional objectives, which means that you don’t need to win every race to succeed, although you are encouraged to. The point and level-up system is one of the things that really hooked me. Taking a cue from RPG’s (and also from the likes of Project Gotham Racing) you earn points during the race for performing aggressive actions (like corner sliding, trading paint with cars and even spinning them out) and clean actions (like taking a clean corner, overtaking opponents and reaching speed thresholds) and this points allow you to level up. When you do, you will unlock invitational events, earn sponsorship money and unlock vinyl and rim categories. You are classified as an Aggressive or Precision driver depending on how you drive and where the majority of your XP comes from, but it is possible to earn a bucketload of points from both categories per race. This is one of the game’s best and most addictive features. Almost all of the events grant stars for achievement a set amount of points during the race, so even if you loose, you are making progress. There are optional objectives as well, like performing a clean lap, beating a set lap time, leading for a whole lap or spinning out a certain number of drivers. These also grant stars.
The Career events are a mixed bag, but mostly positive. You have your standard races, of course. You have Time Attack races, in which you are racing with other drivers in the same track, but the objective is to score the best lap time and not necessarily being in first place. I suggest you aim for the first place anyway, since it is easier to concentrate on the track without anybody in front of you. There are also Car Battles and Manufacturer Competitions. In these cases, you don’t have to own a car, but you are provided one for the event. Manufacturer Competitions means that everybody is driving the same car. Car Battles means that you chose one of two available cars and race the other on a one on one race. Dream matchups like the Lamborghini Murcielago vs Lamborghini Gallardo and Ford GT vs Dodge Viper are available. The concept of rivals is carried over from previous NFS titles. This time after completing a certain amount of events you will be challenged by a rival to a one on one race that plays just like Car Battles do. The winner is the first one to reach the finish line or get a five second lead. Personally I found this unnecessary, a carry over from previous games that does not fit into the new Simulation concept. I mean, it’s not like Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt challenge each other to grudge one on one races, but it sure as hell would be fun! However, one of my main issues with the game has to do with these challenges. In a word, they suck. The first few are too easy and then the difficulty rises significantly, to the point that even on easy they are too hard. Not because of anything you do, but because the A.I. cheats. For example, they run perfect lines without breaking and if you try to run them off the road your car bounces away from them like if it was made of rubber while the A.I. car continues merrily on its way like nothing happened. A number of times I ran head on into the A.I. car, full speed and into the passenger door and I would bounce and spin out of control while the A.I. car was completely unaffected. This only happens during the Rival challenges and thankfully there are only a handful of them. The other event type is Drift racing. This is supposed to be one of the game’s big showcase pieces, realistic drift racing. Well, I don’t know if it is realistic, but it sure as hell isn’t much fun. On the dozens of message boards I have visited online, there is NOT ONE PERSON who claims to have done a perfect drift race. Don’t get me wrong: the career goals on drift racing are achievable, if a bit easy. The problem is that it is nearly impossible to keep a drift going without hitting a wall. As a matter of fact, I think the mode worked better on Most Wanted and Carbon than it does here. The controls get overly sensitive, even more so than on normal races. It feels like the game develops a completely different physics engine for this mode than for the rest of the game. No matter how much tuning I did to the car and the controls, I was never able to replicate the cool stuff you see on real drift racing. Thankfully, you don’t loose any points when you hit the walls, which is why the career goals are achievable. But sliding into walls is not my idea of fun.
Thankfully the core racing is good enough to carry the game, both online and off. The Career mode spans hundreds of events, between Tier specific events and invitational events. I have put way over 20 hours into the game already and I am not done with all of them. Although there is a bit of track repetition (there are around 18 tracks in the game) the experience is varied since playing the same track with a different car can be a different experience. The bumps and turns of Ambush Canyon are challenging on a lowly Honda Civic, but they are lethally dangerous when you are driving a Porsche 911 or Lamborghini Gallardo. Online the performance is solid and the experience is a good one. The cash and experience earned online works offline as well, which is a nice integration of both modes. There are a couple of glitches I experienced online, like invisible opponents, but it doesn’t happen all the time or often enough to be a hindrance.
Graphics:
The car models are beautiful. I guess we expect that from all modern racing titles. There is car damage in the game and although cars take a good beating, showing scratches, dents, broken windshields and even wobbly tires, it is not on the same level of carnage as Burnout, but I guess that was the intention. It still pains me to see a super expensive car like a Lamborghini, Porsche or BMW crushed like a soda can.
The game has several different views, but the highlight is the cockpit view. The interiors are well done and different for each car. You can see the hands of your driver as he steers the car and shifts up and down. The windshield will crack and break after collisions, even collect dirt and dust, so it is possible to have your vision affected after some time. I played the whole game from this view because it is simply amazing. It feels like driving a real car. After a particularly nasty collision you will hear your driver grunt, his heartbeat rise up, his breathing will be deep and his vision blur; it is a fantastic effect that adds up a touch of realism.
As a side effect from the transition of illegal street racing to circuit tracks is that the tracks feel sparsely populated and not as alive as in previous entries. Don’t get me wrong: the tracks look just like their real life counterparts, with banners, signs, speed bumps and so on. But the environments themselves are a bit drab, just like in real life. The differences between say, Laguna Seca and Willow Springs, are more noticeable on the track layout than on the sidelines.
However, there are still some serious frame rate drops. Some of them happen on specific tracks, during specific sections of it, so you can anticipate when the drop will come. However, others are entirely random and can throw your timing off, especially during tight turns. The PS3 constantly suffers from frame rate drops in many games, but none of them first party. This means that it is a shoddy port job. I don’t blame EA for this, pretty much every company does it, but I guess it is time Sony takes some sort of action.
Sound:
On the sound department, the game delivers a good experience as well. Cars sound different enough that you will never mistake a Nissan 350Z for a Ford GT and vice versa. Everything else that compose the sound effects department is good enough as well. Screeching tires sound like you expect them to, your tires sound different when you run off course and into the dirt and so on. The soundtrack is really good, but in order to keep the simulation experience and keep you focused on the track at hand, the music is turned off during the races and is audible mostly during loading screens. For what I could tell, the music is similar to previous games, meaning that it retains a bit of street culture flavor.
Lasting Appeal:
Like I mentioned in the gameplay section, there are well over one hundred events to tackle in the Career mode. If you add the fact that you can play online (and it is a pretty addictive experience), you can play this game for well over 30 hours. If you are looking for the trophies (which are all very doable, but they take a lot of time) then you can double that amount. Most of the trophies can be acquired by finishing the Career mode and leveling up, but quite a few of them require you to earn a certain amount of badges. Badges come in bronze, silver, gold and epic flavors, each one harder than the next. They require you to perform specific actions a certain number of times. Some of them are career related (such as beating all rivals or winning all race series), others are car specific (such as reaching 100 miles on one American car) and others are awarded for performing in-race actions, like overtaking opponents or trading paint, a certain number of times. There are also a few track specific (such as performing a clean race and mastering all corners), others are online specific (getting to a certain number of online wins) and others are awarded for winning a certain amount of races against the A.I. on different difficulty levels. There are a lot of badges to earn, but you need to get at least 20 of them to Epic level in order to get that platinum. That takes quite a bit of time, but they are all doable and for anti-social gamers, they can all be achieved offline if you replace those online badges with any of the other tasks.
Fun Factor:
Yes, NFS Shift can be frustrating. But it is also very fun. The chore racing experience is very good, online is pretty stable and well integrated with the offline career mode and the ability to level up and earn rewards is very addictive.
The 411:
There is no doubt that Need for Speed Shift has room to improve. The drift racing mode needs to be fixed, there are quite a few frame rate issues and other bugs that need to be addressed and the sequel really needs more tracks. But I want to make one thing perfectly clear: As a lifelong NFS fan, this is the best NFS I have played in years. This is the game ProStreet should have been and for the first time in years, after reviewing an NFS game, I am actually excited about the prospect of a sequel.
Graphics
8.3
The cars are real eye candy, they suffer car damage and the tracks are realistic, if a bit drab. The cockpit view is amazing.
Gameplay
8.5
A simulation take on Need for Speed. Takes a bit of time to master the controls and gameplay style, but it is very fun.
Sound
8.5
The cars sound realistic, the rest of the sound effects fit in well with the game and the soundtrack is solid.
Lasting Appeal
8.8
The career mode is long, online racing is addictive and the trophies take quite a bit of time to get. It will last you quite a bit of time to complete.
Fun Factor
8.5
Bugs and issues aside, NFS Shift is the best NFS title in years and one of the best racing games released this year.
